"He always does that," Sera says, to the ceiling.
"I'm the host," Adrian says around the plantain.
"You're not the host of anything. We're in a hospital."
"Then I'm the host of the hospital." He gestures broadly at the room. "My domain."
"Your domain has a two-star rating on Yelp," Gabriel says. “Bad lighting. Besides, even hospital hosts don’t get to steal patient’s food.”
“You’re not a patient,” Adrian says with a smile.
“You will be in a minute,” Gabriel grumbles, but Adrian just grins wider.
I close my eyes for a moment. The ache in my arm pulses with my heartbeat. Adrian laughs quietly at something Sera says. I open my eyes again because closing them feels like missing something.
The room is quieter now.
"Logan."
He looks at me.
"Your hands." I nod toward the small bathroom off the room. "Go wash them. I'll be here when you get back."
He looks at his hands. The dried blood still on them, still on his shirt, worn through every arrival and every hour.
"I'll be here," I say again.
He doesn't move for a moment. Then he stands — slowly, releasing my hand with the care of someone setting down something fragile — and crosses to the bathroom. I hear the water run. Ordinary and quiet, in the middle of everything.
He comes back thirty seconds later. His hands are clean. He sits back down and finds my hand again.
"These friends of yours really love you, don't they," I whisper.
He looks around, and nods, then squeezes my hand.
22 - Logan
The hospital discharges her at nine-fifteen.
I have the car out front before the paperwork clears. The nurse goes through the instructions — concussion protocol, arm brace, the medication schedule — and I stand there writing it down because I don't trust myself to remember it. My handwriting is neat. My hands are steady. Underneath both of those things is something I cannot put down.
She almost died because I called her.
That sentence has been running on a loop since the parking lot, since I followed the ambulance, since I sat in a chair and held her hand while the club ran its crises without me for the first time in nine years. The loop doesn't stop when I collect her prescription from the pharmacy window. It doesn't stop when she walks out of the hospital room under her own power, slowly, the brace on her right arm, the bandage at her temple already changed to something smaller.
She sees my face.
"I'm fine," she says.
"I know."
The discharge paperwork takes eleven minutes. I count them. I have the prescription filled at the hospital pharmacy rather than stopping anywhere else, because stopping anywhere else adds time.
I left for two hours in the night — after she was stable, after her breathing evened and the monitors settled into their reliablecadence. Long enough to issue instructions, arrange the day bed, make the calls the empire required of me in the dark.
I take her to La Sirena.
She doesn't ask why not the penthouse. The penthouse is isolated, forty floors up, too quiet. She gets in the car without comment and rides in silence while Miami does its morning thing outside the windows.
