“If you die, Mila,” he said harshly, “I’ll send Khaos to a back-alley pound.”
My heart beat. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would.”
When the car drew to a stop, Ronan didn’t waste a second. He picked me up and carried me into the hospital. I watched the doctors and nurses rush toward us and throw out questions in Russian. I couldn’t make sense of anything besides what Ronan had threatened as a cold weightlessness consumed me, tugging, pulling, trying to drag me down.
“Don’t do that to Khaos,” I pleaded weakly, interrupting the medical staff.
“Don’t die, and I won’t,” he responded while following the doctors down the hall.
He wasn’t being fair.
“Ronan . . .” A tear slipped down my cheek.
He wiped it away, his tone coarse. “Those are the conditions. You choose.”
How could I choose not to die? Today might be my day, and even D’yavol couldn’t stop fate in its tracks. I may have never gotten the family or love I’d always wanted, but at least I could say I gave it my best shot.
Ronan lay me on a gurney, and a nurse rushed me into an OR room. When a surgeon tried to stop Ronan from entering, he pulled out his pistol and pointed it at the doctor’s head.
“Yesli ona umret, ty tozhe umresh’,” he growled. If she dies, you die too.
The surgeon swallowed, stepped out of his way, and curtly nodded to an area where Ronan could stand.
A nurse put a mask on my face to induce sleep. I tried to pull it off, but it took little effort for her to hold it on while speaking to me in Russian. The gas started to pull my consciousness down, down . . . Though when I met Ronan’s eyes, I knew what I needed to say. Ya lyublyu tebya. I love you. In the end, only one word escaped with the fear I’d never wake up.
“Proshchay . . .”
The last thing I heard before the anesthesia took me under was, “Fuck your proshchay, Mila.”
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
The steady beeps that drew me from a hazy sleep alerted me to the fact I didn’t die. Or Satan just had a sick sense of humor.
My body was in a tranquil, painless state, but I hesitated to open my eyes as my imagination went wild. Maybe the surgeons had to amputate a limb. Maybe I was paralyzed. Maybe I was waking from a thirty-year coma. Unfortunately, what I saw was worse than what my imagination could cook up.
Alexei Mikhailov and D’yavol sat in the same room.
Papa occupied the chair beside the door, wearing a charcoal suit and a black eye. He was staring at his hands, radiating a sense of remorse. I felt nothing when I looked at him. Not nostalgia. Not respect. Not affection.
Everything he’d done tainted my view of him. In truth, I didn’t think he’d ever planned to sacrifice himself for me. The phone call was just another lie and manipulation to make Ronan believe he’d conceded. My papa chose to put me in the middle of his war, unconcerned with the fact something could have happened to me. And it had.
Whether he lived or died, my mourning him was over.
My gaze slid to Ronan, who sat beside my bed wearing Tom Ford and tired eyes. Silently, he watched me. I somehow knew he’d stayed by my side for as long as I was unconscious. This man I once hated had become the man I loved.
Ronan was wrong.
I couldn’t bear the thought of living without him.
It terrified me, this love that threatened dependence. The devotion was a bright glow that warmed my soul, though it also left me feeling vulnerable, as if my chest would simply tear open if I loved him anymore.
I didn’t regret taking that bullet for Ronan, but the fact I’d almost died forced me to look at life from a different perspective. The truth was, I hadn’t truly lived yet. I’d experienced nothing besides the view of closed golden gates, the inside of a Russian mansion, and falling in love.