NIKOLAI
EVERYTHING f*****g HURT.
My stomach felt like it had been torn open—because it had—the bandages wrapped tight around my torso doing nothing to ease the burning throb beneath. My left wrist was useless, broken and swollen, fingers stiff and unmovable. Every breath dragged through my ribs like a knife.
Pain didn’t matter. Not when Claude was lying there, still as f*****g death.
I hadn’t moved from this chair in hours. Maybe longer. Time had blurred into the steady drip of the IV flushing the drugs from his veins, the too-shallow rise and fall of his chest, the quiet, pained sounds that barely even reached my ears. Sounds that never should have left his f*****g lips. Not Claude. Not mine.
I wanted to touch him. To brush my fingers over his skin, to feel the warmth of him
