Trent unzipped his kit. “I need him flat. I need airway access, and I can’t do that with this one clamped on him like a bloody limpet.”
“Let him go, Sarge.” Freddie put a hand on his shoulder. “Or I’ll have to arrest you for obstructing emergency services.”
Warren growled, throat burning tighter than the smoke. Jude stirred weakly in his arms, a rattle in his breath ripping him open. Then slowly, reluctantly, he sank to his knees on the gravel, easing Jude down onto the waiting stretcher, but kept holding his hand.
Trent checked him over, tilting his head, jaw support, two fingers sweeping clear. Then the mask over Jude’s face, oxygen hissing into the night. He glanced up at Warren, not breaking rhythm. “Breathing’s shallow. Pulse thready. I need a GCS. Eye response, verbal, motor.” He pinched Jude’s nailbed, watching for reaction. “Come on, Jude. Squeeze for me.”
Jude’s fingers twitched weakly in Warren’s.
Warren bent low, lips brushing damp curls, whispering through the mask’s hiss. “Still here, baby. Still here.”
And this time, the squeeze came again — stronger.
chapter twenty-five
The Final Account
Jude hurt.
Not from the stitched gash at his temple, nor the concussion they’d scanned twice and cleared. Those were tidy now. Sutured, stapled, neatly signed off in his notes. He’d passed every neuro obs. Stable. Mobile. Independent. Fit for discharge after forty-eight hours.
On paper, he was healed.
In his body and mind, he was anything but.
Every breath dragged fire through his ribs, the dull throb of bruised bone blooming with each inhale. Smoke still haunted the back of his throat, acrid and bitter, as if it had settled in for good. And beneath it all sat a bone-deep exhaustion no sterile ward could touch and wouldn’t fade with rest.
“Do you want Nate to get you some stuff from the supermarket?” Freddie dropped onto the edge of the bed beside him. “Get you some food in for when you get home? Whatever you need?”
Freddie was in uniform. He’d been the one the police had sent to ensure his safety, to ask the questions that would feed back to whoever it was in charge.
“I’ll be fine.” Jude slid his spare glasses on, the ones Nathan had collected from his house along with spare clothes so he didn’t have to go home in a hospital gown. “I’ll live on takeaways.” He glanced between them, managing a smile. “Thanks, though. For bringing my things. And… being here.”
“You’re our friend, Jude.” Freddie dipped closer until Jude couldn’t avoid his gaze. “That doesn’t change. No matter what.”
The words cut deeper than the bruises. Jude smiled again, sniffing back the sting behind his eyes. They didn’t know everything. Couldn’t. Not about the operation, or Callum Reid, or Jude’s own past and how that had dragged him into the Radley house. But they knew enough. At least Freddie did, as the officer on site. Enough to know Jude had been tangled in it all.
And that thought gutted him. That his reputation, the friendships he’d built in Worthbridge, might already be slipping through his fingers. That he might have to leave again, vanish, start over somewhere else with nothing. Would he even still have a job? Be allowed to teach? What school would take him if the truth surfaced? The questions circled endlessly, tightening like wire around his chest.
And beneath all of it, the fear that Freddie’s words would crumble the moment the whole truth came out.
Jude pushed it down. Reached for safer ground. “How’s Piper?”
Freddie drew in a long breath rattling his chest. “She’s okay. She and Ryan were outside the blast line. They got out unharmed.” He shot to his feet, unable to stay still, hands restless at his sides. “I wish she’d fucking told me that Radley was Ryan’s father.”
Nathan stepped in, sliding a hand onto Freddie’s shoulder and squeezing with that easy intimacy lovers carried. A touch that saidI’ve got you. Freddie leaned into it, softening, the storm inside him anchored by Nathan’s presence. Watching them, twomen who’d found their way back to each other, made him smile through the pain.
“Maybe she didn’t tell you because she knew you’d throw your warrant card the second you found out,” Nathan said quietly.
“I would have.” Freddie’s voice cracked with the truth of it.
“Hopefully, if anything, it means she and Ryan will get some compensation. Ryan must be entitled to something.”
Freddie had told him the bare minimum he was allowed until the task force gave orders. Radley had escaped with nothing worse than a broken leg and a smoke inhalation Jude himself carried in his lungs. For the second time. But he was unharmed. Housed somewhere in this same hospital, mercifully far from the ward Jude had been in. With police standing guard, too. There were those who hadn’t made it out of the explosion, but Freddie’s lips stayed sealed, sworn to the confidentiality of the investigation.
“I also wishyou’dtold me.” Freddie gave him a look that he used on his sister, or the one Jude used on the kids in his class.
“You know I couldn’t.”
