Page 126 of Shadow Of Sin

I fall over and she catches me before I land on the floor. Her arms lock around my waist as she pulls me close. My face presses into her neck.

“Stay with me,” she whispers. “Wolfe. Don’t you dare.”

“I’m not going anywhere. That’s a fact,” I say, my voice barely a whisper.

Her arms grip me harder. She’s holding me up and keeping pressure on the wound. She’s doing everything right.

My head falls back, my eyelids drooping. But not before I catch a glimpse at her gaze. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the blood on her hands.

And I can’t tell if she thinks she’s saving the man she loves, or the man she hasn’t decided whether to forgive.

Then everything goes black.

CHAPTER 31

EVA

“Wolfe. Wolfe!”

He’s not responding. His eyes are closed, and his body is dead weight against me, and there’s so much blood I can’t tell where the wound ends and his shirt begins. I’ve got one hand pressed hard against his shoulder, and the other cradling his head, and I’m saying his name over and over like that’s going to fix a bullet hole.

It’s not. I know it’s not. But my mouth won’t stop.

“Somebody help me!” I scream it at Lochlan’s guys. At Sal. At the walls. “He’s not waking up!”

One of Lochlan’s men kneels beside me and checks his pulse. “He’s out but he’s breathing. His pulse is strong. He’s not dying.”

He’s not dying.

Those two words are the only thing keeping me from completely losing it on the floor of my brother’s restaurant.

His blood is everywhere. On my hands, my arms, soaked through the front of my shirt. Warm and sticky between my fingers from holding him up before his body went limp against mine.

The medic shows up in under three minutes because of course, the Molloys had one on standby for tonight. He comes through the back door with a medical bag. No uniform. No ambulance. No questions. He drops beside Wolfe, checks the wound, and says “exit wound, missed the artery” in a tone that’s way too calm for the amount of blood on this floor.

He packs the shoulder, wraps it tight, and tells Wolfe to stay conscious. Wolfe’s eyes keep drifting shut and snapping back open. Every time they close, my stomach bottoms out.

They’re going to take him to the Molloy house. Not a hospital. Because hospitals mean questions and police reports and paperwork that connects a Molloy to a shooting in the same neighborhood where an Albanian lending operation just got raided.

Of course, not a hospital. Because God forbid anything in this world operates the way normal shit is supposed to operate.

Cillian bursts through the front door about five minutes later, out of breath and wild-eyed. He takes in the scene—the blood on the floor, his brother on a stretcher, me standing in the middle of it soaked in red and shaking so hard I can feel it in my teeth.

“How bad?” His voice is tight and scared. I’ve never heard Cillian sound scared.

“Through and through. Missed everything important,” the medic says.

Cillian lets out a breath and drops his head for a second. When he lifts it, his eyes are wet. He blinks it away fast, but I saw it.

Then he looks at me. “You coming with us?”

“No.”

“Eva—”

“I’m staying with Sal,” I say, my voice raspy.

He looks at Sal. My brother is white as a sheet and holding himself together with both arms, which is probably how I’d look, too, if someone just got shot in my restaurant and I had zero explanation for why.