I drifted again. This time, I saw the shop as it was now—gutted, bleeding color, the wolf flash on the wall reduced to a black hole of spray paint and profanity. Ransom wasn’t there. Only me, alone, and the knowledge that I’d failed to protect the only place that had ever felt like home. I tried to scrub the mess off the wall with my bare hands, but the paint stuck, oily and alive, crawling up my arms until it choked my throat.
I came to with a start, gasping, nails digging bloody half-moons into my palm. The pulse monitor spiked. I wanted to rip it out, throw it across the room, but I didn’t have the strength.
I tried to keep my eyes open, but the world kept slipping sideways. I caught fragments of voices: a doctor at the foot of the bed, asking about my pain level; a woman from hospital security, wanting to know if I recognized the suspect; another nurse, moving my chart and whispering about visitors. Each time, I asked, “Anyone here to see me?” and each time, the answer was no, or not yet, or maybe soon.
They didn’t know how to deal with a patient like me. I’d seen it a thousand times on the job: the tough guys who tried to take a bullet and keep walking. Some of them made it. Most didn’t. Itried to be the exception, but the longer I waited, the more I felt like I was just another statistic—just another fuckup whose best feature was that he wouldn’t die even when he probably should.
Late afternoon, the clouds outside went from sickly white to a blue-black that looked like rain. The room got darker. Every time I checked the clock, less and less time had passed, even as the dread in my chest expanded. My eyes went to the door, the handle, the thin line of light beneath it. I wanted Ransom to walk through, but I wanted even more for him to not see me like this, half-broken, caged in a hospital bed.
It was my fault. All of it. If I’d just asked him to stay, if I’d just said what I really felt instead of pushing him out, maybe he wouldn’t have had to leave. Maybe his shop wouldn’t be trashed. Maybe I wouldn’t be here, alone, waiting for a man who was too good to forgive me.
The next nurse who came in tried to make small talk, but I shut her down with a look. She checked my chart, adjusted the IV, and muttered, “Still no sign of your visitor, Sheriff. But the waiting room is packed. Word got around.”
I grunted. “That’s all I ever wanted,” I said. “To be the center of attention.”
She smiled, sympathetic but a little scared. “You want the blinds open?”
I shook my head. “No. Leave it dark.”
By the time dinner rolled around, I couldn’t have said what day it was. The only light came from the monitors and a streetlamp outside, which flickered against the glass with every pass of a car. The hallway was quiet except for the squeak of nurse shoes and the occasional murmur from a TV somewhere down the line.
I counted the seconds, the breaths, the heartbeats. My hands never left the sheets, twisting them into ropes. I kept my eyes on the door. Hoping. Dreading. Hating myself for both.
If he came, I didn’t know what I’d say. But if he didn’t—if he didn’t show, after three weeks and a hundred years and every goddamn thing I still wanted from him—I didn’t know what I’d do.
I closed my eyes, and for once, I prayed for sleep.
I must have drifted off again, because the next thing I knew, the entire floor had erupted. It started with a muted argument outside my door, voices tangled in a knot of anger and worry.
One of them I recognized instantly—deep, edged with a sarcasm so familiar it made my jaw clench. The other belonged to a nurse, all procedural and panicked, trying to corral the first with a barrage of policy and threat.
They were moving fast, and then the footsteps were right outside. The door slammed open with a violence that could have stripped the hinges, and Ransom filled the frame, raw and wild, bigger than I remembered.
He looked like hell: hair in a mess of knots, the stubble on his jaw a week past ironic, eyes bloodshot and bruised with exhaustion. His leather jacket was soaked through at the shoulders, smeared with mud and something darker, maybe blood, maybe just the road. He stood there, hands curled into fists, taking me in from head to ruined toe.
For a second, neither of us spoke. I could feel the monitors picking up, tracking the erratic thunder of my heart. The world stopped, then went hyper-real, every detail—his boots, the jagged line of a new cut on his cheek, the ink crawling out from under his collar—etched so deep I’d never forget it.
He shut the door behind him, gentle this time, and crossed the room in three strides. For a second, he just stared, eyes dragging over the tape and the bruises and the stupid, humiliating hospital gown. His throat bobbed.
“Fucking hell, Floyd,” he said, voice gone soft and hoarse.
I tried to answer, but the words caught. Instead, I swallowed, the taste of regret thick as bile, and managed, “Nice entrance.”
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He just stood there, chewing it over, until finally he said, “You listed me as your emergency contact.” The sentence came out brittle, like he was daring me to say it was a mistake.
I nodded. The pain in my head made it a bad idea, but I did it anyway. “Yeah,” I said, barely a whisper.
He let out a breath that was half laugh, half sob, and dropped into the chair at my side. His hands shook when he reached for mine—those big, callused hands, always so sure, now trembling like they didn’t know what to do.
I looked at him. Really looked. The road grime, the shivering, the way his lips wouldn’t stop moving as if they were rehearsing a fight that would never come. I didn’t know if he wanted to hit me or kiss me or both.
“I didn’t know if you’d come,” I said.
He blinked. “Are you serious? After three weeks of radio silence, you get half your head caved in and you think I’m going to just—what, ignore it?”
“I thought you’d moved on.”
He shook his head, slow and deliberate. “You’re the only thing I can’t move on from.”
