My Groom Abandoned Me at the Altar — Six Months Later, He Showed Up Bleeding at My Door

Part 2

Aunt Brenda aggressively pushed past me, her sensible leather boots splashing without a moment’s hesitation into the terrifying bloody puddle that was rapidly forming in our quiet foyer.

She sharply barked at me to stop staring like a startled goose and immediately grab his broad shoulders.

We desperately needed to drag his massive frame closer to the fire before the bitter coastal chill took whatever fragile life he still had left in him.

I moved on pure instinct, my knees hitting the stone floor beside him.

Setting the heavy iron lantern aside, I dropped roughly to my knees.

My hands grasped the sodden wool of Brian’s coat.

He was dead weight, the soaked fabric pulling against my grip.

I dug my heels into the floor and hauled him forward.

Together, my tough aunt and I hauled the completely unconscious man across the sprawling foyer and directly into the grand library.

We left a highly gruesome, widely smeared trail of thick mud and bright crimson behind us on the pristine stones.

We finally hoisted him onto the expansive, ornate rug lying directly before the roaring hearth.

As the flickering, warm firelight washed fully over his pale face, I let out a sharp, entirely involuntary gasp.

His sharp cheekbones were bruised and hollow.

A laceration cut across his left temple.

His lips were tinged with a shade of blue.

Aunt Brenda roared loudly down the darkened hallway, urgently summoning help and aggressively demanding boiling water, clean linen, and her extensive medical kit.

For the next three agonizing, endless hours, our normally quiet home completely transformed into a frantic, makeshift hospital ward.

I knelt beside him, my hands hesitating for a fraction of a second over the ruined coat of the man who left me at the altar.

I forced myself to strip away the wool, my fingers slipping on the warm blood.

Beneath his torn shirt, I finally discovered the precise source of the terrible, life-threatening bleeding.

It was a incredibly neat, remarkably dark puncture wound situated dangerously close to his lower left ribs.

Someone had deliberately, maliciously shot Brian Pendleton.

When the local coastal doctor finally burst through our heavy doors, he asked absolutely no questions regarding the true identity of the bleeding man on our floor.

I watched entirely in a state of suspended, terrified animation as the skilled physician painstakingly extracted a heavily deformed lead bullet from Brian’s side.

Throughout the brutal, entirely unanesthetized procedure, Brian remained hopelessly trapped in a feverish, twisting delirium.

He tossed his sweating head violently from side to side, constantly muttering disjointed, deeply terrifying fragments of mysterious sentences.

He rasped urgently about a hidden ledger, his voice reduced to a gravelly, pained whisper.

He begged an unseen person not to let Craig drink anything from the glass.

Then, he desperately, heartbreakingly whispered my own name, urgently warning me about the hidden poison.

My blood instantly ran significantly colder than the violent, freezing wind currently howling outside our windows.

I carefully dabbed his burning, feverish forehead with a damp cloth, my overwhelmed mind racing frantically to comprehend his terrifying fever dreams.

Why was the man who callously abandoned me terrified that my own uncle was going to poison me, and who exactly was trying to kill him?