CHAPTER 3.

Cole’s POV.

The emergency ward doors closed around Sabrina, cutting her off from me, and the silence they left behind was worse than the sirens.

I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. Her blood had dried on my cuff in a dark, ugly smear that I couldn’t stop staring at.

I had seen her like this before.

More times than I wanted to count. Pale and breaking while her body betrayed her and she begged it not to. Every other time I had stood there feeling useless, watching a woman I cared about fall apart for a man who wouldn’t.

Not this time.

I called Leon and he declined the call. I called again and he declined that one too.

Then his text came through: In a meeting. Stop calling. Come to the office if it’s business.

Business. His wife was in critical condition and he was worried about business.

I told the nurse at the desk that I would be back, and that she needed to call me the second anything changed. I didn’t run out of the hospital.

I already knew what I was going to do.

*

The drive to his office blurred into red lights and the sound of my own pulse in my teeth. Every time I blinked I saw Sabrina’s face, the way her eyes had rolled back, the way her lips had formed the word please before she went limp in my arms.

His assistant took one look at my expression and stepped aside without a word. I pushed Leon’s door open hard enough that it slammed against the wall.

He was behind his desk with a glass of scotch at his elbow and a document in his hand. He looked up at me with a polite, empty smile like I had shown up for a scheduled lunch.

“You came,” he said. “Done playing ambulance driver?”

“She collapsed,” I said, stepping into the room. “She is in the emergency ward right now. The doctors are worried about the baby.”

Leon took a sip of his drink and set the glass down carefully. He did not flinch. He did not even blink.

“I know,” he said. “The butler told me.”

“I’m done, Cole,” he continued, his voice flat. “I filed the papers yesterday. I am checking out of this cycle.”

“She is fighting for her life right now,” I said, and I could hear my own voice shaking with anger. “You cannot wait until she is stable before you burn her world down?”

He shrugged like I had asked him about the weather. “I have wasted seven years waiting. I am already with someone else. We are getting married.”

“You are what?”

The private bathroom door in his office opened before I could get the rest of the question out.

The air left my lungs the second I saw her.

It was Zara. The woman Leon had obsessed over in college. The one who had laughed at his cheap suits and dumped him the minute a richer man looked her way. The one who had left Sabrina to pick up every piece she shattered.

Zara walked into the room like she had already won, with one hand resting protectively over her stomach. She did not even glance in my direction.

“Hey, baby,” she said to Leon.

Leon was on his feet instantly. I had never seen him move that fast for Sabrina in seven years. He pulled a chair out for Zara and kissed her forehead with a tenderness that made my stomach turn.

“Zara is the one I am marrying,” Leon said, looking right at me like he was daring me to argue. “She is carrying my child. She is four months gone.”

I did the math without meaning to. “You were with her while Sabrina was in the hospital the last time?”

“Sabrina is the past,” Leon said coldly. “Zara is the future. Sabrina knows. I told her.”

“You told her?” I took another step toward his desk, my hands already curling into fists at my sides. “She is alone in a hospital bed, barely holding on, and you are in here planning a nursery?”

Leon’s eyes went flat and hard. “Do not lecture me, Cole. I do not care if she is dying. Seven years of watching her break has been enough. I am done. If she does not make it through this one, then maybe it is mercy. It is better than her being my burden for the rest of my life.”

That was it.

Seven years, gone in a single sentence.

I didn’t think.

My fist connected with his jaw.

The sound was loud and clean and final. Bone on bone.

Leon stumbled back into his bookshelf and took half of it down with him. Awards and books hit the carpet around him. Zara screamed.

“You are a monster,” I said, standing over him while he bled onto his expensive rug. “When this perfect little life you bought for yourself falls apart, you are going to remember that you threw away the only woman who ever loved you when you were broke.”

I walked out and left him there.

I made it to my car before the shaking started. I slammed my hands against the steering wheel and screamed his name until my throat burned. Then I asked the only question that mattered.

How do you choose the woman who mocked you over the woman who sold her jewelry to keep your lights on? How do you step over your wife to kiss your affair?

I remembered college too clearly. Zara pointing at Leon’s shoes and laughing with her friends. Sabrina in the library at two in the morning, sitting across from him, re-teaching him accounting like she had all the time in the world.

“I should have fought for her,” I said to the empty car. “I never should have let her go.”

My phone rang and cut through the silence. City General.

I answered before the first ring could finish. “Hello?”

“Mr. Cole? It is Mrs. Sabrina.”

“Is she—”

“She’s crashing,” the nurse said, panic breaking through her voice. “Her vitals are unstable. We need a donor immediately. Do you have her husband’s number?”

“Forget him,” I said, already starting the engine. “He is not coming.”

“Sir, we need to know the blood type—”

“I am O-Negative,” I interrupted, reversing out of the parking spot. “I am a universal donor. I am five minutes out.”

“Hurry,” she said.

I dropped the phone onto the passenger seat and pressed the accelerator to the floor.

I ran two red lights. The third, I didn’t even see. Horns and sirens blurred into white noise.

Leon called her a burden.

Fine. Let him.

I’ll be the one who bleeds for her.