Chapter Fifteen
~ Ransom ~
When you spend a night in a hospital, you learn a few things. One, the cheap vinyl chair is engineered to produce maximum spinal pain. Two, the nurse who says, “Don’t hesitate to buzz if you need anything,” is actually on a smoke break from midnight until five a.m. And three, even in a building designed to keep you alive, the only thing that makes you want to live is the person lying in the bed beside you.
Knox had driven up in the early morning, a duffel bag of my clothes thrown on the passenger seat, half the contents balled up instead of folded. I caught his expression in the reflection on the window—he tried to act annoyed, but even he couldn’t keep the worry out of his eyes.
He dropped the bag with a thump, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, “I’m heading home. Don’t let him die.” Then he left, because McKenzie men aren’t built for scenes, and I had enough of one unfolding here already.
Floyd was out cold, thanks to whatever cocktail they pumped into his IV. He looked like a prop from a cop drama: bruises up and down his arms, left cheek stitched and swelling purple, a cut on his scalp stapled tight. Even sleeping, his jaw was set, like he might wake up at any second ready to arrest the next nurse that brought him decaf.
I took the hospital bathroom, which was roughly the size of a gas station janitor’s closet and smelled like the concept of “clean” was invented by a serial killer. I used the hot water until my skin went pink, the steam turning the metal fixtures into mirrors of warped regret. I scrubbed my hair, wishing I could wash the last three weeks off my skull, but when I stared at myself in the soap-smudged mirror, my eyes were the same asever: brown, bloodshot, a little too eager to believe in something that wasn’t going to last.
The change of clothes was strictly utilitarian: black jeans, black tee, flannel shirt. No jacket—I’d left it at the nurse’s desk, crusted with mud and dried blood that probably wasn’t mine. My boots squeaked on the tile. I hated it.
I went back to the room, shut the door behind me, and flopped into the chair. Floyd’s hand was hanging off the edge of the bed, palm out. I took it before I knew what I was doing, and then didn’t let go.
He was different than I remembered. Not in the face—he still had that hard, stubborn bone structure, the cop’s perpetual five o’clock shadow—but in the body. He’d lost weight. The lines in his neck were sharper, the collarbone more obvious above the hospital gown. His hand, usually so strong, felt like it was made of chicken wire and hope. There was a tremor in his fingers, a small vibration I could barely sense, and it made something in my own chest shake in sympathy.
I ran a thumb over his knuckles, watching the slow dance of the pulse in his wrist. I’d never been scared for him, not like this. It was a new kind of terror, the kind that stripped away all the bullshit armor I’d spent years putting up. I wanted to take his pain, or at least punch something until it looked worse than he did.
Three weeks ago, this man had thrown me out of his life, and I’d spent every day since pretending I was okay with it. Now, looking at him—pale, unconscious, with a tube taped to his arm—I understood why people did stupid things for love.
He woke up before sunrise. I knew the exact moment because his grip on my hand tightened, fingers squeezing like he was holding on to a life raft. His eyes opened, just a crack at first, then all the way, and they landed on me like a tactical laser.
For a second, neither of us moved. Then he said, voice raspy, “It wasn’t a dream.”
I tried to make a joke, but it got stuck in my throat. “Fantasizing about me now, Sheriff?”
He smiled, and it was a real one, crooked and half-broken but so full of relief it hurt to look at. “More than you could possibly know,” he said, then closed his eyes again, as if the effort of being alive was more exhausting than the fight that put him here.
I watched him breathe for a while, chest rising under the bandages, then settling slow. The hospital room was quiet except for the beep of the monitor and the soft whisper of Floyd’s breath. The ache in my hand was nothing compared to the ache in my chest.
After a while, he said, eyes still shut, “You stayed.”
It was the most ridiculous question I’d ever heard, but I answered anyway. “Did you really think I’d leave you alone to die of boredom?”
He didn’t answer, but I saw the corners of his mouth twitch.
We sat like that until the first hint of morning bled into the sky outside the window. The light made him look even more fragile. I counted the veins on the back of his hand, each one a road map of things I wanted to fix.
He opened his eyes, blinking against the light. “You look like shit,” he said.
I grinned, even though it felt wrong. “Takes one to know one.”
He snorted, then coughed, which hurt him enough to make his whole face pinch together. “I feel like I got hit by a train.”
“You look like it, too.”
He tried to sit up, failed, and made a disgusted noise. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said.
I didn’t know if he meant the pain, the job, or us. “What do you want, then?”
He was silent for a long time. Then: “I want to take you on a date.”
The words didn’t make sense. I replayed them, trying to understand the hidden meaning, but there wasn’t one.
I blinked. “You want to take me on a date?”
