Chapter 56
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Aric
Ayanna’s body jerks backward from the impact, her eyes going wide with shock, her hand reaching for something—for me—and I catch her before she hits the floor.
I see blood.
So much blood.
Blooming across the champagne fabric of her gown like a dark flower opening. Spreading. Staining. Ruining.
“Ayanna!”
Her name tears out of me, raw and uncontrolled.
The world splinters into fragments. Screaming from inside the ballroom. The crack of return fire—Tassilo, maybe, or one of the others. Guests scattering like shattered glass.
None of it matters.
My arms close around her. Her head lolls against my shoulder. Her eyes are closed. Her skin is losing color by the second, and the blood… The blood is everywhere. On her dress. On my hands. Soaking through my jacket where I’m crushing her against my chest.
“Ayanna,” I say her name like a prayer. “Ayanna, look at me.”
She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t open her eyes.
The world goes red at the edges.
I carry her through the ballroom toward the stairs. The chaos parts around me—people stumbling back, voices raising in confusion and fear, someone screaming about gunmen while my wife bleeds out in my arms.
“Eero!”
My voice cuts through the noise. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I just stop hearing anything except my own heartbeat and the shallow rasp of her breath against my neck.
She’s breathing.
She’s still breathing.
Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.
Eero appears, his face white. He looks at Ayanna. At the blood. At me.
“The doctor,” I say. “Now.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s the voice of a man holding himself together through sheer force of will while everything inside him screams.
“Aric—”
“Get Kirill. Helicopter. Now.”
“The hospital—”
“No.” It comes out sharp, a command and a threat in equal measure. “The hospital is thirty minutes away. Kirill can be here in fifteen.” I shift her weight, and more blood seeps through my fingers. Too much. Too fast. “Call him. Gunshot wound. Tell him to bring everything.”
Eero doesn’t argue. He pulls out his phone and moves.
Good. Someone needs to be useful, because I can’t think past the weight of Ayanna’s body and the smell of her blood and the way her skin looks too pale, too much like something already lost.
I carry her to the study, away from the chaos. Away from the eyes and the questions and the hundred things I can’t deal with right now.
Tassilo follows. His face is a mask, but I see the rage under it—cold and contained, the same rage I’m holding back through nothing but will.
“The shooters?”
“Two dead. One escaped.”
“Find him.”
“Already deployed.”
“I want him alive.”
Tassilo nods. “Understood.”
He disappears, and then it’s just me. And her. And the blood that won’t stop coming.
Gently, I lay her on the leather sofa. I press my hand against the wound. Abdomen. Right side. Too much blood. It seeps hot and slick between my fingers, and I press harder.
She doesn’t react or flinch or open her eyes and tell me I’m hurting her—the way she would if she were conscious. The way she would if she were okay.
“Ayanna.” I can’t stop saying her name, as if the sound of it might anchor her here. Might keep her from slipping into whatever’s pulling at her edges. “Stay with me.”
No response.
“That’s an order.”
Nothing.
“Ayanna—”
My voice breaks. Breaks.
I don’t break. I don’t crack. I don’t let anyone see what’s underneath the control, the calm, the careful mask I’ve worn since childhood.
But she’s bleeding in my arms. She threw herself in front of a bullet meant for me.
And I can feel her slipping with every heartbeat, every second that passes without the sound of a helicopter cutting through the dark.
The door opens, and there’s Naomi—her face a wreck of tears and terror, her whole body vibrating with the need to do something. Behind her, Eero. Behind him, Ingrid, already moving with a calm that feels almost offensive.
“I need towels,” I say. “Clean ones. Water. And—”
“Already done.” Ingrid is beside me, arms full of white cloth, her face pale but her hands steady. “Kirill is en route. Eight minutes.”
Eight minutes. An eternity. Too long.
I press the towel to the wound, and the white turns red in seconds.
“She needs a hospital,” Naomi whispers, sobbing. “She needs—”
“She needs to survive the next eight minutes.”
It comes out too harsh, and Naomi flinches like I’ve struck her. I don’t apologize. I can’t. If I soften, if I let even a fraction of what’s underneath show on my face, I won’t be able to put myself back together.
The helicopter’s engine and the specific sound of its blades reach us before I see it, then growing closer, cutting through the night like a promise of salvation. Like a hope I cannot allow myself to lose.
Ayanna hasn’t moved. Her breathing’s gone shallower. Her skin is gray now.
Gray. The color of death.
I’ve seen that color before. On enemies. On targets. On men I’ve put in the ground without a second thought.
Never on someone I…love.
Don’t.
She’s not dying. She’s not.
Kirill arrives like a force of nature. He’s been the Vold family doctor for years. He’s stitched me back together more times than I can count. And now he’s going to save my wife. There is no alternative.
“Out,” he says. “Everyone out. Except—” His eyes find my blood-soaked hands, still pressed to her wound. “You. Keep pressure until I tell you otherwise.”
The room empties. Naomi, crying. Ingrid, grim. Eero, looking at me like he’s never quite seen me before.
The door closes, and Kirill goes to work.
