49. Sage #2
The blood turned his tactical gear a glossy, terrifying black.
It clung to the massive, impossible width of his shoulders and chest, highlighting the lethal, unyielding power of his body.
He was a machine built for war, a god of ruin who had just ripped men apart with his bare hands simply because they had chased me.
I was extremely, inappropriately turned on.
Time and place, Sage, I quickly reminded myself.
I swallowed hard, my eyes dropping to his blood-stained throat, remembering the, dominant pressure of his mouth on mine just minutes before everything erupted into violence and chaos around us.
I wanted him to touch me again. I wanted those blood-slicked hands to grab my hips and pull me back into the shadows where we had just shared our first kiss.
Stop it, I mentally scolded myself, my face flushing hot. People are dying.
“Alright, honey, let’s take a look at that leg,” a frantic, exhausted voice interrupted my dangerous mental spiral.
I wrenched my gaze away from Julian as a volunteer nurse hurried over to my cot.
She dropped a plastic tray of supplies on the stand beside me, her hands fumbling into a pair of latex gloves.
She looked pale and overwhelmed by the volume of casualties flooding in, but she quickly took a pair of trauma shears and cut the torn denim of my shorts away to expose the wound.
“You’re lucky,” the nurse muttered, pressing a thick gauze pad soaked in antiseptic directly onto the angry red groove carved into my outer thigh.
I hissed, my nails biting into the mattress as a sharp, burning pain finally grounded me back to reality.
I forced myself to keep my eyes on the nurse’s hands, trying desperately to ignore the magnetic, suffocating pull of the man standing just a few feet away. But my peripheral vision betrayed me.
Julian had turned his back to me, the blood on his vest shining under the harsh lights. He walked across the narrow aisle to the cot directly opposite mine.
Noah was lying there. His tactical vest had been stripped off, and a different medic was aggressively packing a deep wound near his shoulder. Noah was deathly pale, his eyes squeezed shut in pain, his usual bright, joking demeanour erased by the reality of the ambush.
Julian pulled up a metal stool and sat down beside his friend.
The lethal, feral energy that had been rolling off him in waves seemed to temper the moment he looked at Noah.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his massive, blood-stained hands clasping together as he spoke in a voice too low for me to hear over the chaos of the room.
Noah peeked his eyes open, a weak, pained grimace crossing his face as he muttered something back.
I chewed on my lower lip, the adrenaline finally beginning to crash, leaving me exhausted and aching. “Julian?” I called out softly.
He stopped talking instantly. He slowly turned his head, his eyes locking onto mine across the narrow aisle.
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked, gesturing weakly to Noah.
“Yeah,” His voice rough and devoid of emotion. He looked back down at his grime-covered hands. “But he’s pretty hurt.”
The hours in the makeshift hospital bled together into a chaotic, fluorescent nightmare. The air was thick with the moans of the wounded, the sharp sting of antiseptic, and the constant, frantic rush of boots on the stone floor.
Julian disappeared and reappeared like a blood-soaked phantom. He would sit with Noah for a few minutes, his jaw tight and his posture rigid, before vanishing back into the foggy night to gather intel or coordinate with the command tent.
I sat alone on my metal cot, my bandaged leg throbbing with a dull ache.
I had patted down my pockets an hour ago, realising with a sinking feeling that my phone was gone—likely dropped somewhere on the concrete plaza when I was running for my life through the chaos.
I had no way to contact the rest of the NGO team to see if they were okay and what our next move would be.
Not that there were many of us left here anyway.
Most of my group had packed up and gone home earlier this week.
I was one of the few who had insisted on staying behind, desperate to finish securing that damn stained-glass window.
I let my head fall back against the canvas, staring up at the flickering overhead lights. I didn’t know whether to be furious at the universe or incredibly, selfishly grateful. As messed up and horrific as tonight had been, if I hadn’t volunteered to stay behind, I wouldn’t have met Julian.
And God, something about him was pulling me in so fast it felt like falling off a cliff head first.
I’d had boyfriends before. Safe, normal guys back home.
Nothing serious, and nobody worth holding onto when a lease was up or graduation finished.
But I had known from a very early age, sitting alone in that cold house with my adoptive parents, that I didn’t want a safe, quiet life.
I wanted something big. Something heavy and all-consuming.
That naive, romantic part of me wanted to see exactly where this terrifying pull with Julian went.
I had been let down and overlooked by the world my entire life.
I figured I couldn’t possibly be let down any more than I already had been.
If he was the ruin he promised he was, a sick, twisted part of me wanted to let him ruin me.
The canvas flaps parted, and Julian stepped back into the nave area.
The blood on his tactical vest had dried to a terrifying, crusty black. He moved with that same lethal, silent grace, bypassing the triage chaos and stopping right at the edge of my cot. His gaze swept over my bandaged leg, checking the dressing before meeting my eyes.
“I’ve found a secure location for you,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that barely carried over the noise of the room. “There’s a civilian shelter being set up in the heavily fortified subterranean cellars beneath the cathedral plaza. It’s secure. I’m taking you there now.”
I sat up straighter, my fingers instinctively gripping the edge of the mattress. “Are you staying there with me?”
He looked away, staring at the massive stone archway over my shoulder. “No. I have to return to the plaza perimeter. My unit is still securing the breach.”