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My heart gave one desperate lurch, and then everything went still inside me. Too late. It was all too late.

At least I got to see him one last time.

“Come on, baby,” he pleaded. His voice sounded so far away. “Don’t do this.”

“Who is she?” a woman’s voice asked as I slipped farther into the dark.

Seb’s voice was the last thing I heard. “My wife.”

Ex-wife, I tried to say, but my lips wouldn’t move.

And then⁠—

Nothing.

2

SEB

How the hell did I end up here again? The smell of antiseptic tickled the back of my throat, and my heartbeat ratcheted up with the incessant beep of machines. Tubes and wires crisscrossed the bed. And her in the middle of it all, exactly as she had been four years ago, an IV drip piercing a blue vein that stood out vibrantly against her nearly translucent skin. Her, of all people.

My fucking wife.

Restless energy made every cell of my body vibrate like a tuning fork. No matter how I contorted my body, I couldn’t get comfortable. I wanted to smash something, but instead I surged to my feet. Paced three strides across the room and back again like a caged animal. When that did nothing to settle my agitation, I sat down again and drummed my fingers on the vinyl and chrome armrest. Leaned forward, elbows on my knees, chin on my fists, and stared at her like I could beam healing powers into her body through my eyeballs.

Her peach-hued eyelashes fluttered like she could sense the weight of my gaze, but she didn’t wake. Seeing Lila like this, with all the vitality drained out of her, was a special kind of torture. Even her strawberry-blonde curls, usually as buoyant as dandelion fluff on a summer breeze, were limp and lifeless. It scared me more than I cared to admit. With a quiet groan, I squeezed my eyes shut. But that didn’t protect me from it, because the image of her in a hospital bed had branded itself on my eyelids four years ago, and I still saw it now.

My wife. Fuck.

A lead brick sat on my chest. I couldn’t breathe past it.

“I’m alive. Oh, thank god, I’m alive.”

At the rough sound of her voice, I jerked to attention, my eyes popping open. Gray-green eyes that had haunted my dreams stared back at me. Bloodshot and depleted, like the rest of her. A fresh wave of fury rolled through me.

“You shouldn’t be,” I bit out.

Between the blood loss and the collapsed lung, she should have died right there in my arms. If there hadn’t been three EMTs within earshot and an extensive first aid kit, she would have. But Mercy River Ranch was a sanctuary for military and first responders recovering from physical and mental trauma. That saved her life yesterday. We’d gotten her stable enough to safely transport her to the hospital, where she’d needed a blood transfusion and surgery.

Tearing the world apart with my bare hands wasn’t an option, so I leaned back in the too-small chair and folded my arms across my chest, hands tucked safely into my armpits, and smirked like I wasn’t crumbling inside. “Over your dead body, huh? I didn’t think you meant it literally. If you wanted to see me so badly, you could have called.”

Annoyance flared in her hazel eyes. There she is. My spitfire was still in there.

“Nowhere else to go,” she rasped.

That puzzled me even as it pissed me right off. What the hell did she mean, she had nowhere else to go? That felt all kinds of wrong. I hated that I was apparently her last resort when I should have been her first call, even though I knew damn well that I wasn’t capable of being anything more. Not for her.

But that shouldn’t have mattered because Lila had friends all over the world. Real friends, the kind who showed up for each other in good times and bad. And she had family, too. She didn’t know her father, but she was close to her mother and aunt.

“A hospital should have been your first stop,” I pointed out.

“He would have expected that.”

My hands twitched. So she knew her attacker. It wasn’t random or a robbery gone wrong. She knew who attacked her, and she believed he would try again.

Lila looked like she wanted to say something more, but instead she shifted, arching her neck, and her fingers fluttered restlessly against her throat, clearly irritated. They hadn’t had to intubate her for the collapsed lung, but even with the IV drip, the hospital air was drying.

I snatched the disposable cup from the small oak nightstand, shedding its plastic wrapper as I stalked to the bathroom sink.