Page 44 of Devil’s Candy

“I already fucking know you saved her. I had to watch.” Killian reaches me and pulls Chloe from my grasp, wrapping her in his arms. “I’m so sorry, baby. I fucked up.”

Chloe bursts into hysterical sobs as she burrows into Killian.

I let my head relax back. “Killian?”

He stops babbling to Chloe long enough to give me a quick, “Yeah?”

“Is your plan to let me bleed out?”

Silence meets my words.

“I’m going to need someone to take care of Candy.”

“Angel already settled my hash over Candy today, he’s on it. As for your death”—he lets out a long sigh just as Rock trots toward us—“I’ve got a doctor who makes house calls.”

I look down at the pool of blood collecting on the pavement. “Hurry.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Candy

I hold Sver’s hand, being careful with the IV.

It’s been hours since he was conscious.

Killian brought him back to Angel’s, the doctor, who everyone weirdly just calls Hank, arriving just after them.

Despite the fact that Sver was drenched in blood, he seemed hyperaware, whispering shit about where I could find money in his apartment and how I should have Killian cut off his thumb to access his apartment and his safe if he died.

It was dark.

But I’m a girl who can handle dark.

What struck me more than the darkness was how he handed me the keys to life just in case something happened to him.

Does that mean that he wasn’t going to leave me? That he might care?

I don’t want to hope. They’ve been dashed so many times. But Sver…he just feels different. Whatever he does out there in the world, when he’s with me, he feels like a shield. Can I tell him that I’d give him every piece of myself if he’d just let me stay in his shadow sometimes?

But I can’t ask him any of this now. Maybe I’ll never be able…

The doctor knocked him out to remove the bullet and he hasn’t woken up since. They’ve been pumping him full of medication and blood for what feels like forever, and every minute that passes that I don’t see his blue-gray eyes makes me feel like they might never open.

Like I might lose him for real.

I heard what he did to get himself shot. Saving Chloe just like he saved me. And I’m so glad that he did. But this tiny part of me hated it. Just a little.

I know it makes me a bad person but I kind of wanted to believe that he saved me because he had feelings for me.

But now I’m wondering if that’s just what he does. A way of making up for what happened in his past with Rebecca.

Killian sits on Sver’s other side, Chloe folded in his lap, asleep. Because I finally can’t stand another second, I ask the question that I keep coming back to. “Who was Rebecca?”

Killian clears his throat. “My brother Win’s fiancée.”

My brow furrows. That makes even less sense than before. “Why would Sver kill your brother’s fiancée?”

“My brother was trying to take a short cut. Made a deal with Ivan Ivanov, A Russian mob boss, to let him use our family property to smuggle drugs into England. When Win wanted to back out, Ivan made Sver kill Rebecca. Ivan knew that Sver was actually Katarina and Sasha’s father. So he told Sver that if he didn’t act as his assassin, he’d kill the girls.”