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I should feel horror, guilt, and regret. After all, I—a woman who swore the Hippocratic oath—just took a man’s life. Instead, I feel alive. Terrifyingly, completely alive.

Is this who I am now? A woman who kills to protect what she loves?

Mason’s warning in that coffee shop echoes in my head unbidden.

This is who you’re involved with. This is what he’ll turn you into.

But Marco didn’t make me anything. I chose to fight and kill beside him.

The question now is whether that proves my strength or whether I’ve lost myself.

In the aftermath, a compound medic tends to me while I watch Marco coordinate the cleanup of the chapel. When the medic moves on to other patients who probably need his help more, I stand and walk to a corner of the hall, staring into space.

Jenna approaches, then reaches for my hand, her fingers cold but steady.

“Lu? You okay?”

I turn to her, and she pales when she peers into my eyes. Maybe she can see the woman I’ve become.

I whisper the truth I can no longer hide. “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

One thing remains certain, though. I’m married to the man I love, and I murdered someone to keep him alive.

The rest can wait.

Chapter 30

Marco

An hour after the wedding is shot to hell—literally—I march into the compound’s clinic.

The place is filled with beeping monitors and medics helping my wife coordinate triage. Lucia’s been tending the seriously wounded for the past hour, and it doesn’t look like she’ll be done any time soon.

She looks nothing like a woman who gunned down a man in her wedding dress.

My wife saved my life.

With the last patient stabilized, Lucia washes her hands at the sink. The water runs pink before clearing. She rolls her shoulders, working out the tension, and finally peers at me from across the room. Though blood and dirt have ruined her white dress, mascara streaks her face, and strands of her hair have fallen loose from the pins, she’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

“Stop staring.” She crosses over to me, her voice heavy with exhaustion. “I’m fine. The bullet only grazed me.”

“I’m not staring at your arm.” I pull her carefully into my chest, her heart thudding against my ribs. “I’m staring at you. My wife.”

Her shaky laugh comes out half joyous and half disbelieving. “Being someone’s wife is going to take some getting used to. Specifically, being your wife.”

“We have time.” I press a kiss to her hair and breathe in the scent of her beneath the smoke and blood.

Lucia draws back to meet my eyes with that direct gaze I’ve come to love.

“I need to clean up. And then we can go to our room.”

We’re going home to a space we’ll keep building together until it fills with her journals, more succulents on the windowsill, and countless signs of her presence in my life.

“Anything you need, my love.”

We bathe first. Steam billows around us as I carefully clean the graze on her arm. The wound is shallow—a kiss from a bullet rather than a bite—but the sight of the injury makes my chest clench. My hands are gentler than they’ve ever been on any wound. I treat her like she’s precious and breakable, even though she’s proven she’s anything but.

She watches me work, her expression soft in the light. “You’re good at this. Steady hands.”