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When Loïc’s head lolled, I realized he was completely out of it.
Fear spiked my blood with adrenaline and I bolted after them, catching up only because the man couldn’t half carry Loïc as fast as I could run. What the fuck was going on? What had the man done tohim?
“Stop! Someone stop them!” It took a few horrifying moments for me to catch up, and I punched the guy in the back of the head with the full force of my momentum. His head crashed into the wall, and he dropped Loïc, but the man shook it off and rounded on me before I managed to hit him again.
He swung, but I ducked the worst of it, but his ring clipped my ear. We traded punches, and I wasn’t sure who was winning. Every time I hit the man, he popped back up again.
Where was the fucking bouncer?
Time moved in slow-motion. It was one of the men Loïc had pointed out earlier. I was afraid his friend was going to show up and make the fight less even. He’d landed a few blows at this point, and my ears rang. My eye and cheek felt like they had their own heartbeat. My nose felt smashed. I took a chance to look around to see if Loïc was safe and found him lying on the floor with his head in a woman’s lap.
The bachelorette party swarmed up, and started screaming at my assailant as he landed another jab to my jaw. They beat at him with their high-heeled shoes as he tried to get out the door. One of them grabbed a can of mace out of her handbag and sprayed it at the guy as he pushed past one of the smaller women and took off down the street.
I was torn, wanting to chase the man and beat his ass into the ground for what he’d tried to do to Loïc, but too worried about Loïc to follow.
“I called the police!” one of the women shouted, her voice cutting through my chaotic thoughts and pain.
“We all saw him. Maybe we can give them a description.”
“I took some pictures of him!”
“I dropped the AirTag from my purse in his hood. I can track him with my phone!”
A bouncer finally showed up, apologizing. “What happened? Some guy started a fight out of nowhere, and we were dealing with that. We didn’t know anything was happening up here.”
So that was where the creep’s friend had gone—luring security away so they could sneak Loïc out the front door?
I tried to lever Loïc up, but he was dead weight. I sat on the floor and took him from the woman who’d stopped to help, sliding his head and shoulders into my lap. Heart in my throat, I checked to make sure he was still breathing. His eyes fluttered, and he weakly tried to push me away.
“It’s Valor. You’re going to be okay,” I said with more certainty than I was feeling. I was shaking, and I hurt all over. It had been years since I’d been in a scrap, and fighting a grown man as a grown man was a completely different thing from teenagers getting in a tussle over the remote. “It's me. I've got you, baby. I won't let anything else happen to you.” I tried to swallow down my panic.
He was always so full of life. Seeing him without at least a flicker of mischief in his gaze made me feel ill.
“He wasn’t drunk when I talked to him a few minutes ago,” one of the women said.
“I called for police and an ambulance.”
I stroked his silken hair. He was mumbling, but I couldn’t hear over the din. An announcement came over the sound system advising everyone to bring their drinks back to the bar because someone had been drugged.
I gazed down at his troubled face, remembering how he’d worried about the bachelorette party. Neither of us had even thought of worrying about ourselves.
Fuck. Hadn't he been through enough in his life?
Why hadn't I kept a better eye on him?
What if he'd been sexually assaulted?
The police came, then an ambulance. The bride-to-be got her friends organized and gave a statement as Loïc was loaded into the back of the ambulance. The designated driver from the bachelorette party and one of the other women threw me in their rented passenger van and followed the ambulance to the hospital. The police had said someone would meet me there and get my statement.
At the desk, I asked for him, sick with worry. After a few minutes they figured out where he was, but started giving me a hard time about letting me in to see him since I wasn’t ‘family.’
“Let me in to see my fiancé immediately,” I growled, losing my temper in public for the first time in my life, “or we’ll be suing your fucking asses off.”
Chapter Twenty-Four: Tarryn
I was a mess all the way to the hospital—mind racing, and so worried I wanted to throw up.
Rodrigo drove as Severin, beside him in the front seat, impatiently criticized his driving. I clutched Minnow’s hand, grateful Rodrigo’s mother had been staying with them since the twins’ birth, and was watching the children so the rest of us could go to the hospital. Minnow was nursing the twins, so she wouldn’t be able to stay indefinitely, but she’d been too worried about Loïc to stay home.
