“Stay awake,” Klaus commanded. “I don’t know how bad this shit is. We need you to fight it, OK?” He pressed a new cloth to my chest. It was over my heart. I could feel the burning pain spreading.
“O-OK,” I rasped, my body shaking as my vision grew hazy.
“Fuck, man. How much longer?” Anson said, a note of desperation in his voice.
“Any minute,” Klaus murmured.
But any minute felt like an eternity as I lay there in my own blood with Anson holding my hand, while Klaus kept pressure on my chest.
“Anson,” I said thickly. “T-Tell Rosalie that I-I…”
“Shh,” Anson murmured. “Focus on breathing. You’re going to be OK.”
“Hurts… to breathe.”
“I know,” Anson said, his voice cracking. “I just need you to keep doing it.”
My lashes fluttered again as I continued to struggle to stay awake. Something wasn’t right. Sure, I’d been shot, but I felt completely out of it.
Maybe it was the blood loss. I’d never lost this much to know.
God, Rosalie… fuck.
“I love you,” I mumbled, my tongue heavy. “I love you, Red.”
And that was it. I couldn’t fight it any longer. The darkness rolled in, and the pain left.
9
ANSON
“Do you need anything?” I asked Ryder as he lay in his hospital bed. Seeing one of my best friends bleeding like that had really fucked me up. The cops had swarmed in with a fucking bomb squad. And of course, we made front-page news with an assassination attempt on Bishop’s life.
Needless to say, shit was not going well. Rosalie had been moved from Klaus’s. I had to phone in a favor to Dominic, who set a safe place up for us after Rosalie refused to go to Dante’s, even though he was making it pretty fucking known that’s where he wanted her and Ellis.
Ryder’s eyes were barely open since they had him on so many pain meds.
“No,” he mumbled, squeezing my hand lightly.
I reached out and pushed his hair away from his face. The bullet had gone through his chest and exited through the top of his shoulder. It missed his heart and had gotten a lung. He’d spent the first few days here needing help to breathe. He was over a week into recovery and still looked and acted like hell.
Now, he winced whenever he tried to breathe, but at least he was awake. For a moment in the beginning, I really thought I was going to lose him. In fact, the doctors even said it was a miracle he’d lived.
It hadn’t slipped past my mind his words before he passed out on us.
I love you, Red.
I blamed it on his pain, shock, and the fact that he and Rosalie were close.
It was likely just shit firing off in his head. He spent the last five years protecting her. He devoted his life to us.
He didn’t love her. Not like that. He wouldn’t. He’d never made a move on any girl I’d ever been with, and I very much doubted he’d do it with Rosalie since he knew how much I loved her.
So I pushed it away. It was nothing. I’d ask him about it, and if he said it was nothing, then it would be nothing.
And if it were something…
Just no. It wouldn’t be, so it didn’t matter.
