The Queen Reborn: Claiming What's Mine novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: Patching Him Up

Cora found him in the yard with the car door open and one boot in a puddle.

His jacket was dark and heavy with rain and blood, and he was trying to stand like nothing had happened.

"Don't," she said. "Lean on me."

"I can walk."

"I know you can walk. Lean."

He leaned, and she felt how much of his weight he had been holding back.

She got him up the back stairs and into the bathroom at the mill, and sat him on the closed toilet under the hard white light.

She cut his jacket off with kitchen scissors, then his shirt.

There was a long cut across his left forearm and another along his ribs, low, where the old scar was.

Neither was deep enough to kill him.

Both were deep enough to make her hands go cold.

"Who did it?" she said.

"Two men. Odessa's. One of them was the man who cut your line."

"Where are they?"

"Gone. One of them has a broken wrist." He tried to smile. "I kept his tool case."

"You kept his tool case."

"It's in my car. It's got a slot for the blade he used."

She said nothing.

She ran the water and cleaned the forearm first, and he hissed through his teeth.

She pressed the edges closed with white strips from the kit under the sink, one after another, her fingers steady.

Then she turned to his ribs.

The washcloth turned pink in her hand.

"Hold still."

"I'm holding still."

"You're breathing at me."

"I'm trying to stop."

She looked up, and he was watching her face with an expression she had never seen on him.

He looked as though he were memorizing it.

"Ronan."

"I couldn't save you the first time," he said.

The washcloth stopped.

"I know," she said.

"I got there first. I knelt in the water and held your hand and I couldn't do one useful thing. I've had that in my hands every day since the morning we woke up."

"You're not that man tonight."

"I was a quarter mile behind you."

"You're in a bathroom with me," Cora said. "I'm washing your blood off, and you're alive. I'm alive. Stop apologizing to a dead woman."

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