"He's here." Dr Volkov says it like it's self-evident. Like it would be absurd for Nick to be anywhere else. "He'll be back in a moment."
I close my eyes. The beeping is steady and rhythmic and I want to count it, but I lose the numbers somewhere around seven.
It’s dark now. Or dim. A lamp somewhere to my left, warm and low.
I'm in a bed. A real bed, not a hospital gurney. The sheets are heavy and soft, the kind of sheets I've never slept on, and there's a blanket over me that isn't mine.
The IV is still in my hand. The bag has been changed. There's a monitor clipped to my finger, and its green light pulses with my heartbeat.
I turn my head, slowly this time, bracing for the pain. It comes, but duller. Manageable.
Nick is in a chair beside the bed.
He's asleep. Or close to it. His head is tipped back against the chair, his legs stretched out, and he's still in the same dark sweater from when we met at the diner. One hand rests on the edge of the mattress, close enough to my hip that I could reach it without lifting my arm.
I look at his face in the lamplight. The sharp line of his jaw. The dark circles under his eyes. He looks exhausted. He looks like a man who has been sitting in chairs beside beds for days, and instead of sleeping in his own bed he's sleeping in a chair beside mine.
I reach for his hand.
My fingers find his on the mattress and I curl mine around them. It's a small movement. Weak. But his eyes open immediately, as if he was never asleep at all, just waiting.
"Hi," I say.
His hand turns under mine and closes around my fingers. His grip is careful, measured, the grip of a man who is aware of every pound of pressure and is giving me only enough to feel him there.
"Hi." His voice is rough. He leans forward, his other hand coming up to push my hair back from my face. His thumb traces the edge of the bruise I can feel at my temple, gentle enough that it barely registers as touch.
"Where am I?"
"My house."
I look at the ceiling, the walls. Crown molding. Papered walls in a deep blue. Heavy curtains drawn across what I assume is a window. A dark wood dresser with a lamp on it. Nothing in this room looks like a hospital, except for the IV stand and the monitor on my finger.
"How long?"
"Three days."
The number lands on my chest and sits there. Three days. I've been unconscious, or close to it, for three days. Fragments come back. The white ceiling. Dr Volkov's glasses. The sharp sting of the glucagon injection. Nick's arms lifting me off the floor. Between those fragments, nothing. Just black.
"My sugar," I say, because that's where my brain goes first. It always goes there first.
"Stabilized. Mikhail's, Dr Volkov’s, been managing it. He's been checking your levels every two hours." He pauses. "He told me what hypoglycemia does when it goes untreated for that long. He told me how close it was."
I watch his face. His jaw is tight, the muscle in it working the way it does when he's holding something down.
"Jason," I say.
His hand doesn't move on mine. His face doesn't change. But something behind his eyes shifts, a door closing, and I can feel the weight of what's behind it even though I can't see through.
"Jason isn't going to be a problem," he says.
"Nick." My throat is dry and the word comes out cracked. "Nick, I need to tell you what happened."
"You don't." He says it quietly. Firmly. "You don't need to tell me anything right now. You need to rest. You need your levels stable and your head to heal, and you need to eat something. Everything else can wait."
"It can't wait. There was—" I stop. The memory surfaces and it's ugly and sharp and I can feel the phantom weight of the knife handle in my palm. "There was blood. On the floor. Jason, he was—"
"Sadie." He lifts my hand and presses his mouth to my knuckles. His lips are warm and his breath is steady and his eyes are on mine when he says it. "There was nothing on your floor when I found you. There was nothing in your apartment except you, unconscious, with your sugar at twenty-eight and a head wound that should have put you in the ER. That's what I found. That's all I found."
