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Progress went a little faster with Taavi’s assistance, and I was able to sink down carefully and gratefully onto the bed, on which Taavi had already pulled back the covers.

“Okay, sleeping beauty. I’ll see you in a few hours when we’re all less tired and cranky, okay?” Elliot was already halfway out the door.

“Okay,” I mumbled.

“Come get me if you need me,” he said, but when I opened my eyes to look at him incredulously, he was looking at Taavi. My clearly still furious boyfriend nodded.

Elliot tapped the side of the doorway, then left, pulling the door shut behind him.

I was expecting a lecture.

What I got was silence.

“Taavi?”

“Close your eyes and try to sleep, Val.”

He was pulling off my shoes and socks—because Elliot hadn’t wanted to try to get my shoes off me, and they hadn’t been outside to pick up dirt. This pair, anyway.

“What happened to my other shoes?”

Taavi let out a soft growl in the back of his throat, but then answered me anyway. “They’re in the trash along with your clothes.”

“I liked those shoes.”

“I can go get them if you want to scrub the blood off them,” he retorted, the words sharp.

“I got blood on my shoes?”

“You lost almost twenty percent of your blood volume,” he snapped. “So yes, there was blood on pretty much everything.”

Oh. Fuck.

“Taavi?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

Wrong thing to say. Really fucking wrong thing.

Because he folded, his back to the side of the bed, crumpling into a ball, his face in his hands.

And, oh, holy fuck, did it break me.

I tried to turn and failed, biting my lip to keep from crying out as I tried—and failed again—to sit up. To do anything to reach him. Fuck my stitches. Fuck this whole fucking day. And yesterday.

In fact, fuck this whole fucking month. Everything from the day Gregory Crane had been killed onward could just go fuck itself with a flaming baton because…fuck.

All I could do was plead with him. “Taavi—”

I tried to reach him, but my hand fell, ineffectually, beside the bed.

“Taavi,please.”

I lay there, pain slicing through my side and my heart, tears falling from my eyes as I listened to the love of my life sob, completely powerless to do anything about it. I tried. Several times. My abdominal muscles simply refused.

I don’t know how long it took before he spoke. It felt like forever.