Chapter 22 - Between Life and Ruin
The scaffolding gave way with a screech of tearing steel.
Julian grabbed the lower support beam with his right hand, dangling by a single arm over the void. The ceramic knife still protruded from his ribs. Blood poured down his arm, making the wet steel dangerously slick.
“Julian!” I screamed, throwing myself flat against the wet mosaic tile and reaching my hands through the broken glass framework. “Grab my hand! Julian, please!”
He looked up at me. His vision was swimming, consciousness slipping away under massive blood loss. “Elena… it’s going to collapse… get away from the edge…”
“Shut up and take my hand!” I screamed, tears streaming down my face, mixing with soot and rain. “You said you wouldn’t leave me! You swore on your life, Julian Blackwood! Take my hand!”
With the last reserve of his indomitable will, Julian reached upward. His blood-slicked fingers brushed against mine. I grabbed his wrist with both hands, locking my fingers into his flesh, digging my heels against the inner lip of the marble floor.
The pain in my shoulders was blinding. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds, and I was pulling dead weight over an abyss. The iron frame beneath my chest groaned as the mansion’s structural foundations began to vibrate. Alexander’s thermite charges were burning through the bedrock.
“Elena… let go…” Julian whispered, his eyes fluttering. “You’ll fall…”
“Never!” I pulled with every fiber of my being, every ounce of rage and love and defiance that had kept me alive from the day I ran from the altar. “I am not letting you go!”
Suddenly, another pair of hands gripped Julian’s jacket.
I looked up in shock. Victoria Blackwood was kneeling beside me, her designer clothes shredded, her hands raw and bloody.
May you like
“Hold on to my son!” Victoria screamed against the howling wind. “Pull, Elena! Pull!”
Together, screaming against the roar of the mountain, we heaved Julian up over the shattered railing. He collapsed onto the mosaic floor, limp and unconscious, his chest barely rising.