“Nothing a few weeks in a cast won’t fix,” Hawk said as the distant sound of sirens broke through the air.
“Thank fuck,” Vigo said. “Help is on the way.”
It should have been reassuring, but a fresh wave of panic rolled through my body.
Rescue was just the beginning. Once I was out of the car I’d have to face the reality of what had happened to me.
I’d have to face the fact that I was blind.
“I’m… I’m scared,” I said.
“We’re here, Cass.” Hawk’s warm hand closed around mine. “You’re not alone.”
And despite everything, I felt the truth of it in my bones.
6
HAWK
My stomach churned,my bloody hand throbbing as I paced the hospital waiting room, a generic box separated from the rest of the hospital by a glass wall. Chairs with cheaply upholstered seats were lined up along the walls, and a TV displayed an old episode ofSupernatural, the volume on low.
Vigo flipped aimlessly through one of the magazines scattered across the end tables, his face and clothes smudged with dirt, while Jagger stared into space like a zombie.
A middle-aged man and woman who looked like siblings sat near an elderly man at the other end of the room, but I hardly saw them. My head was still back at the bottom of the ravine where Cassie’s car had landed. Everything had moved quickly once the rescue team arrived, but the time before that — the time when Vigo and I had been alone with Cassie in the ravine — had seemed infinite.
I could still feel Cassie’s small hand in mine, could still hear the shallowness of her breathing (I was pretty sure she had at least one broken rib), could hear her voice, small and terrified from the twisted confines of the car.
I’m scared.
I’d wanted to lift the Subaru off her body like a superhero, had wanted to pull her forcibly from the car, gnaw through her seat belt if I had to.
But this time, my recklessness couldn’t save me. Couldn’t save Cassie.
I can’t see.
I’d been forced to wait, to do nothing but hold her hand, murmur comforting, pointless, useless words through the shattered glass of the Subaru’s windshield.
It had been a form of torture, one I’d endured because the alternative — hurting Cassie worse than she’d already been hurt by trying to get her out — was unthinkable.
Vigo threw down the magazine he’d been aimlessly flipping through. “Not gonna lie, I’m freaked that she can’t see.”
“Same,” Jagger said.
“It could be temporary,” I said. “A symptom of a head injury.”
It wasn’t just wishful thinking. I’d looked it up in the bathroom after we’d gotten to the hospital during a frantic ten minutes when I’d paced the antiseptic-smelling room like a caged animal before finally stopping to punch the tile wall until my knuckles had bled.
Jagger and Vigo hadn’t even asked about my hand when I’d joined them in the waiting room.
They felt it too.
I could rob a bank without so much as a butterfly in my stomach, but waiting for one of the doctors to give us an update on Cassie was enough to make me want to puke all over the linoleum floor.
I stopped pacing when Jagger and Vigo turned their heads toward the hall, followed by the middle-aged couple and the old man. There was a disturbance in the air, like a rush of cold wind before a storm, and I followed their gazes just in time to see Bram stalk into the waiting room.
He held Maeve’s hand, his face a mask of fury as Poe and Remy followed close behind them.
I’d called Bram myself, but somehow I was still surprised to see him in a setting as mundane — as human — as a hospital.
