The world had gone completely still.
Camille stood frozen beside the car, pulse slamming against her ribs, staring down at the stranger crumpled a few feet away on the cold asphalt.
Blood had soaked clean through his shirt, spreading dark across the front of it in a stain that seemed to grow even as she watched.
It seemed, he had been shot.
In the weak throw of the streetlight she could make out the bruising along his jaw, his temple — evidence of something that had clearly started long before he’d staggered into her headlights.
“Oh my God.” The words left her as barely more than a breath.
She dropped to her knees beside him, hands hovering, unsure whether touching him would help or make it worse.
She had never been this close to this kind of damage in her life.
Nobody had ever taught her the rules for it.
She made herself reach for his wrist anyway.
A pulse — faint, uneven, but there.
Relief crashed through her hard enough to leave her dizzy.
She looked up and down the empty road.
No houses.
No other cars.
Nothing but streetlights marching off into the dark in both directions, and she realized, distantly, that she had no idea how far she’d driven without noticing.
Her breathing turned ragged.
“What do I do.” She fumbled her phone free with shaking hands.
“I need to call—”
A hand closed around her wrist.
Camille gasped, the phone nearly slipping from her fingers.
His eyes had opened.
For one suspended second, everything else fell away — the cold, the blood soaking into the knees of her dress, even the fear.
And then, beneath the bruising, beneath the blood at the corner of his mouth, something in his face resolved into a shape she recognized, and the ground seemed to drop out from under her all over again, for an entirely different reason than the blood.
Liam Macford.
The same composed, unbothered man who’d handed his ruined jacket to a guard three weeks ago without so much as raising his voice.
The same name a bartender had said barely an hour ago like it belonged to something dangerous enough to avoid even thinking about too loudly.
She’d sat at that bar less than two hours earlier hearing about the empire of fear this man supposedly commanded, and now here he was, bleeding out in front of her on an empty road, his hand locked around her wrist with whatever strength he had left.
Every instinct in her body told her to run.
She’d heard exactly what kind of man this was tonight, straight from someone who clearly knew.
She didn’t run.
“Don’t call the…
police,” he rasped.
“But you’re hurt.
You need real help.”
He breathed through it, ignoring her entirely, gathering whatever was left of himself into two words.
“Hospital…
Saint Andrew.”
“Yes — yes, okay, I’ll take you.
Just hold on.” Her voice shook more than she wanted it to, some frantic, disbelieving part of her mind still circling the same impossible fact.
This is him.
This is actually him. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
His gaze slid past her shoulder, and his jaw went tight enough that she saw it even through the pain glazing his face.
His grip on her wrist tightened with it.
“They’re coming.”
A chill went straight down her spine.
She turned to look.
Nothing — just the empty road, silent and still.
“Who’s coming?” she asked, voice thinner than she meant it to be.
He fought the words out like they cost him something.
“Take me.
Saint Andrew Medical Center.” His grip slackened, fingers slipping from her wrist as his eyes fell shut again.
“Hey.” She leaned closer, heart lurching.
“Hey — can you hear me?”
Nothing.
She checked his pulse again, forcing her fingers steady — still there, barely.
Her phone sat heavy and useless in her palm, every rational part of her screaming to call an ambulance regardless of what he’d said.
But his words kept circling, refusing to let her think past them.
No police.
They’re coming.
Far down the road, a faint glow bloomed against the dark.
Headlights.
Distant, but moving, and moving toward her.
Her heart lurched.
“They’re coming,” she whispered, and shoved the phone back into her bag without letting herself think about it twice.
Whoever he was — whatever he was — she wasn’t leaving him here to die on an empty road while men who terrified an entire city closed in behind her.
“Come on.
Please.”
She slid an arm beneath his shoulders, bracing herself against the dead weight of him.
He was far heavier than she’d braced for.
She staggered under him, nearly went down with him twice, forced herself upright through sheer refusal to fail.
It took three attempts before she managed to haul him around to the passenger side and fold him into the seat.
By the time the door shut, she was breathing hard, blood smeared dark across her palms, her dress, the leather upholstery she’d have to explain to Kelly eventually.
She ran around the hood and dropped behind the wheel, hands shaking too badly to get the key into the ignition on the first try.
The GPS lit up under trembling fingers.
Saint Andrew Medical Center — 34 minutes.
“Please,” she said, glancing sideways at him, at the slow, shallow rise and fall of his chest.
“Just stay alive.
That’s all I’m asking.”
The engine caught.
She pressed the pedal down harder, the city smearing past the windows in long ribbons of light while the GPS recited turns she barely registered, her whole attention narrowed to the rhythm of his breathing.
Every few blocks she glanced over, some fresh disbelief resurfacing each time — Liam Macford is bleeding in my passenger seat and I have no idea why, or who did this to him, or what I’m actually driving myself into.
Every time she found the rise of his chest still moving, she let herself breathe again, just barely, just enough to keep driving.
At last the blue glow of Saint Andrew’s emergency sign rose out of the dark ahead of her.
She swung the car into the entrance and had the door open before it had fully stopped rolling.
“Help!
Please — somebody, help me!”
Staff came running with a stretcher, their faces shifting the instant they saw him — the practiced calm of people who dealt in exactly this kind of crisis, snapping instantly into motion.
They lifted him from the seat and moved fast down the corridor, and Camille followed on legs that no longer felt entirely like her own.
A doctor peeled off to fall into step beside her.
“Did you bring him in?”
“Y-yes.”
“Thank you.
You did the right thing.” He was gone again before she could answer anything else — no questions about who she was to him, or how a stranger had ended up bleeding across her passenger seat.
Only once he’d disappeared through the doors did she look down and actually see her own hands.
Red, drying at the creases of her knuckles.
Her dress, ruined beyond saving.
A nurse touched her elbow, gentle.
“Miss?
Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She let herself be led, numb all the way through it — hands washed under water too warm to really feel, the dress taken away to be dealt with, a set of plain scrubs pressed into her arms in its place.
Minutes later she sat alone in a hard plastic chair outside the emergency ward, staring at nothing, trying to piece together how an evening that had started with Kelly’s cookies and a fight over a black dress had ended with her covered in the blood of the most feared man in New York.
Her phone rang.
Kelly Calling.
Her stomach dropped — the party.
Brielle.
All of it came rushing back at once, and she realized, with a lurch of guilt, she’d forgotten Kelly entirely.
She answered.
“Kelly—”
“Camille!” Kelly’s voice cracked through the line, frantic, breathless.
“Where are you?
I’ve been calling for an hour, I’ve been looking everywhere—”
Camille closed her eyes, the emergency doors blurring in front of her.
“Kelly,” she started, quieter than she meant it to come out.
“I need to tell you—”
Kelly didn’t let her finish.
“The party got raided.
Police showed up out of nowhere, Cam — I’m at the station.”
Camille’s eyes snapped open, every ounce of guilt she’d been holding for the stranger down the hall suddenly crowding in beside a fresh, colder wave of it.