Page 214 of Never Die for a Sinner
She’s out of it. Has been for hours, and yet, I haven’t moved, sitting in the hospital chair beside her bed despite everyone coming in and out of the room.
It would take a fucking nuke to move me now.
Call it what you want, but I’m just crazy enough to light this city and watch it burn to the ground before I’d leave her side again.
I thought I was doing the right thing, giving her the space she asked for. I let them trick me, and for that, I feel like I deserve that bullet they dug out of her side.
I never would have guessed Donovan would be her brother. Never could have imagined it when Marks came to me. Allthe signs were there. I should have fucking realized what it all meant.
She paid the price. The love ofmy lifepaid the price. And for that . . . I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive myself.
“You going to sit here all night?” Christian asks, stepping quietly into the room. His voice is low, aware of the heaviness already thick in the air. My family left over an hour ago to head down to the cafeteria, while I stayed behind, unwilling to leave her side.
He places a tray of food on the small stand beside me. I don’t look at it. I’m not hungry. The smell alone turns my stomach.
“Mila,” he explains, and I grunt in response.
He sighs and lowers himself into the seat beside mine, the one that’s barely been empty since we got here. For a long moment, neither of us speaks. We don’t need to. The silence says more than words ever could.
He’s thinking the same thing I am.
“Any word on Mendez?” I finally ask, my voice like gravel from disuse.
Christian nods once, casting a quick glance at Ava to make sure she’s still asleep. She is—her chest rising and falling under the hospital blankets, her face pale but peaceful. It’s the most deceptive kind of calm.
“I was hoping he’d bleed out before he made it to the hospital, but he’s stable.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees. “They got everything they need to put him behind bars for the rest of his miserable life.”
I shake my head, violence filling every vein in my body.
“I want to kill him, Christian.”
“Well,” he mutters, “I think you’re going to have to accept that he’s going to rot in whatever federal hellhole they throw him into. Slowly.”
I should feel some satisfaction about Alex’s fate, but I don’t. I wanted more than a quick end. I wanted to hurt him the way he hurt her. But I didn’t get the chance—not when she was in danger.
Definitely not after she took a bullet for me.
Fuck, it pisses me off so badly my hands shake when I think about him drugging her and pulling her from her cottage. Stealing her right out from under my nose.
All this time, I was worried about Palmer, but as it turns out, someone else was pulling the strings.
Palmer was just as much a pawn as the rest of us.
“I wanted to make him suffer,” I say quietly, staring straight ahead, my voice flat. “I wanted him to choke on his own blood while he begged for death.”
Christian doesn’t say anything at first. His silence is agreement enough.
“She almost died,” I whisper again, the words cutting me open from the inside. “She almost fucking died, and it’s because I wasn’t careful.”
He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t try to soften it. That’s not who he is.
“You know this only ends one of two ways, right?”
I nod slowly, clenching my jaw so tight I feel it crack. Of course I know. I’ve been sitting here with the weight of that truth pressing into my spine since they wheeled her out of surgery.
“You going to tell her the truth?”
“She knows everything,” I grunt, but we both know that’s not what he means.
