Page 83 of Ruthless Reign

Then, my brain caught up with the pain. My stomach…Something had happened to my stomach.

Had I stabbed myself?

No, my knife still stuck out of her neck where she collapsed on the floor.

“Julia!” Roman cried, rushing toward me, a look of sheer panic echoing out of his wide eyes.

Oh…

My chest erupted into agony, the burning heat of having been shot cascading down my legs and up my spine. My knees gave out, and I sank to the ground just as Roman’s arms wrapped around me, holding me up.

This is it. It was real. The whole time.

But it wasn’t Roman that fate wanted. Oh no. This time, it came for me.

As I stared up at his beautifully frightened eyes, I remembered there was something I wanted to tell him, something important.

“It was real,” I said, reaching up to touch his face. My fingers were coated red with Caputi blood, both mine and Gabriella’s. Despite this, I couldn’t feel them, and I couldn’t feel his cheek. The world had started to fade away. “I love you, and it was real. The whole time.”

Then everything went black.

26

BEAR

The steady beep-beep-beep of Julia’s heart rate monitor was the only thing keeping me sane. Watching her go down had pierced through my soul, and for one heart-clenching moment, I thought I’d lost her. I almost did. She bled out in front of me while chaos erupted around us, and I did my best to shield her from the fray.

The bodice of her wedding dress had been reinforced with body armor, but she’d managed to twist in just the right way for Gabriella’s bullet to go through a seam and into Julia’s chest. It was a one-in-a-million shot, but like Julia feared, fate had it out for her after all.

After Gabriella died, what little remained of those loyal to her either fled or were killed by my brothers. And the fucker that put his hands on Julia, Lenny or whatever the fuck his name was, fell lifeless to my feet when I put a bullet between his eyes.

Then Selene held my wife together until we could get her here. All in all, we’d lost over two dozen men, either killed so Gabriella could sneak onto our property or caught in the fray between the MCs after she went down. We couldn’t afford to loseany more, not after Stallion’s treachery and the raid earlier this year.

I should have been doing damage control at the clubhouse with KC and Hollywood. But instead, I sat by my wife’s side, my hands still stained with her blood.

It had been two days of touch and go, and after surgery removed most of the bullet fragments from her stomach, the doctors told me the rest would be up to Julia. She’d lost so much blood, she’d been sheet-pale by the time they got her on a gurney, and then they’d had to wait until she could even sustain surgery to get the pieces out.

“Have you slept?” came the deep voice from the doorway.

I glanced up to see Leo walking toward me with his hands in his dress pants. Verona had brought me a change of clothes earlier today, but I hadn’t been home since before the wedding, choosing instead to sleep on the tiny sofa just in case Julia woke up. I wanted to be the first person she saw. I wanted her to know we’d both made it, that she truly belonged to me now in a way she never could let herself before. We belonged to each other.

“Some,” I said, shifting in my seat as he sat in the chair on the other side of the hospital bed. He swept his red-rimmed eyes over his sister before letting out a long, drawn-out sigh. “What about you?”

“Some.” He attempted a smile, but it wasn’t genuine, not when Julia had paid the price for our high-stakes chess game. “Any change?”

I shook my head. She’d been hooked up to machines since she came out of her operation, and the doctors couldn’t say for sure if she would ever come off them. Selene was hopeful, and I’d never known her to mince words. If she thought Julia wouldn’t make it, she’d tell me.

“She is strong,” Leo said. “Stronger than both of us. She’ll come out of this.”

I didn’t know what I would do if she didn’t, and my lungs seized at the notion. It hadn’t started as love. Hell, it had barely started as friendship, but we’d built a solid foundation of trust and admiration. Now I loved her more than I’d ever loved anyone who dared stand in her place before.

“How’s your rise to the Caputi throne?” I asked, deciding to change the subject before my worries escalated into an anxiety attack.

“Going very well,” Leo said. “My uncles have ceded the top seat to me, and the underbosses have already fallen in line.”

“Do you expect dissent?” I thought of my brothers who had betrayed me and how hard it was to deal with them. Now, I couldn’t be sure if the rest of the club was scared of me or truly supportive of the plan. I guessed it didn’t matter either way, as long as they did what they were told and didn’t start shit. We would probably be hunting down their allies in the Hell’s Knights for years to come.

“Probably,” Leo said, picking lint off his shirt. “Some will think it easier to get rid of me than Gabriella. They may have gone along with it if only to topple me once I had the reins.”

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