Claimed by the magnate I saved

POV Avelina

The man on my bed fought to survive, and I led that fight to keep him alive. That wasn’t unusual. That was Monday.

What was unusual was finding him, no ID, no phone, a single knife wound in his body, on a road near my house. I should have called emergency services without saying who’d called for help, but instead I grabbed him by the arm, dragging him through the dry grass while a trail of blood trailed behind us.

Waiting for help would have taken too long, and we both knew it. My house sat twelve miles outside town. By the time paramedics arrived, he’d be dead.

I had less than sixty feet to drag him to the small house where I lived and help him. He was heavy; I thought I wouldn’t manage it.

As the rain approached, the rain would soon wash away those blood trails along the path. He was unconscious, his blood pressure crashing the second I got him onto the bed.

His face carried a strange look I’d learned to read as an emergency. His body was going to collapse. I had no time to think about who he was, or whether what I was doing was right or wrong. I needed to work if I wanted to keep him alive.

I found the primary bleed on his right side and applied pressure. His blood pressure came back up, barely, but I managed it.

I let the air out hard, my lungs burning. He wasn’t safe yet, but something felt off with me. As I pulled on the gloves, I kept in the drawer beside the bed, my mind drifted back to everything that had happened that day.

I told myself I wasn’t thinking about it. I was thinking about it constantly while my hands worked to save a stranger’s life.

Thirteen hours earlier, I’d been getting ready to surprise my boyfriend. I slept well that night. Ate a bowl of cereal first thing in the morning and went for a run along the river. I did everything perfectly, worked hard to make sure nothing went wrong on his birthday.

I put on my best outfit and headed to Andrei’s apartment, running through everything I needed to do to make our day unforgettable. The building smelled like coffee and old paper. The doorman was never at the front desk, so I slipped into the elevator while something stirred restlessly inside me.

Andrei always left the spare key under the mat in front of the door. I bent down to grab it. The memory of how we’d met at the hospital, how we’d fallen for each other, made my hands tremble and a naïve smile spread across my face.

We’d been together a year, and I was the happiest woman alive standing beside him.

A strange sound came from inside, stopping me cold. Every instinct in my body went silent. I pressed my sweaty hands against the wood of the door and leaned my ear against the cold frame. Muffled moans, whispers that froze my entire body solid. It was Andrei’s voice, tangled with another voice.

A seductive, feminine voice. Slowly, I brought the key to the lock and turned it, careful. A small gap, and I saw him kissing another woman. I didn’t recognize her, had no idea who she could be, but he devoured her with a kiss while his enormous hands roamed shamelessly over every inch of her body.

“I can’t resist you, Anny.” Andrei whispered, drunk with pleasure. “You’re the best birthday present I could ever ask for today.”

She laughed like he’d said something genuinely funny.

“Send your girlfriend flowers and end things with her already.” She made a sound that meant I was being spectacularly stupid. “End this farce already and let’s be together.”

He took a moment to answer, his mouth far too busy giving her a long, lingering kiss.

“Avelina can’t tell I don’t feel anything for her anymore.” Andrei nearly choked out the words. “But you’re right. I need to end it and be with only you.”

Something shifted in his voice as he said that. Something that sounded uncomfortably close to real, something I’d simply never noticed before. I stood frozen in the cold, empty hallway, my eyes stinging as I stared through the gap in the door, bile rising bitterly, burning my throat.

How long had they been together? How long had they been deceiving me?

“That’s sad.” She said, and this time she didn’t sound like she was laughing anymore.

A short, measured pause made me realize I shouldn’t be standing there anymore. Either I pushed the door open and slammed Andrei against the wall, or I walked away forever.

“Let’s not talk about her, let’s talk about us.” Andrei said before scooping her into his arms and carrying her toward the bedroom.

I opened my mouth. Then closed it. The air stopped moving through my lungs after that. After the silence.

He was right. I hated that he was right, more than I hated watching him betray me. I’d spent three years building a love story just to forget the past, while pretending not to see that Andrei never loved me. He’d given plenty of signs our relationship was never going to work, but I was so determined to stay with him that I ignored everything else. I ignored it so thoroughly that now I could barely stand the pain.

I went with the second option and left. I wiped my soaked face with the back of my hand. I don’t even know when exactly I’d started crying that hard.

I remember it all blurring together after that. My lungs burning as I ran through the building’s front door without looking back once. My throat closing up as I drove through the streets, holding back a scream between my teeth.

Minutes, hours, dragged past. The image of Andrei kissing another woman looping over and over, no matter how hard I tried to stop it, the pain tearing me apart inside as I drove down the dirt road, until I finally parked and walked into my house, forgetting everything else for one split second.

An unconscious man covered in blood was worse than betrayal.

I pushed that away and came back to the present. I swallowed the pain, pressing my hands back onto the wound on his left side. It bled faster now. His pressure dropping to sixty over forty. My old blood pressure machine worked nonstop while I administered a unit of saline.

“Come on, hold on a little longer.” I whispered, focusing on his face, forgetting Andrei and his rotten betrayal. “I already died once today; one death is enough, so please, don’t die on me too.”

I was going to save that man. I’d promised myself I’d do something good that day, that at least one of us would get a happy ending.