Page 141 of My Brother’s Best Friends Entanglement

Leon holds his hand up. “No. If you actually cared about her you'd stay the hell away from her.”

“We tried,” Rhys says, quiet, wrecked. “We tried to stay away, Leon, for years, we've⁠—”

“Don't! Don't you dare stand there and tell me anything other than you did the one thing you knew I never wanted you to do.”

He's pushing himself up out of the chair before Patrick can stop him — and I see the exact second it goes wrong. The wince tears across his face, and every trace of colour drops out of it at once. Then he cries out, and there's blood, blooming fast and dark through his shirt where the stitches have torn open.

Marcus lunges forward. “Leon!”

“Don't touch me,” he hisses, sinking back into the chair. Patrick's hands move fast and practised, pressing hard against the wound. “Someone call an ambulance. Now,” he says to me, his voice tight.

I'm already dialling. My hands are shaking so badly I have to redial twice, and the operator's voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere underwater.

“You all need to step back,” Patrick says to the guys, fast, clinical. “Alexia. Stay with me. Talk to the operator. Tell them what I say.”

I remember nothing after that, only the sound of Leon's ragged breaths, Patrick steadily telling me what to repeat to the operator, telling Leon to breathe, to calm.

I grab his hand and he doesn't stop me.

In the corner of my eye, I can see the guys standing there, barely breathing, ready to jump forward if they're called on, but never are.

The ten minutes it takes the ambulance to arrive feel like hours. Leon's gone pale and quiet by the time the paramedics get him onto the stretcher, eyes half-closed, jaw still tight with pain, and I don't let go of his hand until they physically need to free him to load him in.

“I'm coming with him,” I say, already climbing up after the stretcher before anyone can tell me otherwise.

Nobody argues. I catch one look back, Marcus, Zachary, and Rhys stand frozen in the wreckage of the trestle table, sausages and lamingtons and someone's abandoned trivia sheet scattered around their feet.

“I'm coming, too,” Rhys says, already moving towards the doors once I'm inside.

“No room. You can follow in your car,” the paramedic says, not unkindly. The last thing I see before the doors close is Rhys's face. Inside, the ambulance smells like antiseptic and coffee. The paramedic's already got a line in Leon's arm, monitor beeping steady and fast beside him. I hold his other hand the whole way, watching his face, watching the machine, willing them both to keep telling me that he's going to be okay.

His eyes crack open halfway to the hospital, unfocused, finding me slowly.

“Xi,” he says, voice thin and cracked.

I squeeze his hand and slide forward. “I'm here. I'm right here.”

He blinks, working to focus, and when his eyes finally settle on mine properly, there's nothing in them but pure, exhausted bewilderment.

“What the fuck,” he says, “is going on with you?”

FORTY

Alexia

The second the ER doors close behind us, a nurse is calling numbers over her shoulder, BP dropping, heart rate climbing, and I have to half-jog to keep a hand on the bed rail as they wheel him down the corridor.

“I'm sorry.” I get it out between steps, breathless. “Leon, I am so sorry.”

He doesn't look at me. Stares up at the fluorescent lights sliding past overhead instead, jaw working, face gone the colour of the sheet under him.

“Sorry for what, exactly.” His voice is thin, breathless, but there's no doubt about the fury underneath it. “Sorry for being with my mates behind my back? Or sorry you got caught lying to me about it?”

I give the medical team credit for not reacting to the family drama. “Both. Neither.”

He winces as the bed rattles over a bump. “Pick one, Alexia.”

“Leon. I... I can't, I have feelings for them all,” I pant.