My Fake Husband Was Bleeding On My Floor — Then The Royal Guard Arrived

Part 1

The stench of rotting cabbage, wet asphalt, and sour beer always clung to the suffocating alleyway behind my apartment building.

I kept my head down, clutching the damp paper bag of cheap groceries against my chest, desperately wanting to get inside before the freezing acid rain soaked completely through my threadbare coat.

Then, over the relentless drumming of the downpour, I heard the wet, agonizingly slow dragging sound.

I found him wedged precariously beside the rusted, overflowing dumpster.

Blood, thick and nearly black in the sickly, flickering glow of the broken streetlamp overhead, pooled rapidly beneath him, washing into the grime of the gutter.

I knew I should have kept walking.

In this brutal sector of the Narrows, playing the Good Samaritan usually earned you nothing but a rusty knife between your ribs.

But then his chest heaved, a jagged, broken intake of air, and the harsh light caught the sharp, predatory planes of his face.

He was dangerously handsome, possessing the kind of lethal, sculpted symmetry that usually belonged to high-end corporate assassins or elite silver-screen idols, not bleeding out in the city trash.

“Help,” he rasped, a raw, guttural sound like grinding stones and crushed glass.

My little brother, Leo, was upstairs in our freezing apartment, coughing up pieces of his infected lungs.

I did not need more trouble.

I could not afford more trouble.

But the bleeding man’s eyes fluttered open, revealing irises of a piercing, impossible, luminous silver.

They locked onto mine with terrifying intensity.

I cursed under my breath, hooked my scrawny arms under his broad shoulders, strained against his immense dead weight, and began the agonizing process of dragging him up three flights of rusted fire escape stairs.

Inside my cramped, freezing kitchen, I dumped him onto the cracked linoleum floor.

The heavy metallic tang of his hot blood quickly overpowered the lingering smell of boiled pasta and stale dampness.

I grabbed my worn sewing kit from the drawer, threading a thick needle with trembling, blood-slicked fingers.

I took a pair of shears and cut his ruined, expensive-looking shirt away, exposing a torso corded with dense muscle and marred by a deep, jagged slash carving diagonally across his ribs.

“This is going to hurt,” I warned him, pressing a rough towel soaked in cheap, burning vodka directly to the gaping wound.

He did not scream.

He did not even flinch.

He simply watched me with those unsettling silver eyes as I drove the steel needle through his torn flesh, pulling the skin taut, knotting the thick black thread tight.

I stitched him together while the buzzing neon sign from the twenty-four-hour pawnshop across the street cast jagged, bloody, pulsing shadows across his impassive face.

He called himself Callum.

That was all the information he surrendered.

A violent, rattling coughing fit suddenly echoed from the bedroom down the hall.

I dropped the bloody scissors on the counter with a clatter and pressed the heels of my hands against my burning eyes.

Leo.

The plastic medication bottle sitting on the counter was completely empty.

The local pharmacy wanted six hundred dollars for a single refill of the respiratory suppressants.

I had precisely fourteen dollars and forty cents to my name.

Worse still, Silas was coming.

The ruthless loan shark practically owned this entire decaying block.

I owed him two thousand dollars, a crushing debt inherited from a deadbeat father who vanished three years ago into the smog.

Silas had cornered me in the stairwell just yesterday, his thick, heavy fingers bruising my jawline, promising that if I did not have his money by Friday night, he would take my little brother instead to work off the debt in the undercity mines.

I looked down at the lethal stranger bleeding on my kitchen floor.

A desperate, utterly insane idea took rapid root in the darkest corner of my mind.

“You are running from someone,” I said, my voice echoing hollowly in the quiet, tense space.

“You need a place to disappear.

A place to lay low and heal.” Callum shifted his massive frame, his jaw tightening in suspicion.

“And?” “And I need money.

A lot of it.

Yesterday.” I paced the narrow strip of sticky linoleum, kicking aside a discarded, blood-soaked rag.

“The city council offers a massive housing grant for low-income residents in the Narrows, but you only qualify if you possess a stable family structure.

A married couple.

Two incomes, heavily paper-verified by the state.” I stopped pacing, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped, panicked bird.

“Marry me.

On paper.

You get a secure safe house where no one will ever look for you.

I get the grant money, I buy my little brother’s life-saving medication, and I finally pay off a monster named Silas.” Callum stared at me.

The silence stretched between us, thick and suffocating, broken only by another ragged, terrible cough from Leo’s dark room.

Finally, Callum offered a slow, deliberate, heavy nod.

“Deal.” Two agonizingly long days later, standing in the grim, fluorescent-lit purgatory of the city courthouse, I officially became a wife.

The bored clerk, a tired, graying woman with smudged lipstick and dead eyes, stamped our marriage certificate without bothering to look up from her screen.

We exchanged cheap, tarnished brass bands I had bought from the pawnshop for five bucks apiece.

