But for one awful second, everything inside her goes still. I freeze. The world folds in on itself.
Then she breathes—a shallow, gasping drag of air—and I start shaking harder than before. Relief and terror taste the same.
“She’s fighting,” Mormor mutters with sympathy from the passenger seat. “Brave girl.”
I look down at her face, pale beneath the fever-flush. And suddenly, I can’t see anything beyond this car. I try to picture life without her—me, the empty penthouse, Hattie waiting in the living room, the neon lights outside—and there’s just static. Nothing. A hole. I can’t see it because it can’t exist. Without her, there is no world.
I kiss her forehead, her temple, anywhere I can reach. “Don’t you dare,” I whisper. “Don’t you fucking dare leave me.”
chapter twenty-one
WILLOW
Some idiot is beepingat me. Loudly. Persistently. Rudely. It takes me a second to realize the idiot is a machine and the reason it’s beeping… is because I’m apparently not dead.
I try to open my eyes and instantly regret it. The light feels like knives. My skull throbs. My throat is dry, raw—like I swallowed sand and regret. There’s an IV in the crook of my arm, tape biting into my skin. I smell antiseptic, metal, and something faintly floral.
Hospital. Perfect. I’m still on earth, then. Hell would probably smell more like Axe body spray and shame.
It takes me a second to realize I’m not alone.
Lucky’s slumped in the chair beside me, his upper body resting against my bed, his hand clutched around mine. There’s a darkening bruise on the left side of his jaw, and a smaller, lighter one in the middle of his forehead. His shirt is torn at his shoulder, and beneath it, I see blood. His hair’s a disaster, wild and tangled, like he’s been running his hands through it for hours.
For a moment, I just stare at him. My brain tries to piece together the last thing I remember: lights, screaming, chaos, Phoenix, andhis family.
Oh, fuck. So much was going wrong. Luckyfell. And there were other people there too, each of them just as blond as Lucky. And the gunshots. Fuck. The gunshots. Who got shot? My eyes flash over to Lucky. That tear in his shirt might have been a graze, but beside that, he doesn’t look shot.
I let out a breath, my eyes fixing on the ceiling. I thought I was going to die. My body was in full on revolt. The taste of that foul drink flashes back, sour and metallic and wrong. My stomach clenches hard enough to make the monitor beep faster as everything that just happened rips through me.
Lucky stirs. His eyes snap open, and for one dizzy heartbeat, I swear I see his whole soul in them. Fear. Relief. Love so fierce it borders on madness.
“Hey, handsome,” I croak, and it sounds like I’ve gargled gravel.
He laughs, broken, breathless, and presses the back of my hand to his lips like I might vanish again if he doesn’t anchor me. “You’re awake.” He presses his lips to my hand, over and over, holding my eyes the whole time like he’s scared to look away. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Me? You’re the one who looks like he lost a fight with a concrete mixer.”
He grins. “I won.”
The laugh that slips out of me hurts my ribs, but it feels good anyway. It feels like life returning.
He brushes a thumb over my cheek, careful, reverent. “You’re okay,” he whispers. “You’re really okay.”
“I feel like death reheated in the microwave, but… yeah. Still breathing.”
The memory of Phoenix’s eyes, calm and calculating as he forced that thing down my throat, flashes behind my eyelids. My stomach turns. The IV pump clicks beside me, reminding me that modern medicine is currently fighting off whatever hell cocktail I was forced to swallow.
I glance at Lucky again—the bruises, the exhaustion, the sleepless red rims around his eyes. “You didn’t leave. You could have gone home and slept.”
He shakes his head. “Not a chance. They tried to make me. I told them they’d have to sedate me first.”
The words, the love, the devotion, they shake something in me. As I meet his eyes, my own well. I’ve never had someone who fought for me. Literally. Who refused to leave my side, no matter how hard or dangerous it got.
“Seeing you like that,” Lucky says, his voice dropping low and rough. He shakes his head, and he looks… haunted. “I’ll never unsee it. They would have had to drag me out here dead, Willow. That’s the only way I would have left you.”
I can see it in his face. Every second of the night replaying behind his eyes. Every fear. Every ounce of devotion. I can’t stand to see him so heavy and dark.
I reach for his hand, tracing a cut across his knuckles. “Guess I’m hard to kill.”
