Page 50 of All’s Fair In Love & War (The Bulgari Cartel #2)

Up In Smoke

Felicity

I couldn’t feel my legs.

I wasn’t sure if it was from the shock or the way the dashboard had crumpled around us like paper, but everything below my waist felt far away. My ears were ringing, my head was spinning, and the only thing I could hear over the chaos was the sound of my heartbeat thudding against my ribs.

“Khalil,” I croaked, my voice barely audible over the sirens and shouting. “Please wake up, Khalil, please.”

His body was slumped against the steering wheel, his head tilted at an angle that made something cold settle in my chest. Blood trickled from the side of his temple, winding its way down his cheek, and he wasn’t moving. Not even a twitch.

“Khalil,” I said louder this time, reaching for him with trembling fingers. “Please. Come on. Say something,” I begged, pleaded, even, but he didn’t.

Someone outside the car was yelling. I couldn’t make out the words, just the urgency in their tone.

Lights flashed red and blue across the shattered glass and bent metal, turning everything into a strobe of panic and steel.

I tried to lift my arm again, but my seatbelt had locked tight across my chest, pinning me in place.

I slightly turned my head, seeing the first responder outside my window.

“We’ve got movement in the front passenger,” he called out. “Driver’s unresponsive.”

I wanted to scream that he wasn’t just a driver. He was Khalil. He was the only reason I hadn’t completely lost my mind since my world had flipped upside down, and now he was sitting there as if all the fight had been drained out of him.

A firefighter crouched low beside my door, peering in with a calm expression that didn’t match the urgency in his movements.

“Ma’am, you’re going to be okay. We’re going to get you out of here, alright?”

I nodded once, even though I wasn’t sure I believed him.

Metal groaned around me as they started cutting. Sparks flew in the corner of my vision, and the whir of machinery seemed unforgiving. I winced, not from pain, but from the fear that they were wasting time trying to get to me when Khalil hadn’t opened his eyes.

I looked back at him again, reaching for his hand this time.

It was still warm.

“Khalil, please,” I whispered, barely able to keep my voice steady. “I’m right here. You can’t do this. Please don’t be the one to die. I’ll take your place on any day.”

The door beside me peeled open with a screech, and gloved hands reached for me, unbuckling the belt and sliding something under my legs.

My body shifted in pieces, as if I weren’t fully connected to it, and my limbs belonged to someone else.

A sharp sting pulsed down my side, but I bit down on it. I wouldn’t cry. Not yet.

As they lifted me onto the stretcher, I caught sight of two silhouettes across the street, standing behind the flashing lights.

Sophia.

And Dallas.

They weren’t moving. They weren’t rushing to help. They were just watching, their eyes locked on the wreck.

My breath caught in my throat, and the next thing I knew, I was being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Questions were flying around me, but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t focus.

Because Khalil was still in that car.

And I didn’t know if he would ever wake up again.

They say time slows down in moments like these, but that’s a lie.

If anything, it speeds up and tramples you in its sprint.

I never believed in karma, but even I recognized the symmetry when it was my time to face the consequences.

I knew right then that even if Khalil lived, something fundamental would die.

Maybe it was the illusion that I’d ever be free, or maybe it was the last bit of mercy he had left for me.

Either way, I felt the border snap inside me, and at the same time, I felt nothing at all.

The ambulance doors slammed shut on Tatum as the other paramedics continued to struggle to get Khalil’s body out of the vehicle. My body bounced slightly as the one I was in pulled off, but I kept my eyes on the back window, refusing to blink.

I wanted to see Khalil one more time. Even if it was just his feet. Even if it was just his blood. But we turned the corner before they got him out, and that was it.

I stared at the ceiling, my vision swimming as the paramedic beside me asked the same questions over and over. Was I allergic to anything? Could I move my fingers? Could I feel my toes? I nodded when I could. Spoke when I had to, but inside, I was unraveling.

This was all my fault.

I had done a lot of reckless things in my life.

Lied to the wrong people. Trusted the worst ones.

Pushed buttons that didn’t need pushing, and smiled in rooms where I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

But nothing— nothing —prepared me for the moment I realized Khalil might die, and I’d be the reason why.

Not because I grabbed the wheel. Not because I swerved. But because from the start, I had been the distraction that knocked him off course. And now he was paying for it.

The medic adjusted the oxygen mask around my face, and I flinched without meaning to. Everything felt like too much. It was too loud, too close, and too late.

“Try to relax,” she said gently. “We’re almost there.”

But she didn’t understand. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be back in that car, before the swerve, before the crash, before my name had become a curse in every mouth that once called it sweet.

I wanted Khalil to open his eyes and call me a headache, just one more time.

Instead, I was alone in the back of an ambulance, headed to a hospital where nobody would tell me anything, and surrounded by strangers who didn’t know that my silence wasn’t from shock.

It was from grief because I had truly lost myself.

I didn’t even know if I had the right to feel it.

The ambulance slowed, then stopped altogether. I felt the shift in momentum before I saw the doors swing open, flooding the back of the rig with too much light. My eyes burned at the sudden exposure, and I turned my face toward the wall.

“We’ve got her,” someone said from outside. “Watch the left side. She’s got possible rib fractures.”

They wheeled me out into the chaos of the hospital’s emergency bay, my body jostling over every bump in the concrete.

The sky above me was dark, but the fluorescent lighting made it feel like morning had arrived.

I saw a row of gurneys, nurses moving like clockwork, and orderlies trying to keep the noise down while noise roared in the background.

“Vitals are holding. Let’s get her inside.”

