Aura let out one broken sob beside me.
Then Charm grabbed me so hard I almost fell, and my dad’s arm came around both of us immediately, anchoring us against him while the whole room tried to remember how to breathe around the one word we had been waiting for.
Alive.
“He’s critical,” Harrison continued, voice rougher now. “But stable. They’re keeping him sedated for a few days. He’s on a ventilator. The next couple of days matter.”
No one cheered. No one acted like it was over, because it wasn’t.
Cade was alive, but not safe.
I pressed both hands to my mouth as tears spilled over again.
Hope did not feel gentle right now. It felt like something with teeth. It hurt almost as much as fear because now I had something to lose all over again.
Elenore crossed the room and wrapped one arm around me while my dad held the other side, and for a moment, I stood between Cade’s mother and my own mother’s memory, between the family I was born into and the one Cade had accidentally dragged me toward with blood and love and the worst night of our lives.
“He’s alive,” I whispered.
Aura nodded through tears. “He’s alive.”
And until someone told me otherwise, that was the only prayer I had left.
43
Bliss
By the third morning, the hospital had stopped feeling like a place and started feeling like a world I had been sentenced to live inside.
The windows in the private family room were the only things telling me the outside world still existed. There was no real sense of time anymore beyond the dim shift of light slipping through the frosted glass near the nurses’ station and the rhythm of people entering with soft voices and leaving with careful faces. Someone had brought coffee. Someone had brought muffins. Someone had brought blankets, chargers, bottled water, and the kind of snacks people bought when they wanted to be helpful but had no idea what grief ate for breakfast.
I hadn’t touched any of it.
Cade was off the ventilator.
That was the only sentence that mattered in my life right now.
They had removed it around five the morning before, after his lung held steady long enough for the doctors to let the machine step back. I had watched through glass while nurses moved around him, while tubes and wires and monitors turned his body into something terrifying and clinical, while Elenore Mercer cried silently beside me and Harrison stood behind us with one hand pressed to the wall like even all his money couldn’t keep him upright.
He was breathing on his own. Not easily. Not normally. But on his own.
The doctors were careful with hope, like it was a medication that could hurt us if they gave too much at once.Cade was still critical. Still heavily medicated. Still sleeping more than waking, drifting in and out beneath pain control strong enough to keep his body from fighting every stitch, tube, drain, and breath. They kept saying the next few days mattered. They kept saying recovery would be long. They kept saying he was young, strong, healthy, and those words were supposed to comfort us. All I heard was that his body had needed to be young, strong, and healthy to survive at all.
He had opened his eyes twice.
The first time, he didn’t know where he was, let alone who he was.
The second time, he found me.
Barely.
His eyelids had lifted only enough for a sliver of blue, hazy and unfocused beneath the bruised exhaustion on his face. His lips had moved around the oxygen cannula, but no sound came out. I had stood over him with both hands wrapped around his because I needed him to feel me there even if he couldn’t make sense of anything else.
“I’m here,” I whispered. “I’m right here, Cross Check.”
His fingers twitched once beneath mine.
Then he was gone again, dragged under by pain meds and trauma and the kind of sleep doctors said his body needed but my heart hated anyway.
