Page 23 of Ruin

I pointed to the right, indicating the hall that led to the bedrooms, and she turned back around and started dragging me again. I hesitated for just a moment, wanting to stay with my men, but then realized that there was nothing I could do for them tonight. Brock needed to be alone. and Remy and the others could take care of themselves. I was tired and sore and shot, and I wanted a bed, a dark room, and my woman in my arms, making me forget about what had happened.

CHAPTER 15

SARAYA

I REMEMBERED NOW WHERE the other rooms were—stupid to have forgotten after we were just in here—and moved quickly toward one of them.

I hoped the door had a lock on it, because I was planning to get Knight naked and drag him to the bed.

Not for that.

I’d seen him limping ever since I arrived and had felt the wetness of blood under my fingers when I ran them down his sides. The man had been shot at some point—probably when those guys in the car were shooting at me—and I was betting he didn’t even realize it. He’d had so much on his mind when it came to taking care of other people that he might not have paused to take stock of his own body.

It was my job to do it for him, and this was going to be my best chance to do it.

Of course, he wasn’t going to make it easy. The moment I started towing him toward the room, he pulled back.

“But the guys—”

“Are adults and probably know how to put themselves to bed,” I returned, not bothering to look back at him. “They’re tired, and they want to sleep, not tell you again and again what happened tonight. And the last time I checked, none of them had been shot.”

The silence behind me told me that he either did know he’d been shot and just hadn’t told me about it or hadn’t realized until that moment that there was something wrong.

Men. Always trying to play the hero. Always trying to pretend that they weren’t human and capable of bleeding and—gasp—dying if they didn’t take care of themselves.

He didn’t fight me anymore, though, and a second later, we were in the bedroom. I closed the door behind us with a sharp click and turned the lock in the knob. I hit the light and used the dimmer to tone it down enough that it didn’t hurt my eyes. When I looked at him, he had one brow raised and the start of a smile on his lips.

“If anyone is coming after us, that little lock isn’t going to stop them.”

I shoved him gently in the chest. “It’s been a very long day, Knight, and lots of shit has gone bad. I want to look at you and make sure you’re okay, and then I want to sleep. I don’t want anyone coming in here and bothering us.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, lifting his hands up in surrender. “No need to get violent.”

That part was true. We’d both seen enough violence already tonight, and I had a bad feeling it wasn’t over yet. That didn’t mean I was going to let him escape my attention.

“Sit down,” I demanded. “Shirt and pants off. Now.”

His face turned serious at that, but he did as I asked, sinking onto the bed and stripping out of his clothes.

I gasped at what I saw. He wasn’t bruised and broken, the way I’d feared, but one hip was covered in blood, and when I glanced down at his jeans, I saw that they weren’t much better. A large rip showed me exactly where the bullet had hit him, and I dropped to my knees in concern.

I put my fingers to the skin of his thigh and pressed gently, wishing like hell that Mandy was here to tell me what to do. A soft ooze of blood just to the side of my fingers showed me where the wound was, and I moved toward that.

Knight gasped when I got too close and reached down to hold my hand. “It’s just a scratch,” he murmured.

I eyed the wound doubtfully. “That’s an awful lot of blood for a scratch.”

“You’d be surprised at how much you bleed from a flesh wound. But I checked. There’s no exit wound, and I don’t have a bullet inside me. It just scraped along the side. I was insanely lucky.”

I looked up at him from my position between his legs, wondering at this man. “Lucky to be shot at because you decided to adopt a girl you should have run from, screaming? Lucky to be in this mess because you refused to give me back to Devil? Because from where I’m sitting, you’re in an awful lot of trouble, and all of it is my fault.”

I clamped down on the sob that wanted to break from my throat at the thought, trying to remember what Gem had told me and what Knight himself had said. Not my fault. Not my doing, or my choice.

Devil had done this.

That didn’t change how guilty I felt, though, and it didn’t fucking touch how much I hated what was going on. It certainly didn’t stop the burning in my throat at the thought of how close I’d come to losing Knight.

Fuck, the evidence was sitting right in front of me on that bed, bleeding all over the comforter, his jeans shredded and bloody at his feet.