Page 5

I smiled.
Hallucinations of hot men were nice. Much better than the burn of ropes or the agony in my lungs. The pain seeped away, but so did the Vaughn image, darkness trying to consume me whole.
So quiet.
So dark.
So dead.
We broke the surface, and noise exploded around me.
“I’ve got her! I don’t know if she’s breathing!”
Hands reached for me. Fang’s terrified face flashed by. Then Kian’s.
“Get those ropes off her, Kian! Hurry!”
That was Vaughn’s voice.
I couldn’t work out what was going on. Only that suddenly, everything somehow hurt more than it had a minute ago.
I crashed down onto the ground none too gently and with no idea if I’d fallen or been tossed there. Pain scraped along my arm, tearing at what was left of the stupid Catwoman costume. My head flopped down on the hard poolside tiles. My body convulsed painfully, water pouring from my mouth. I moaned miserably, my stomach clenching in on itself to release the liquid I’d consumed.
“She’s breathing!” Kian crowed in victory. He pummeled my back, forcing more and more water from inside me. “Someone check on Sasha.”
The vomiting and coughing felt never-ending.
But the pain told me maybe I wasn’t dead after all.
“Sasha is fine,” she said from somewhere behind me. “But where the hell is the ambulance? One of you called one, right?”
I didn’t hear a reply. Fang knelt and covered me in a towel and his jacket. He looked absolutely destroyed.
I was pretty sure my tears mingled with the pool water on my cheeks. I wanted to reach out to him, tell him I was okay, except I wasn’t sure if that was true.
All I could do was cough and moan and plead with my eyes for him to not leave me.
I didn’t know when exactly Fang had become my safe place.
But he was.
“Love…”
The words were barely more than a gurgle around a cough.
“Don’t try to talk,” he soothed.
“Love you,” I choked out, pain in my throat. “Don’t want to die without you knowing that.”
He put one warm hand to the side of my face, his fear melting into something warmer as he held on to me. “You tell me that now, Pix? When this lot are all here listening and you’re puking pool water?”
I was pretty sure I was just dribbling water now but still managed to mumble, “Your timing wasn’t much better.” He’d confessed he loved me in Caleb’s house, while we’d been standing on the spot where I’d been attacked.
Hardly romantic.
He shook his head slowly and then leaned down and placed a kiss on my forehead. His voice went croaky. “I love you so fucking much. You scared the shit out of me, Pix. I thought you were dead when we got out here and you were at the bottom of that pool. I thought we were too late.”
A siren sounded from somewhere out front, and he glanced over his shoulder then gazed back down at me. “I’m gonna go get the paramedics. You keep breathing. You are not dying, you hear me? I won’t fucking let you. So help me, if I come back here and find you didn’t listen, I’m gonna spank your ass.”