Page 54 of The Last Time You Break Me

“And you are?” A short brunette asked as we turned a corner.

“Me? I’m her fiancé.” Because there was no way if she survived this, that I was not going to make her my wife. As the doors to the surgery wing swung open and they rolled her away from me, I grabbed the orderly by the arm and pulled him into me, my eyes lifeless and cold as they bore into his. “If she dies, I’ll burn this hospital to the ground,” I sneered and he gulped before he took off behind the doors that kept me separated from my future. I looked down and stared at the blood that covered me as my stomach revolted.

“What the fuck happened?” Dom roared, as he gripped me by the shoulder and turned me around to face him. “What the fuck happened?” he asked again, more brokenly as a sob caught in the back of his throat.

“I-I don’t know,” I answered honestly. The last half an hour was nothing but a blur of moments coiled together without a face or name. Without a voice or structure. “She was justsitting there, smiling at me. She was just smiling at me all until she wasn’t anymore,” I uttered numbly as something wet trailed down my cheek and the world around me spun out of control. There was a void that had opened in my chest and all of my anguish became directed there, to that endless space that harbored all of my pain.

“And the person who did this?” Dalton asked, as he cleared his throat and set his face. I could see the strain in his features, the ones that hurt savagely as he tried to keep his tears at bay.

Dallas wasn’t so lucky. He sat on the ground, head in his knees as he sobbed, before rearing back and slamming his head into the wall. Dylan knelt beside him and pulled his brother in close and cradled his head to his chest. Green eyes peered up at me, sunk in so much sorrow that I had to look away from the torment. From the familiarity.

I had to look away from them all.

“He's still there, at the restaurant. I killed him before he rained down any more fire,” I told them before I looked back up and met Dom’s eyes in fury. “He aimed directly for her, Dom. She was his target.”

“I’ll head back there now. I’ll see what I can find on the body,” Dalton decided as he turned to leave but stopped to look back at me. “Keep me updated.” Then he walked away.

“Dalton!” Dom called, as he followed his son down the hall to speak with him before he went to search the body of the man who could have potentially murdered his sister.

It had been days, maybe weeks.

I was uncertain at this point as I sat beside Lara’s bedside with my head laid flat beside her.

Her hand cradled in mine as I held my finger to her pulse.

I hadn’t left.

I hadn’t showered and I had hardly slept.

She hasn’t woken yet, doctors were unsure if she would.

They had said at this point that it was a conscious thing. That she hadn’t woken because she hadn’twantedto. Survival instincts they had called it. Bred from trauma and self-preservation. They said that her body needed to heal, so her brain was potentially waiting for that to happen. The other option was that she has just retreated into her mind. That she had not wanted to wake up at all.

It was a hard pill to swallow but after everything she had been through it did make me wonder.

I began to question her.

To questionusand I didn’t know how to process that.

I twirled the ring on her finger. The engagement ring I had placed there the second she was out of surgery and lost myself in the emerald diamond. The center was stretched like glass, and I could see my reflection in it. But it wasn’t my face that stared back at me, instead it was a crystal ball of our future.

The one I had hoped wewouldandstillcould have.

A contradiction of the fucked up place within my mind right now.

I sat up, reached into my pocket and pulled out the crumpled letter that Dalton had found on the dead man from the restaurant.

Once upon a time, a life was stolen.

A little boy lost.

To the riches and the wilds, the boy was double-crossed.

I was discarded and left to rot. I had nothing left to lose, Dom.

So I decided to build an empire, and burn those old wounds you created.

I made the first move and struck the match.

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