The ceiling changed again. It was now cold white tiles and buzzing lights that hummed louder than they should have. I blinked at them, numb, disconnected, unable to process where Khalil was or if he was even behind me.

“What’s your pain level on a scale of one to ten?” a nurse asked, walking beside me.

I turned my head to meet her eyes. “I don’t know yet,” I said quietly.

She nodded like she understood, but I doubted she did.

They took me into a trauma room, one wall open to the hall, and began hooking me to machines before I could ask any questions.

Wires were clipped to my chest, a cuff tightened around my arm, and a nurse lifted my shirt to check for bruising.

I let them do whatever they needed. I didn’t care what was broken.

Not if Khalil was still lying in the street.

Not if he never made it out of that car.

“Can someone check on the driver?” I asked finally, my voice thin and hoarse.

The nurse beside me glanced at her chart. “You mean the male passenger?”

“No,” I corrected, eyes locked on hers. “The driver. He was unconscious at the scene. Khalil Bulgari.”

“I’ll find out,” she said, but she said it like she was trying to quiet me, not like she intended to do it.

I looked away.

I wasn’t sure what hurt more, the fear that he might die, or the knowledge that even if he lived, nothing between us would ever be the same.

He wouldn’t forget the argument.

He wouldn’t forget the swerve.

And if he pieced together that I saw Sophia and Dallas before the crash and didn’t say anything, I wasn’t sure he’d forgive that either.

I lay there, staring up at the ceiling while the beeping of machines filled the room. My body ached, my side throbbed, and my chest burned with the kind of guilt that didn’t leave bruises but still left marks.

I wanted news.

I wanted updates.

But most of all, I wanted Khalil to open his eyes and be angry. I needed him to yell. I needed him to curse at me. Because as long as he was yelling, he was still breathing.

And I could live with the rest.

Time didn’t move inside that room.

The machines beeped, the lights buzzed, and people came and went, but none of it mattered. Not when every breath I took felt like a countdown. Not when I kept waiting for someone to walk through the door and tell me whether or not he made it.

I couldn’t cry.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to—I just couldn’t. The tears sat too high in my chest and too far behind my eyes, like they refused to fall unless someone said the words out loud. Until then, I would stay stuck in this purgatory between hope and regret.

Eventually, a nurse came in and handed me a pain pill and a paper cup of water.

“Any news?” I asked, my voice quieter now.

She paused for a second longer than I liked, then gave me a vague, rehearsed smile. “I don’t know yet.”

I nodded and took the pill. It scraped down my throat, making me feel even more guilty because it was my drug habit that got me into this in the first place.

She adjusted my IV, checked my vitals, and scribbled something on the chart. I didn’t ask for her name. I didn’t want to remember anything about this moment except whether Khalil lived or died.

The curtain pulled back again, and I sat up a little too fast, pain shooting through my side, but it wasn’t a doctor or a nurse. It was Sophia.

Her eyes swept over me, taking in every detail—my hospital gown, the scratches on my arms, the bruises forming along my ribs. She didn’t say anything right away, and that silence alone almost broke me.

“How bad is it?” I asked, my voice cracking on the edges.

“They got him out,” she said finally.

My breath hitched.

“They were able to wake him for a moment in the ambulance,” she continued, her expression unreadable. “He’s in surgery now.”

I closed my eyes and let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. It didn’t mean he was safe. It didn’t mean he’d recover. But it meant he still had a chance.

“He’s strong,” she added. “If anyone can make it through this, it’s him.”

I nodded, but my throat was too tight to speak.

Sophia stepped closer, pulling a chair beside my bed. For a moment, I thought she was going to ask what happened and why Khalil was behind the wheel when we should have been at dinner, but she didn’t. She just sat with me and cried.

And at that moment, everything inside me really clicked.

She wasn’t at the dinner.

She had been with Dallas.

That was why she didn’t rush to help. That was why she stood there frozen across the street, trying not to be seen. Something else hit me then. We weren’t in a freak accident. Khalil didn’t just panic or lose control.

I yanked the wheel. I pounded on his head. And I did it because I wanted out.

Not just out of the car, but out of the marriage arrangement, out of the Veneto family, out of the prison where I’d been held captive by Khalil. And now, lying here strapped to an IV, ribs aching, blood still under my nails, I realized something else.

This was my out.

“I saw you,” I whispered, my mind moving a mile a minute.

Sophia’s posture shifted, and she said, “Huh,” playing dumb.

“With Dallas,” I added. “I saw you in his car. Then I saw you standing next to him at the scene of the wreck.”

She said nothing, and I leaned forward, my voice low but steady. “You’re fucking him, aren’t you?”

Still, she didn’t confirm it, but she didn’t have to. Her silence did all the work for her.

I nodded slowly, my mind working faster than my body. “You know what that means, right? You weren’t supposed to be there. And I definitely wasn’t supposed to see you.”

She pressed her lips together, tight.

“I could blow this whole thing apart,” I said, not bothering to sugarcoat any of it. “You think your brothers would let that shit slide? You think Naeem would protect you if he knew?”

Sophia’s jaw clenched, but she held my stare.

“Don’t worry,” I said with a small, bitter smile. “I’m not gonna tell.” I let the pause hang for a moment before I went in for the kill. “But you’re going to help me disappear.”

She blinked once, slowly, like she was absorbing what I had said.

“No, Felicity. My brothers will kill me. I can’t help you with that,” she replied, frantically shaking her head.

I leaned closer, letting her see just how serious I was. “Oh, yes, you can, and you will. I’m getting the fuck out of here,” I said, “and you’re going to help me do it.”

To be continued…