Page 3 of Deacon

“Deacon?” I shot back, because nothing about that made sense. The world had shifted beneath my feet, but there was no time to understand how or why. There was only the bed moving under our hands and the ugly, wet sound of a man trying to breathe through damage his body might not survive.

We hit the trauma bay in a flood of light. The room swallowed us whole, bright and cold and already waiting. Evan came in from my right, gloving up as he moved, his expression sharpening the second he took in the patient. The rest of the report came around us in clipped pieces, words like unstable, chest wound, and hypotensive landing without fully sticking.

They never did at first. Not when the body on the gurney belonged to someone you knew. Not when one look at his face could pull an entire buried life up by the roots.

I had seen Jackson hurt before. Bruised after football games. Favoring a rib he swore wasn’t broken after crashing his bike, even while Matty and I told him he was full of shit. Bloody knuckles from fights he refused to explain, accompanied by that stubborn half smile he wore whenever he wanted everyone to believe he was fine, especially me.

This was different. His skin had gone pale beneath the blood, his lips edged with the wrong color, and every breath came too shallow to trust. This was a body giving ground fast.

“Lila.”

Blue’s voice cut across the noise and struck me square in the chest. I looked at her, and whatever had shown on my face was enough. Her eyes held mine for one brief second, neither soft nor prying. She was simply there, giving me one clean beat to get my head straight before turning back to the bed.

“Let’s go.”

Thank God for that. There was nowhere to put what I felt. Not here. Not now.

The shears made quick work of his shirt, but the leather pants fought us. Someone muttered a curse when the blade caught before the thick material finally gave way and fell open in ruined pieces. The sight beneath it made my stomach clench hard enough that I locked my knees.

There were several wounds. Too much blood. His skin cooled beneath my hands even while the room burned with movement, and I stepped in because there was nothing else to do.

Pressure, gauze, suction. Numbers called out and answered. The rhythm took over the way it always did, and I let training and muscle memory build a wall between my hands and everything trying to tear through me. If I stayed inside the work, I could breathe. If I let myself drift beyond it, I would see him in other lights. Summer lights. Lake lights. The weak gold glow from the Morgan deck the night he kissed me.

I would remember the last time I saw him alive and whole, looking at me as though he had finally stopped fighting what he wanted.

I pressed harder against the wound and focused on the blood slicking my gloves. It was easier than looking at his face.

Blue gave orders in the clipped, calm tone that made every room tighten around her. Evan answered without hesitation, and the rest of the team moved with them. The trauma bay worked like a machine, yet all I could hear was the monitor, the uneven drag of Jackson’s breathing, and my pulse hammering behind my ears.

A body remembers before the mind gives it permission. Mine remembered him in pieces: the shape of his shoulders at eighteen as he leaned over the handlebars of his bike, the rough warmth of his shirt wrapped around my injured hand when I was eight while he marched me home ready to murder whoever had hurt me. His laugh beside the lake. His mouth against mine.

I shoved the memories down until my jaw ached. This wasn’t the time for them. Not with him bleeding beneath my hands and Jade at home, unaware that her entire life had begun tipping sideways.

The thought of her struck so hard it nearly knocked me off balance. I refused to let myself feel it completely. It was too large, too dangerous, and it would split something open that I couldn’t afford to expose inside this room.

So, I worked.

Blue called for blood while Evan pointed out something he didn’t like. Behind me, someone repeated a pressure that was already too low and still falling. Jackson made a sound then, torn from somewhere deep inside him, and every muscle in my body tightened.

He sounded close enough to memory to hurt.

“Stay with us,” Blue said, leaning over him.

I kept my mouth shut, not because I had nothing to say, but because I didn’t trust what might come out if I opened it.

Something changed on the monitor.

The shift came the way a summer storm rolled over the lake, beginning with a pressure change felt before it could be understood. The room sharpened. Movements quickened, and strain entered the voices around me, hovering just beneath panic.

Then panic arrived anyway.

He was crashing.

I heard it from several directions at once. Weak pulse. Pressure dropping. Move. Push this. Blue’s voice cut through everything, hard enough to make the entire room obey. I leaned in without being told, one hand braced and working while the other reached for what came next.

My braid had loosened somewhere in the rush, leaving damp strands of hair stuck to the back of my neck. The room smelled of blood and sweat, antiseptic, and the faint scorched odor of the defibrillator being readied.

A second later, the monitor flattened.