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Then, as I try to focus, a face lurches into my field of vision, staring down with big blue eyes, her long blonde hair hanging down over me.
“Alistair!” Eloise chokes. Her eyes fill with tears, and she puts a hand over her mouth as she starts to cry.
“Hey…” I croak.
I try to sit up, but I’m abruptly knocked back by excruciating pain exploding through my side. Pure fire claws at my ribs as I glance down.
My shirt is ripped open, stained red. A blood-soaked hoodie is wrapped around my torso, over the pain in my ribs.
“What the fuck…”
“Don’t move,” Eloise says quietly. Her hands take one of mine, squeezing as her eyes pierce into mine. “You’ve been shot.”
Shit.
I glance down at the hoodie again and grimace.
“I… You were bleeding badly,” she says softly. “So I took my hoodie?—”
“Thank you,” I murmur, wincing. “How bad?”
Her face is bleak. “I don’t know. It looks like the bullet sort of…” She makes a face. “Carved a channel through your side, like a knife slash?”
Okay, not great. But it could be worse. I don’t have a hole clear through me, or a bullet lodged in my body. My brow furrows as I replay opening that hotel room door and finding myself face-to-face with Massimo, holding a gun.
I remember the muzzle flashing, and the white-hot knife stabbing into me.
I start to snort, but then groan as I keel over, the pain slicing into me again.
“Whoa, hang on,” Eloise hisses, grabbing me and helping me lie back down. She fixes me with a look. “Were you just trying to laugh?”
“That…” I grunt, biting back the pain. “That fuckstick shot me from two feet away and almost missed,” I chuckle, wheezing again as my torso burns.
I exhale as I lie back down. My eyes slide up to hers, and I slip my hand into hers.
“I’m sorry,” I growl quietly.
Eloise starts to cry, shaking her head.
“I hated doing it,” she chokes. “But…he…he threatened Camille, and with my father in a coma?—”
“Eloise.”
I grit my teeth, ignoring the pain as I wrench myself to an upright position.
Perspective.
I have it now. I’ve actually had it ever since this woman walked into my firm and back into my life. And I don’t have to “forgive” her for anything she did spying on my firm for Massimo.
Eloise is not the enemy. She never was.
She’s the woman I’ve loved since the day she walked around the corner of the stables back at Knightsblood and asked me why I kept getting into fights. The day I told her if she had a brain, she’d stay away from me.
Thank fuck she didn’t.
“I love you.”
Her eyes are filling with tears as her lip quivers.
