Not now.
Not when we were this close to getting out of this alive.
Pain I could handle.
Losing him wasn’t acceptable.
Time fractured after that.
I remember a voice, not Caleb’s, brisk and clinical. “Doc,” someone said, like a call and a warning at the same time, and then hands again, more of them, and I tried to push up, but my body didn’t respond the way it should.
A jab.
Pressure in my arm.
Then nothing.
The next time I surfaced, everything was too bright, light cutting through closed lids before I even opened my eyes, and when I forced them open, recalibrating to the space, Caleb was there, right beside me.
“Hey, Leon,” he said, voice softer now, steadier, his hand coming up to my face, thumb brushing under my eye as he checked my pupils, a slight tremor in his fingers. “How are you doing?”
I ran a quick assessment on the pain, but it wasn’t critical enough to kill me.
“I’m okay,” I lied.
Caleb exhaled, something easing in his expression, and then he started talking, filling the silence the way he had in the truck, but this time I caught the words.
“Eden?” I said. “Noah?”
“Some of the girls, Eden included, went back to Maine with Zach and Kai,” he said. “They’ve got a proper medical setup there. Noah and the boys went with them. Everyone else is at the hostel with Mickey,” he added.
I turned my head slightly to confirm the environment, exits, and threats, though I couldn’t do much about them. “Where are we?”
“Doc’s place.”
Recovery was unproductive.
“Drink this,” Caleb said, pressing a glass into my hand. “Now.”
They kept me in bed for two days, a restriction I didn’t agree with but didn’t have the capacity to override, so I adapted, limiting movement to what was necessary—bathroom, repositioning—because there was no scenario where I needed help with that, not from anyone, not even Caleb.
Caleb, who stayed right next to me.
He worked from a chair too close to the bed, laptop balanced on his knees or the edge of the mattress, shoulders hunched, attention split between whatever he was doing andme, monitoring both without losing efficiency, and every time I surfaced properly, he was there, exactly where I expected him to be.
He talked sometimes.
“Doc says you’re being impossible. Drink this, then sleep,” he said at one point.
“You’re a stubborn fucker,” he said at another, then, “Just fucking live, asshole!”
Then the conversation became more complicated.
Caleb worked through the file beside me, laptop balanced on his knees, fingers fast and uneven, breath catching every few minutes when something on the screen cost him something I couldn’t see from where I was. I didn’t ask. I tracked his face instead—jaw set, eyes too narrow, the muscle at the side of his neck working when he forgot to relax it.
He talked while he worked. He always did, but it was different this time, less narration than discovery, the words spilling out in pieces because he was finding the pieces in real time and didn’t have anywhere else to put them.
“Okay,” he muttered. “Okay, so—Lyric flagged this account already, but—wait. Wait, no, that’s the same routing number. Leon, that’s the same routing number as the church one. Fuck.” A breath. “Fuck, that’s not even hidden. They didn’t even try.”
