My voice catches. I’m gasping now, shaking so hard I can barely stand. “He’s my—he’s mine.” My hands claw at the desk desperately. “He’s my person. Please—don’t do this, just—tell me if he’s okay—tell me if he’s alive.”
The world spins and I’m going to break something if I don’t see him in the next ten seconds.
The second the receptionist repeats herself—family only—something in my chest detonates.
Security steps in—big guy, broad, older, probably used to dealing with drunks and belligerent teenagers, not feral, terrified rookies who just watched a bus burn. His hand clamps down on my arm. Bad move.
I rip out of his grip so hard he stumbles. He reaches again, slower this time, and I shove him back with every ounce of my fear, my rage. He slams into a chair, shocked. “Sir, you need to—”
I swing. My fist cuts the air where his face used to be—he dodges, barely—but I’m already winding up again, breath gone, heart detonating inside my chest. I don’t care who he is. I don’t care what he says. I’d fight god right now if it meant getting to Damian. I’d tear the walls down. I’d bleed on the linoleum. I’d set this whole place on fire if it meant one more second with him alive.
Then a hand clamps around my arm, hard, unmovable, and jerks me back. “Elias,” a voice growls, low and rough, a warning that makes me look up.
Viktor.
He must’ve bribed a cab, broken traffic laws, maybe committed light homicide to get here this fast. He’s panting, bruised, sweat still drying on his forehead, and he grabs me just before my fist connects with the guard’s face.
I thrash anyway. “They won’t tell me!!!” I scream. “Vik—I need to know—I need to know if he’s alive—Vik PLEASE—”
He yanks me back into his chest and pins me there. “I’ll handle it,” he snarls. “Stop fighting me.”
I crumble against him, shaking so hard my teeth clatter. He drags me back to the desk, arm locked around my ribs, voice cold enough to freeze the entire lobby. “Captain Damian Kade,” Viktor says, clipped and coiled. “We are his team. This is his partner. Do not make this worse.”
The receptionist blinks, clearly ready to argue, but pauses long enough to glance at the monitor. A single second passes. Then another and her entire expression changes. Her posture stiffens, hands flying over the keyboard again. Her eyes flick to me andwiden, then her voice stumbles over itself. “Oh—oh my god,” she exhales. “You’re… Elias Mercer.”
I flinch like I’ve been hit. Hard. Across the face. Across the chest. Viktor’s grip clamps tighter on my arm. I can feel him behind me.
The woman’s voice drops into something softer. “He listed you,” she says, eyes darting between the screen and my face. “You’re his emergency contact.”
Everything inside me crumples. My knees give out, legs folding with no warning, and I would’ve hit the tile if Viktor didn’t lunge and catch me, one massive arm wrapped around my middle, keeping me upright when I can’t even breathe.
I don’t hear the rest of what she says. Just fragments. Just sounds.
“…surgery…”
“…stopped breathing…”
“…once… in the ambulance…”
And then there’s nothing. Only the roar of silence flooding my ears as the world drops out from under me. My chest locks, panic slamming in hard and fast, and suddenly I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, not past the pressure crushing my ribs and the terror clawing its way up my throat. Viktor says something. I don’t hear it. My heart is slamming, exploding, my vision going in and out like bad static.
I tear out of Viktor’s grip with a strength I didn’t know I still had and bolt down the hallway, crashing into gurneys, slamming into walls, sprinting like the building’s on fire and Damian’s inside it. People shout after me, nurses, security, but I don’t stop until I reach the one hallway everyone fears.
The one with the double doors. SURGERY — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
I slam into it full-force. It doesn’t budge. I pound my fist on it so hard I feel something tear in my wrist. “FUUUCK!” I scream,clutching it to my chest as pain rockets up my arm. “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”
Nothing. Just the distant beeping of machines and the hum of fluorescent lights and the sound of my own sobbing shredding my lungs apart. “Open it!” I scream again, slamming my palm, my shoulder against it. “OPEN THE DOOR! LET ME IN—LET ME IN—LET ME IN—”
A nurse approaches carefully, hands up like she’s facing a wild animal. “Sir,” she says, firm but sympathetic, “if you don’t calm down, I’ll have to call security. Or sedate you.”
I scream. It isn’t a word. It isn’t anything human. It’s a sound—broken and violent—torn straight from the deepest part of me, the twisted place where loss lives. The same sound I made when I lost my brother. The one I swore I would never make again. But it rips out of me anyway, like my entire soul is trying to claw its way out of my body to get to him.
I slam my head against the doors. Hard.
The impact reverberates through my skull, a sharp jolt that barely registers past the terror. I do it again, faster, harder, because I need something, anything to ground me, to stop the freefall, to drown out the words he stopped breathing that keep echoing in my skull.
Once. Twice. The third time, I don’t even feel it—just the throb in my wrist, the burn in my lungs, the silence behind the glass.
