He wasn’t gone.
“No,”Beau was on his knees, holding me, touching me all over as he checked for injuries and yelled to the others that I needed a doctor, or maybe something else.“Please stay with me, baby girl. Please don’t let me lose you again.”
I’d missed hearing him speak Spanish with his slightly Russian accent. I missed the way I could hear the words he slightly pronounced wrong. I missed the way he looked at me, like I was one of the most important people in the world.
Tears streamed down his cheeks, his eyes burned with a thousand dark thoughts, and despite it all, I wanted to comforthim. I wanted him to know just what I needed him to do – what I had fought for but failed at.
I wanted him to know the truth before death took me.
“I’m sorry for how I was made.”My lips parted, and I whispered as I fell into the darkness.
I knew it was before my men reached me that I left whatever sanity and soul I had left on the grounds of my home. I knew that as they reached me, yelling and cursing and far more upset than I would have ever wanted them to be, that despite my current situation, I was happy. I had made it home – I had saved myself. And those I loved were with me. I had even saved Yumi too; a complete stranger of a child who had shared food, water, and strength with me.
Whose sobbing presence so close yet so far had been one of the few things to keep the last shred of sanity in my brain the entire time I had been gone.
The crying in the walls had been the only noise other than my own agony and I had latched onto that.
I had latched onto her. And she was safe.
“Sapphire, please.”Beau begged me again, but I couldn’t reply, and I didn’t care.
I didn’t care that I died because I had got that one last look at someone I loved, that I so desperately needed. The one I had fought for with my life and soul and sanity.
For once in my life, I hadwon. I had won and the devil could go and fuck himself because I was coming for his throne next.
Chapter Eleven
Compressions. Again. Again. Then again.
I was the only one of us outside who knew CPR and could do it. Kellan knew, but his arm was still in a sling from the car crash, breaking it. Aiden knew a little, but he had been upstairs checking on the girls, and that left me.
I hadn’t waited a single moment. I’d ran to my girl the minute her blood soaked and beaten form had shocked Beau to his feet. I’d grabbed her the moment she fell, and I’d started helping her the instant she’d stopped breathing, and her heartbeat hadn’t made a single sound beneath my ear.
Breaths. Again and again and again. At some point, she’d been dragged into a car with me. I didn’t stop, even as she lay in the backseat in Price’s arms. I didn’t stop as my brother took the curves and roads like a maniac, sending me nearly flying each time.
I lost count after a while. I lost count of anything and everything other than the desire to keep going and make sure she didn’t leave us again – make sure that whatever she had gone through to bring herself home, to rescue herself, hadn’t been in vain.
Sweat poured down me, my arms burned, and I kept going. I didn’t give up even once, not until we arrived at the hospital and a bunch of doctors ran out to greet us, and Sapphire was snatched from my arms.
Only then did I stop trying to save my girl from the death I could taste on her lifeless lips and I collapsed against the ground, shattered, sobbing and heartbroken once again.
Chapter Twelve
They took Sapphire from us when the sun almost shined in the sky and morning broke through the clouds.
Non-responsive.
Bloody.
Smiling.
I saw the look in the doctor’s eyes. I saw the faces they pulled as they wheeled her away to the emergency room. There was no mistaking what they were going to come and tell us soon enough.
I knew what death felt like, and it was in every ounce of air that choked my lungs between sobs.
I knew what was going to happen even before it did.
Chapter Thirteen
