It was over. Simon thought about it for a second and decided to lie down.
“Hey. You. You okay?” he heard someone ask from a distance. A face appeared in his vision, blurred and intent. “Shit. He’s hurt. Call in the paramedics. Hey, Ramsey. You’re Ramsey, right? You’re going to be okay. All right? You hear me?”
The SWAT guy was not, Simon thought with the mild calm of shock, nearly as good a liar as Jacob.
He faded out before the paramedics got there.
WAKING UPin hospitals was becoming a habit.
Simon lay without opening his eyes and listened to the beep of monitoring machines and the sigh-huff of a respirator. He had a tube in his nose—he could feel the dry itch of it—and the cool cloud of enough painkillers that he probably had an IV in too.
It hurt—he could tell that even through the opioids—but not enough that he could access how much damage he’d done.
“Mr. Ramsey?”
He grimaced around the dirty wool taste in his mouth, peeled his gummy lips apart, and opened his eyes. Big blue eyes and a severe crop of gray hair swam in his vision and came into focus as he blinked. The nurse was tall and stern-looking, with one of those easy, mobile faces that could flip into warm with a twitch.
She raised her eyebrows at him. “We weren’t expecting to see you just yet,” she said.
He shrugged, or tried to. It wasn’t entirely clear that his shoulders cooperated. The memory of that loose broken jiggle as he hit the concrete came back to him, and the nettle ache of dulled pain was still in his shoulder. If he’d done enough damage….
What was worse? The thought of losing the use of his arm or that he gave a damn about that when Jacob was dead? He closed his eyes again and pressed his head back into the pillow. The nurse mistook it for pain and gently patted his arm.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll top up the pain relief in a minute.”
A minute in hospital time was usually more like an hour or two. It had to wait until the summoned doctor had checked him over. That was familiar too—clinical, gloved hands and questions that felt more like a status report than actual concern with your health. When they started treating you like a malfunctioning machine, it usually meant you’d done some real damage.
“The police want to talk to you,” the stern nurse said when the doctors had finally left. “Do you feel up to it?”
“Not yet,” he begged off tiredly.
She nodded understandingly and patted his hand again. “Your brother’s lawyers have put them off,” she said. “They won’t bother you until you’re ready. He wanted me to call him when you woke up, so he could bring your niece over.”
The in-law part of Dev’s relation to Simon didn’t seem all that important right then. He let the “brother” go uncorrected and nodded his permission for the contact. The nurse started out into the hall—apparently Syntech health insurance covered a private room, or that might have been the police influence—and stopped.
“And here’s someone else who’s been waiting for you to wake up,” she said and stepped out of the way. The quirk to her smile was reluctantly charmed, won over despite herself. “Don’t tire him out.”
Simon rolled his head to the side and expected to see Nora. He had the image of her in his head—with one arm done up in a sling and excuses on her lips now that she could see a way out.
It wasn’t her.
Jacob shuffled in wearing oversized blue hospital pajamas and with a burn shiny on his cheek from ear to chin. He looked…. He looked like shit, but he wasn’t dead. Simon stared at him and blinked to make sure his drug-addled brain hadn’t caused hallucinations.
“Hey.” The word slipped over his tongue half formed.
“Hey,” Jacob said back. He started to grin, but then thought better of it as the blistered skin on his jaw puckered. His expression settled into something close to vulnerable. “You got shot. I thought you were trained for this sort of thing.”
“I thought you were dead,” Simon countered.
“Oh. No. I’m okay,” Jacob said earnestly.
It wasn’t funny. Except it was. Simon snorted out a laugh that hurt and managed to convince one arm to cooperate enough to reach for Jacob. He grabbed hold of his hand, squeezed the fingers roughly, and dragged him down into a hug. Relief filled his chest like warm air and bubbles and pushed the pain out to the corners.
Burn ointment was slick against his cheek, and Jacob still smelled sharply of smoke and explosives. He held himself stiffly against Simon and neither pulled back from the hug nor leaned into it. It took a second for Simon to work out it wasn’t rejection. Jacob just didn’t want to hurt him. Jacob’s body hovered awkwardly over the bed, bent at the waist and propped up on his elbow.
“The car blew up,” Simon said.
“Yeah,” Jacob agreed. His breath tickled Simon’s jaw and was warm in the soft patch just under the point of the hinge. “The bomb went off when the Lexus’s doors relocked.”
