Page 153 of Vow to Claim You

Aric

Ayanna’s body jerks backward from the impact, her eyes going wide with shock, her hand reaching for something—for me—and I catch her before she hits the floor.

I see blood.

So much blood.

Blooming across the champagne fabric of her gown like a dark flower opening. Spreading. Staining. Ruining.

“Ayanna!”

Her name tears out of me, raw and uncontrolled.

The world splinters into fragments. Screaming from inside the ballroom. The crack of return fire—Tassilo, maybe, or one of the others. Guests scattering like shattered glass.

None of it matters.

My arms close around her. Her head lolls against my shoulder. Her eyes are closed. Her skin is losing color by the second, and the blood… The blood is everywhere. On her dress. On my hands. Soaking through my jacket where I’m crushing her against my chest.

“Ayanna,” I say her name like a prayer. “Ayanna, look at me.”

She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t open her eyes.

The world goes red at the edges.

I carry her through the ballroom toward the stairs. The chaos parts around me—people stumbling back, voices raising in confusion and fear, someone screaming about gunmen while my wife bleeds out in my arms.

“Eero!”

My voice cuts through the noise. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I just stop hearing anything except my own heartbeat and the shallow rasp of her breath against my neck.

She’s breathing.

She’s still breathing.

Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.

Eero appears, his face white. He looks at Ayanna. At the blood. At me.

“The doctor,” I say. “Now.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s the voice of a man holding himself together through sheer force of will while everything inside him screams.

“Aric—”

“Get Kirill. Helicopter. Now.”

“The hospital⁠—”

“No.” It comes out sharp, a command and a threat in equal measure. “The hospital is thirty minutes away. Kirill can be here in fifteen.” I shift her weight, and more blood seeps through my fingers. Too much. Too fast. “Call him. Gunshot wound. Tell him to bring everything.”

Eero doesn’t argue. He pulls out his phone and moves.

Good. Someone needs to be useful, because I can’t think past the weight of Ayanna’s body and the smell of her blood and the way her skin looks too pale, too much like something already lost.

I carry her to the study, away from the chaos. Away from the eyes and the questions and the hundred things I can’t deal with right now.

Tassilo follows. His face is a mask, but I see the rage under it—cold and contained, the same rage I’m holding back through nothing but will.

“The shooters?”