Chapter 17 - Blood and Silk
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"Look at me—Lucian, keep your eyes open and look at me!"
Inside the bright white LED light of the concrete safe room, Clara dropped to her knees beside him, tearing off the heavy Kevlar vest he had strapped around her shoulders so she could move freely. Outside the three-inch steel door, the muffled thud of Lorenzo’s men trying to breach the library echoed like distant thunder, visible on the four wall monitors showing the rest of the mansion.
Lucian leaned his head back against the cool wall, his breathing shallow and ragged as sweat soaked the dark waves of hair clinging to his forehead.
"Check the... monitor for the back drive," he rasped, his hand still pressed over the crimson stain spreading across his left side. "Roman and the guards—"
"Enzo’s trucks just pulled through the gate on Camera Two—thirty men are flanking Lorenzo’s crew in the courtyard right now," Clara said rapidly, glancing once at the screen before pulling the trauma kit off the wall shelf and ripping open the sterile clasps. "Right now, my only job is keeping you from bleeding to death on this floor."
With steady, practiced hands—honed by three years of changing dialysis lines and sterile dressings for her dying father—Clara pulled a pair of surgical shears from the kit and cut away the blood-soaked fabric of Lucian’s tailored waistcoat and white dress shirt.
Her breath hitched slightly when she peeled the cotton back.
A nine-millimeter hollow-point round had torn a deep, jagged furrow across the muscle of his lower left ribcage—missing his lung and spleen by less than an inch, had he not twisted his torso to shield her when the skylight shattered.
"You turned your back into the line of fire to cover me," Clara whispered fiercely, her hands trembling only for a second before she poured antiseptic solution across a sterile gauze pad and pressed it firmly against the bleeding wound.
Lucian hissed sharply through his teeth, his right hand shooting out to grip the edge of her emerald coat, his knuckles white with pain.
"I told you in the car," he breathed roughly, his silver-gray eyes locking onto her face from inches away as she prepared the lidocaine syringe and curved suture needle. "There is no version of this day where you get hurt while I'm still breathing."
"Hold still. The lidocaine takes too long to numb deep tissue and you're losing blood too fast," Clara warned softly, tears shimmering in her hazel eyes even as her hands remained rock-steady. "This is going to hurt like hell."
"Just look at me while you do it," Lucian murmured.
Instead of grabbing a steel brace to bite down on, Lucian reached up with his uninjured right hand and cupped the back of her neck, pulling her forehead down until she was inches from his face.
With seven swift, precise stitches using black nylon surgical thread, Clara closed the deep tear in his side. Lucian didn't make a single sound as the needle pierced his skin again and again; he just stared straight into her hazel eyes, his jaw clenched like iron, drawing every ounce of his endurance from the warmth of her breath against his cheek.
When she tied off the final knot, taped a thick pressure bandage over his ribs, and sat back on her heels with blood staining her pale hands and silk cuffs, Lucian didn't let her pull away.
He tugged her gently down into his lap on the floor, careful of his bandaged left side, and buried his face against the curve of her neck.
"My mother used to tell me when I was a boy," Lucian whispered against her skin, his voice raw with emotion as gunfire roared outside on the estate grounds, "that the Sterling men are cursed to love only once in their lives—and when they do, it nearly kills them. I didn't believe her until the day you walked into my kitchen in a gray dress."
Clara wrapped her arms gently around his broad shoulders, holding him tight as she watched the security monitors on the wall.
Outside on the snow-covered lawn of the estate, the tide had turned completely. Enzo Castiglione’s forty heavily armed soldiers had trapped Don Lorenzo’s crew in a deadly crossfire between the conservatory and the front gates, while Roman led a tactical squad straight up the grand staircase to clear the second floor.
Then, Clara noticed the offline military laptop sitting on the communications desk inside the panic room.
May you like
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her father’s titanium micro-drive.
"Lucian," she whispered. "Let’s see what my father died protecting."
