She met his stare, chin lifting even though her body trembled. “And I told you to get him.”
For a heartbeat, silence stretched between them. The kind that wasn’t empty but heavy—thick with things neither of them could say while the world spun out just beyond the door.
A pinch, then tape stuck to her arm, and the nurse scurried away as if she knew this was a private conversation, years in the making.
“You’re bleeding.”
Blake exhaled through his nose, slow, like he’d been holding his breath too long. Then, he reached down and tugged his shirt up.
A thin line of red carved across his side, just below the ribs, shallow but angry-looking, the skin around it bruised from the fight. The edge of the cut caught the light, darkening where the blood had started to clot.
Vivian sucked in a breath. “Blake?—”
“It’s nothing,” he said, the lie falling too easily off his tongue. “Knife just grazed me.”
She frowned. “That’s not nothing.”
“Compared to what almost happened to you, it’s background noise.”
He pressed the fabric back down and gave a small shrug, but she saw the tension around his eyes, the way his body moved like every motion cost him. The exhaustion was catching up now—visible in the small tremors of his fingers, the glassy edge to his eyes.
He’d stayed because he couldn’t walk away. Because she’d scared him.
She wanted to tell him that she saw it—that she wasn’t made of glass, that she didn’t need saving, that she saw that in his mind, he’d saved her from the bully—but the words tangled with everything else between them. So instead she said, quietly, “You’re bleeding on my floor.”
That finally earned her the faintest ghost of a smile. “Guess we’re both leaving our mark.”
“Get it looked at,” Vivian ordered then closed her eyes to stop the spinning. “And no more pain killers. Don’t need them.”
“But you have bruised ribs and?—”
“No more painkillers,” Vivian sighed, trying to ignore the pounding in her head.
“You know, I think he had me. Strange, but I don’t think he wanted to kill me.” Blake shook his head.
“The man had a knife to your gut. I think the plan was to kill you.”
Blake nodded. “And that’s the point. He could have driven that knife in, but he didn’t.”
The silence stretched, neither quite sure what to do with the quiet after the storm. He paced the room with a kind of restlesscare, as if tending to the details could keep him from thinking about the man who’d nearly killed them both.
Then the alarms stopped, the red lights faded, and reality came rushing back in: nurses shouting orders, a security guard radioing the stairwells, the metallic smell of blood and antiseptic curling through the air.
Vivian sank back against the pillow, the edges of her vision graying. “They won’t stop,” she murmured, the words slurring from exhaustion.
Blake pulled the chair over and sat beside her, his hand steadying hers where it clutched the blanket. “Neither will I.”
The world tilted once, and darkness swept in like the tide.
Vivian woketo soft light bleeding around the blinds. Her head throbbed, sharp and rhythmic, and her ribs pulsed in a deep, dragging ache. The faint smell of burnt hospital coffee drifted through the cracked door—comfortless, but grounding.
Blake slept in the chair beside her, shoulders slumped, wearing a scrub top someone must have given him. One arm crossed his chest; the other hung loose over his thigh. The morning light caught the bruise darkening his jaw and the small streak of dried blood along his neck. He looked exhausted. Human. Still here.
Her throat tightened. He’d stayed. Of course he’d stayed.
A gentle knock tapped at the door.
Vivian turned as it eased open. Dan leaned in, still in his dock jacket, cap shoved back on his head.