The next hour exists in fragments. His hands, steady and sure, cutting away her dress. Instruments out of the bag. IV lines. Monitors beeping a rhythm I learn to hate. My hands, still pressed where he tells me to press, covered in blood that’s drying on my skin.
Her face is still and pale and peaceful in a way that terrifies me—because peace is what comes after. Peace is what waits on the other side. And she is not allowed to go there. Not yet.
Not without me.
“Pulse is stabilizing.” Kirill snaps me out of my thoughts an eternity later.
“The bullet?” I glance at him.
“Extracted. No major organ damage. The wound itself won’t kill her. She’s strong. She’ll heal.”
I let out a breath of relief, but then I see Kirill’s face. I see he isn’t finished, and there’s something in his face I haven’t seen before.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
His hands go still, and he looks at the monitor instead of at me.
“When did your wife last bleed? Her cycle.”
The question makes no sense. “Why?”
“Aric.”
“Why, Kirill?”
He exhales. “I ran routine bloodwork while we were stabilizing her.” He finally looks at me. “It showed elevated β-hCG.”
He watches me for a beat. My expression doesn’t change.
“Your wife is pregnant. Based on the hormone levels, I’d estimate she’s around eight weeks.”
The world stops.
Pregnant.
For one suspended second, it’s the only word in the room. Eight weeks. A child. Hers. Mine. Ours.
And something—terror and wonder, hope and joy braided so tight I can’t pull them apart—moves through me. A flash of a future I never once let myself picture, because men like me don’t get those. A small dark-haired thing with her chin and her temper. A reason. Something to protect… a gift.
Eight weeks. The contract I signed without reading demanded exactly this—an heir, conceived and delivered inside a year, or her life forfeit.
I tore that clause out with my own hands.
Burned every copy. Swore no child of ours would ever be a blade held to her throat.
And somewhere in these eight weeks, the thing that began as a death sentence had quietly become the one thing in this world I would have laid down my life to—
I look at Kirill, and it all goes out of me at once.
Because he isn’t looking at me like a man who’s just delivered good news.
He’s looking at me the way he looks at the dying.
His hands are still, eyes hollow. He hasn’t said the word congratulations, and judging by the look on his face, he isn’t going to.
My eyes drop. To the bandage. To the gauze taped over the right side of her abdomen, where the bullet went in. Where the blood came out.
I know before he says it.
“No.” My voice is barely a sound. “No.”
My head drops, and I cup it in my hands.
“The blood loss,” Kirill says quietly. “The trauma. The shock to her body.” He exhales. “I’ll confirm with a scan once she’s stable. But there’s almost no chance. I’m sorry, Aric.”
A weight forms inside my chest that feels so heavy I can’t breathe. I force myself to lift my head, to look him in the eye.
“You’re telling me my wife was carrying my child. And someone put a bullet in her. And it’s gone.”
Kirill’s gaze drops, and that’s all the confirmation I need.
I stand there, covered in my wife’s blood, staring at her unconscious face, and I can’t breathe. It feels like the ground is shifting beneath me, cracking open and engulfing the possibility of a future I didn’t even know I wanted.
A child. Our child. Gone before I knew it existed.
Taken by men with guns and reasons I don’t have yet.
But will.
Will hunt. Will find. Will destroy.
“Leave,” I say.
Kirill looks up. “Aric—”
“I said leave.”
He studies me a moment, and must see something in my face, because he wisely nods. “I’ll be in the next room. If her vitals change—”
“I’ll call.”
He gathers his things and walks to the door. “I’m sorry. Truly.”
The door closes. And I’m alone—with my wife, with my grief, with the rage building in my chest like a funeral pyre waiting for a match.
I sink into the chair beside the couch and grab her hand. Her fingers are cold. I wrap both of mine around them, trying to push warmth into her, trying to anchor her to a world that just got infinitely darker.
“You didn’t tell me,” I whisper. “Did you know? Did you suspect? Or were you waiting to be sure before you told me?”
Nothing. Just the beep of the monitors. Just the sound of her breathing. Just the absence of everything that might have been.
I press my forehead to her hand, and for the first time since I was a child—since my father beat the tears out of me—I cry.
Silently. Without sound. The tears fall onto her skin.
And in the hollow where my heart used to be, something else takes root.
Something cold. Something that will not rest until every person responsible for this is in the ground.
The door opening snaps me out of my thoughts. I don’t move and don’t bother to wipe my face. I don’t care who sees.
“Aric.” Eero’s voice reaches me, quiet and careful. “The shooter. The one who got away.” He pauses for a fraction. “Tassilo found him.”
I lift my head and look at my brother.
“Where?” My voice is hoarse.
“Warehouse on the docks. He’s secured.”
I look at Ayanna one last time—at her gray face, at the gauze, at the cold hand still folded in both of mine. I set it down gently against the cushion.
And when I stand, the man who loves her stays in that chair. Someone else walks out.
“Watch her,” I say. The blood on my clothes has dried to a stiff, dark brown. Her blood. My child’s blood. “If she wakes before I’m back—”
“I’ll call you.”
“If anything changes—”
“I’ll call you.”
I’m already at the door.
The pyre has its match now.