My hand slams into Bronx’s chest, shoving him hard and turning him while I position myselfin the space where he’d stood. The blade drives into me with brutal force in a single, violent rush.
For a second, there’s nothing.
No pain.
Just pressure.
Then heat floods outward, and my knees give as the room tilts.
30
BRONX
Blood.
So much fucking blood.
It’s on my hands, soaking through my shirt, spreading across the floor of this shithole apartment while Tierney collapses against me.
The bastard who stabbed her is already dead. Reign put two bullets in his skull before his body hit the ground.
Cold dread surges from my stomach to my throat as I stare down at her.
Because the damage is done.
She saved my life.
After finding out I was supposed to seduce her. After hearing her entire marriage was built on lies. After telling me she doesn’t give a shit about me and our whole relationship was fake.
She still threw herself between me and that blade.
“Get a fucking ambulance,” I roar, pressing my handsagainst the wound in her side. The knife went deep. Blood pulses between my fingers as I try to slow the flow.
“Already called,” Kingston says. “ETA is three minutes.”
Tierney’s eyes flutter, trying to focus on my face. Her skin sickly pale, lips losing more color with every passing second.
“Stay with me, princess,” I mutter, applying more pressure to the wound. “Don’t you dare fucking leave me.”
She moves her lips like she’s trying to say something, but her voice is too weak, and I can’t hear her.
“Save your strength,” I say, cupping her face with my free hand.
Her shaking hand finds mine, and for a blink, I think she’s trying to hold on to me. Then she pushes my hand away from her face.
Even bleeding out, she doesn’t want me touching her.
Sirens blare out, the ambulance approaching. The paramedics flood in, and they make me step back while they work on her.
“Sir, are you injured?” one of them asks me.
I shake my head. “It’s not my blood.”
Watching them lift her onto a gurney, seeing how small she looks, fuck, it feels like I just took a blade to the chest myself.
“You need to move away,” another EMT says.
But I follow them downstairs to the ambulance anyway. “I’m her husband.”
