Page 47 of Savage Love

I break off before I can finish the thought, as I pull into the driveway. I can’t let myself finish it.It would be one thing if none of that were true.I wouldn’t lie to her and pretend to feel things that I didn’t.

But I’m lying to her anyway, by pretending that I don’t feel what I do. What’s been steadily growing between us since Rio.

It’s not even just desire. Desire can be slaked, fulfilled until it wears out its welcome. But it’s more than that, and I know it.

I feel weighed down as I walk inside, tossing my keys on the side table and heading upstairs, knowing that she’ll likely be in bed by now. There’s no solution to it that I can see. Not one that doesn’t either leave me feeling as if I’ve betrayed a past that I’ve clung to for years or continue to keep us in this purgatory, where I give her only as much affection and care as I can manage without being overwhelmed by the guilt it fills me with.

I know I’m going to want her tonight. And I’m not so sure that I should try to fight that. I tell myself that I’m considering it because it would make her happy, but—

As I push open the door to our bedroom, I stop in my tracks. Elena isn’t asleep, the way I thought she might be, or even lying down, reading or scrolling through her phone. She’s sitting up, her arms wrapped around her, staring out across the room as if in shock. After a moment, I realize that she’s crying silently, her face paler than I’ve seen it in a long time.

She looks up at me, and her mouth opens, making the shape of my name, but no sound comes out. And then I see it—something that I think I’m hallucinating for a moment, a throwback to another woman, another bed, another night where my world fell apart in an instant.

The bed in front of her is drenched in blood.

Elena

Ilook up and see Levin standing there, see his gaze shift to the blood on the bed, and I see the instant panic in his face, the way it goes white as bone.

“Elena, what happened?”

There isn’t the anger in his voice that I expected—no recrimination, just fear and worry, the same emotions crashing through me. “I–I don’t know, I woke up—”

“How long ago?”

His voice shakes when he asks the question. I realize, numbly, that I’ve never seen him so afraid. I realize that he’s very close to falling apart himself, that he’s holding on by a thread so that he can be the one who handles this situation, when I so clearly am unable to this time.

“Not long,” I whisper. “I just woke up. There was this sharp pain, and—”

“We need to get you to the emergency room.”

“I wanted to stay awake until you got home. I—” I don’t finish that thought, that there had been a small part of me that, knowing he was out having drinks with Max and Liam, had hoped that when he came home, we’d have a repeat of the first night we were in our house—that he’d come home tipsy and fall into bed with me. But I’d been too exhausted and fallen asleep.

I’d woken up to a still-silent house, with a cramp of pain tearing through my abdomen that jolted me awake with a gasp, feeling as if I were dying. I’d never felt pain like that, not even after the plane crash. My first thought was that I should get up and call someone. Anyone. Levin, Isabella, the hospital. But I was frozen, in shock, the instantaneous fear that I felt paralyzing me.

I wrap my arms around my waist as I stare at him, gaze flicking between him and the blood-soaked duvet and sheets, all the words caught in my throat as the same thought rushes through my head again and again—I’m going to lose the baby, and Levin will hate me for it. I’m going to lose everything.

Levin steps forward, striding to the bed quickly as he reaches for his phone. He hits a button, and in a second, he’s barking into the phone, telling one of the members of our security to bring the car around. “Here. I’ll help you downstairs.”

“I—” I want to tell him that I can walk, but I’m not sure it’s true. My entire body feels numb and shaky. I don’t protest again when he reaches down, scooping me into his arms, seemingly heedless of whether I might get blood on him.

I feel like I might pass out, as I cling to him on the way down the stairs, my vision blurring with a mixture of tears and a creeping darkness at the edges. I try to cling to consciousness, afraid of what I’ll wake up to if I let myself pass out.

“It’s going to be alright,” Levin murmurs reassuringly to me as he helps me into the car, still holding me as the man driving us slips into the front seat and pulls out of the driveway. “We’re going to get you to the hospital, and it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine.”

He repeats it again, and I know he doesn’t entirely believe it himself. I know he’s saying it to try to calm me—and probably himself—down, and it works, in a way, if only because the sound of his voice is something for me to hold onto, to listen to instead of the screaming fear in my head that tells me everything is over.

That I’m going to lose everything in one night.

The sharp pain tears through me again, making me gasp and press a hand to my stomach, and Levin’s broad hand covers my own. “We’re not far away,” he tells me, and I can hear him struggling to keep his voice calm. “Just hang on, Elena.”

I’m not sure what I’m hanging onto, what it is that I could possibly do to change this one way or another, but I try to calm myself down.Panicking isn’t going to help, I tell myself, trying to breathe, my other hand on top of Levin’s between mine as I cling to him, taking comfort in the only thing I have right now that makes me feel as if I’m not floating away.

“I’ll call Isabella,” Levin says. “I know you’ll want her here, too.”

I want to tell himthank you, that, of course, I want my sister, but I can’t speak. The pain cramps deep in my belly again, and hot tears swim in my eyes as I try to breathe, clinging to Levin’s hand with both of mine. It feels like the car is moving impossibly slowly, as if it’s taking far too long to get there, and I have the nonsensical thought that I must be bleeding on the seats, and Iknowhow hard it is to get blood out of the back of a car.

It almost sends me into hysterical laughter, because it wasn’t all that long ago that I would have never thought that I would know something like that. The idea of Elena Santiago scrubbing her dying lover’s blood out of the back of a stolen car with bleach would have been a laughable one.

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