The monitor blips.
A single spike on the green line. Then another. Then a third, weak and thready, the rhythm of a heart remembering how to beat again.
Jax gasps. His torso heaves, his eyes fly open, and his hand clamps around Jess's wrist and holds on.
Jess's knees buckle.
I rip the needle from my arm and catch her before she hits the floor, blood trailing down my forearm where the puncture weeps. My hands close around her waist and her weight folds against me, her forehead dropping to my collarbone, her body trembling with an adrenaline crash that turns her limbs to water.
"I've got you."
"You gave a pint of blood, you shouldn't—"
"I said I've got you."
Her fingers curl into my flannel. Her face presses against my shirt, and warmth soaks through the fabric—tears she'd kill me for noticing, tears she'd deny with her last breath, tears that have nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with the cost of refusing to let a twenty-eight-year-old die on her watch.
I hold on. Breathe her in. Say nothing about the dampness spreading through my shirt, nothing about the trembling, nothing about the way her hands fist the flannel like she's anchoring herself to something solid in a world that won't stop moving.
The radio crackles on the counter.
"How's my prospect?" Knox's voice, rough with static and concern.
I keep one arm around Jess and reach for the handset with the other. "Stable. Doc Cooper saved him."
"Good. You guys good?"
The question catches me off guard. Knox doesn't usually ask that. Knox assumes I'm good, because I'm always good, because that's my job. "Yeah. We're good, brother."
"Knew you would be." The line cuts out.
I set the radio down and lower Jess into the chair. She wipes her face with the back of her hand, quick and rough, and then gets up to check Jax's vitals without meeting my eyes.
An hour later, Jax opens his eyes.
He blinks against the lantern light, licks cracked lips, and his gaze finds me sitting on the supply crate beside his bed.
"Boss gonna be pissed I got hurt."
"Boss is gonna be grateful you're alive, dumbass."
That gets a grin, crooked but real. "Thanks, VP."
"Thank the doc." I tilt my head toward Jess, who's cleaning up the transfusion equipment across the room. "I just bled a little. She did the hard part."
Jax's gaze follows mine to Jess. Even drugged and half-dead, he has the decency to look impressed.
Colt and Dawson settled in the waiting area, sleeping when they can, their wet coats drying on the backs of chairs. The storm rages outside, but a strange lull has fallen over the clinic in the last hour. The constant rattling has quieted to a low groan, a brief reprieve in the hurricane's assault.
Jess finishes cleaning. She crosses the room, stops beside me, and her palm presses flat against my jaw. Her thumb settles near the ridge of my broken tusk, close enough that I feel her warmth against the rough edge. Her hand is steady now. Her face is not.
"You did more than bleed a little," she says. "Thank you."
I lean into her touch and close my eyes. Her palm against my skin, her pulse beating in her fingertips, her scent shifting like a tide turning—the walls easing back, the warmth flooding in, less afraid than an hour ago, less guarded than this morning, a degree closer to the woman who kissed me in a dark garden and meant it.
"Anything for you, Kitten." I open my eyes and hold her gaze. "Anything."
Her hand drops. She steps back. But not as far as before.
