I’m still tugging him back when the bang sounds.Chapter Forty-SevenAlexanderI should have known it.
I trust Brutus easily as much as I trust myself.
I should have known it wasn’t mindless savagery that sent him fucking livid as I went for that door.
And I should have known my father would never just chance me disappearing into the night.
There’s no hire car outside when I open the door, just a man in black with his hood pulled down low.
It’s not like Hollywood when I see the gun in his hands. There’s no heated showdown where he tells me how much my father wants me dead, or passes on some cryptic message.
There’s just a bang. A bang and a flash.
It feels like a punch. A punch right in my gut.
Only it makes my ears ring.
And everything slows down, just like it did when that cricket ball smashed my temple at twelve years old.
The whole world slows down.
I think I stumble before I fall. It feels like that.
Melissa’s scream is so far away, and I wish I had the breath to tell her to stay back, but I don’t.
I notice the tiny things in those slow seconds.
The shock on the gunman’s face as my shirt pools with blood. The widening of his eyes as he looks past me into the hallway, his gun still smoking as Brutus charges him down.
I’m waiting for a second shot that doesn’t come.
It can’t.
Because Brutus is a savage beast when he needs to be.
And in that one slow moment as I prepare to meet my end, I’m glad he is.
I feel the heat of him as he lunges between me and the man at the door.
I hear the crunch of his teeth as they sink into flesh and bone, and the bang as the gun unloads onto my doorstep.
I’ve already fallen by the time the gunman screams. I don’t see Brutus tear his arm open and lock back on for more.
I do see Melissa, though.
Her blonde hair is like an angel’s under the ceiling light. Like the inclusions in her lucky crystal as she stares down at me and pulls my head into her lap.
My hand is over my stomach.
It feels as if I’ve been kicked.
Only a kick isn’t wet and warm.
A kick doesn’t feel like your life is slipping away from you.
My life is definitely slipping away from me. I see it written in her pretty eyes.
“Call an ambulance!” she screams, and it’s not at me.
It’s so hard to raise my arm. So hard to brush her cheek with my thumb.
Summoning my breath is the most painful thing I’ve ever done, but the most beautiful release I’ve ever felt.
“I love you,” I say, and I wish I’d said it a lot sooner.
I wish I’d have said it that day on the street when I chased her, even though I didn’t know her name.
I wish I’d have told her when she turned up at my hotel room door last night, before I half killed her.
I wish I’d have told her when I still had the strength to kiss her goodbye.
But it’s perfect all the same.
She’s perfect.
And she was worth it.
Worth dying for.
Her fingers are gentle in mine. Her eyes streaming as she tells me I’m going to be fine, that an ambulance is on its way.
She promised me she’d never lie again, but I think I can forgive her this one.
I love the irony of this insane thing we call life. If I was a man who believed in mumbo jumbo, I’d say fate has a wicked sense of humour.
But I’m not.
It’s just one of life’s peculiarities that leads me to this one hilariously ironic moment.
The moment I face my end is the precise moment I least want to slip away.
But I can’t stop.
Even though Melissa screams my name and begs me to stay with her. Even though her hand crushes mine and the kiss from her pretty mouth reminds me of the myriad reasons I want to stay alive with her, I can’t stop my eyes from closing.Chapter Forty-EightMelissaAlexander Henley, the man who is my everything, leaves me once in his hallway, just before the paramedics arrive, and again on the operating table before they stem the bleeding.
I sit and wait in the corridor while they fight to save his life, and my hands are still bloody but I don’t want to wash them.
I don’t want to wash him away from me.
My tears are quiet but they don’t stop, not once in all the hours I wait for fate to show its hand.
Dean only stays a little while before he takes Joseph back home to the bed we were leaving behind. He holds me tight and tells me it’s gonna be alright.
He’ll hold on, he says. He’s not the kind of guy to back down from a fight. No fucking way, Lissa.