He gathers me into his arms before anyone can stop him, holding me so tightly, it almost hurts.
"You're okay,” his voice is rough. "Look at me."
I try. God, I'm trying, but my vision swims, the edges of the room are disappearing.
"Lorenzo." My voice is barely a whisper.
His eyes lock onto mine immediately. "I'm here." The answer comes so fast it breaks something inside me. "I'm here." His forehead presses against mine.
I feel his hand shaking against my back.
Then the room spins, and the last thing I hear is Lorenzo shouting for the ambulance to hurry the fuck up, and then everything starts going dark.
Chapter 25
Lorenzo
My heart is in my throat as I stare down at Quinn.
Her lips are turning blue, her eyes are closed, and her chest is barely moving, and the sound coming from her throat is wrong. It sounds like she can’t get air in.
"Quinn. Quinn, look at me. Quinn," I plead, my hands pressed against her face, holding her close to me.
Nothing.
The room is in chaos behind me. I hear a chair scraping, I can hear Valentina's voice, along with my father giving orders, but I can't process any of it. All my attention is on my wife, who is not breathing properly in my arms. I don’t understand. I gave her the EpiPen. She taught me how to use it when I found out she was allergic to peanuts and how severe it could be. Why the fuck isn’t it working?
A hand grabs my arm. I fight it off without looking. I’m not letting her go, I won’t.
"Sir." An unfamiliar male voice says, close to me. "Sir, we need to get to her."
"She's not breathing." My voice comes out ragged and raw. "She can't breathe, she needs help."
"Sir." The hand again presses down on my arm, firmer this time. "We have her. We have her, but you need to let us in."
I look up at his words and see that the paramedics have arrived. There’s two of them, and they’ve already got their equipment out.
"Sir," the paramedic repeats.
I make myself move, my legs feel heavy and my heart won’t stop hammering. I’m unable to pull my gaze away from Quinn, she’s so small as she lays on the ground.
Come on. I plead silently. Come on, come on, come on, breathe baby, breathe.
The paramedics take over and I hate every second of it. I feel utterly useless watching them work on her.
The panic clawing through me feels horribly familiar. For a second, I'm not looking at Quinn. I'm sitting in the back of a car, listening to the driver tell me my mother has been shot. I remember the way his hands tightened on the wheel, the way everything inside me went cold before he even finished speaking. That moment when you know your life is about to split into before and after.
I feel that same helplessness now, that same sick certainty that something terrible is happening, and I can't stop it.
No. I shove the thought away immediately.
Quinn is alive, she's alive, and I'm not losing her.
The paramedics get Quinn onto a stretcher. I reach for her hand, moving fast as they rush her out of the house and toward the ambulance. The paramedics are firing question after question at me.
They ask for her age, medical history, known allergies, when did the reaction start? Did she use an EpiPen?
I answer all of them automatically and as best I can, all the while my eyes never leave Quinn. She now has an oxygen mask that covers most of her face, but her eyes stay closed.
