I Pretended To Be A Stranger’s Wife To Save His Life — Then The Assassins Came For Me
Part 2
I stood rooted to the spot, my gaze locked on the fresh blood seeping through his ruined shirt.
“You’ve been stabbed,” I stated, the obvious words feeling completely inadequate in the heavy, heated air of the library.
“Your observational skills are matched only by your theatrical flair,” Brian muttered, dropping a surgical needle onto the table with a clatter.
He poured a generous measure of clear alcohol onto a linen cloth, pressing it to his bleeding side with a locked jaw.
“My valet faints at the sight of blood, which makes him entirely useless for anything beyond polishing my boots,” he said dangerously.
“You, however, do not seem the fainting type.”
I hated his arrogance, but the sweet rot of blood filled the room, and if he died here, I would be the only one found with the body.
I shrugged out of my heavy wool coat and knelt on the floor beside his chair.
My fingers trembled as I dipped the needle in alcohol and threaded the black silk through the eye.
“I am not a seamstress,” I warned, staring at the jagged tear just below his ribs.
“It is exactly like sewing a hem,” he replied smoothly.
“Only the fabric complains.”
I pinched the hot, taut edges of the wound together, pushing the steel needle through his flesh.
Brian’s hand shot out, his heavy fingers gripping my shoulder with bone-bruising force as the skin broke.
He didn’t cry out, but I could feel the sheer violent testament to his pain in his grip.
“They asked about you this morning at the tavern,” he whispered relentlessly, the cold gray of his eyes suffocating me.
“It will take them another day, perhaps two, to find the house you share with your aunt.”
Panic flooded my veins as I tied the crude knot, my knuckles smeared with his warm, sticky blood.
“You brought them to me,” I hissed.
“I am offering you a sanctuary,” he countered, forcing me to look up into his drawn face.
He explained the men were assassins, hired to collect a staggering debt his late brother had accrued before drowning in Venice.
Brian had refused to pay the extortionists, telling them the family name was already ash, and now they were hunting him across Europe.
He was a man who had not slept with both eyes closed in two years.
I spent the next few days in a velvet-draped drawing room, listening to him murmur delirious secrets in French and Italian as a fever took him.
When it finally broke on the fifth night, we sat by the fire, waiting in the heavy silence.
The attack did not begin with a heroic shout, but with the subtle, terrifying sound of glass fracturing two floors below.
I crept into the dark library, gripping a heavy brass letter opener in my trembling hands, finding Brian waiting by the door with a loaded flintlock pistol.
Footsteps echoed in the hallway, slow and deliberate, before a cockney voice taunted him from the other side of the wood.
The heavy oak door exploded inward, splintering off its hinges, and as the smoke cleared to reveal the killers stepping into the library, I gripped the brass letter opener and wondered if I was about to die for a man I barely knew?