Callum wore my oversized, faded gray hoodie, leaning heavily against the plaster wall to hide his fresh injury, but his gaze remained terrifyingly sharp, silently cataloging every exit, every security guard, every person who walked past.

It felt like a cold transaction, purely clinical and necessary.

But as we walked back into the cramped, peeling walls of my apartment an hour later, I clutched the officially stamped paper against my chest like a magical shield.

It was the answer to all my prayers.

The money would clear the city banks by tomorrow morning.

We just had to survive one more night.

The universe, unfortunately, always had other violently cruel plans for me.

The flimsy wooden front door splintered inward with a deafening, explosive crash, jagged wood fragments spraying like shrapnel across the tiny living room.

Silas stepped over the ruined threshold.

He completely filled the doorway, a hulking mountain of cheap cologne, grease, and hardened muscle.

Three of his deadliest enforcers flanked him, their scarred hands gripping heavy iron pipes and massive steel wrenches.

“Nora,” Silas purred, his voice a greasy, terrifying smear of malice.

He stepped confidently into the room, his heavy, muddy boots deliberately staining the cheap rug.

“You did not answer my persistent calls.

I thought I would come collect my collateral in person.” His piggish, cruel eyes darted eagerly toward the closed bedroom door, where Leo was currently sleeping.

The air in my burning lungs instantly turned to solid ice.

“Silas, wait.

I have the money.

It comes through tomorrow morning.

I swear to you.” Silas smiled, revealing a row of rotting, yellowed teeth.

“I am done waiting, little girl.

Grab the sick boy,” he commanded his thugs with a flick of his thick wrist.

I screamed and lunged forward, desperately grabbing a rusted kitchen knife from the counter, but Silas carelessly backhanded me before I could even raise the blade.

The brutal blow sent me crashing hard into the plaster wall.

Blinding pain exploded across my cheekbone, and I instantly tasted hot, metallic copper in my mouth.

Before Silas could take another triumphant step toward the bedroom, a towering shadow silently detached itself from the gloom of the hallway.

Callum moved with a terrifying, liquid, impossible grace.

He did not look or move like a man with fresh, agonizing stitches barely holding his ribs together.

He looked like the grim reaper incarnate.

He flawlessly intercepted the first charging enforcer, stepping smoothly inside the wild, swinging arc of the iron pipe.

Callum drove the heel of his palm violently upward, smashing the cartilage of the man’s nose directly into his brain with a sickening, wet crunch.

The massive thug dropped instantly, dead before his knees even hit the floorboards.

The second man screamed and swung a heavy wrench at Callum’s skull.

Callum ducked effortlessly under the deadly arc, grabbed the man’s extended forearm with iron-grip fingers, and violently twisted.

The sharp, explosive snap of breaking bone echoed loudly through the small apartment.

The man shrieked in agony, dropping the wrench, and Callum followed up with a brutal, crushing knee straight to his throat, instantly silencing the cry.

Silas roared in fury, pulling a heavy, snub-nosed black revolver from his leather jacket.

But my fake husband was infinitely faster.

He closed the remaining distance in a single heartbeat, his hand clamping crushing around the cylinder of the gun, completely jamming the firing mechanism.

With his other hand, Callum delivered a rapid, devastating series of piston-like punches directly into Silas’s massive chest.

I heard his ribs crack and shatter, one after another, sounding like dry twigs snapping in a quiet forest.

Silas collapsed, a wheezing, blood-spitting, broken mess on my ruined carpet.

The third and final enforcer took exactly one look at the unbelievable carnage, dropped his heavy pipe with a clatter, and bolted frantically down the stairs, screaming into the rainy night.

The apartment fell completely, deathly silent, save for Callum’s ragged, strained breathing.

He braced one large hand against the cracked wall, clutching his injured side tightly.

Fresh, bright red blood was already seeping rapidly through the gray hoodie, blooming outward like a dark, terrible rose.

I scrambled up from the dusty floor, my hands shaking uncontrollably as I reached out toward him.

“Callum—” Before I could even touch his arm, the narrow hallway outside suddenly erupted with the heavy, synchronized thud of tactical boots.

Dozens of them.

The shattered, hanging remains of my front door were kicked entirely off their hinges.

Mounted weapon flashlights cut through the dim, smoky apartment, blindingly bright, immediately followed by the terrifying metallic clatter of assault rifles raising in perfect unison.

Heavily armed men in sleek, immaculate, expensive black suits poured endlessly into the small space.

They moved with terrifying military precision, their faces completely obscured by tactical combat helmets and mirrored visors.

I threw my body forcefully in front of Callum, bracing myself for the inevitable barrage of tearing bullets, entirely ready to die protecting the strange, violent man who had just miraculously saved my little brother’s life.

Instead, the entire heavily armed squad froze in their tracks.

The raised guns slowly lowered toward the floorboards.

The leader of the strike team, a towering man with a heavily scarred jawline, ripped his black helmet off and tossed it clattering onto the blood-soaked floor.

The lead intruder dropped to one knee and addressed my fake husband as Your Majesty.