Page 105 of Tough Justice

“Let’s go,” Deck vaguely heard someone say. His brain had gone numb with fear.

Like Dan had been, Tori was dying in front of him, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Tori woke to sunlight streaming through the window. She blinked, cringing and not quite ready for the overwhelming brightness.

“There’s my girl.” Someone squeezed her hand. Dad.

On the other side of the bed, Margo held her other hand. “You scared us.” Margo swiped at a tear running down her cheek. “We thought…I thought…”

“So did I.” She’d woken once, briefly, in the middle of the night with a pounding headache, nausea, and vomiting. The fingers of her right hand were achy and bruised. Now, she was just plain exhausted.

She tried remembering everything that had happened down in the tunnels. T-Lo. The fire. Wil. She didn’t even know if he’d been arrested. Or killed. Despite everything, it was still difficult to process the havoc he’d wreaked. All those overdoses. All those deaths.

The last thing she remembered was getting gray death thrown in her face. After that, her memory was a blank slate. Except for Deck. He came for me.

She looked around the room, worried that he wasn’t there. Had he or Thor been exposed? Were they okay?

Her dad’s brows rose. “Looking for anyone in particular?”

“No,” she lied. “I just—” Stupidly hoped Deck might come to see her. “Never mind.”

“He was here,” Margo said, sporting an impish smile. “Deck, I mean.”

Her heart gave a little flutter that reflected on the heart rate monitor visible just over Margo’s shoulder. But she shouldn’t get excited just because he’d shown up in her hospital room. “He probably just wanted to take a statement from me, to find out what happened with Wil before he got there.” It didn’t mean anything else between them had changed.

Margo gave her the same look she’d always given her when they were kids, the one that said her sister thought she was clueless. “Tori, get real.”

“No, you don’t understand.” Her dad probably hadn’t filled Margo in. “Deck and I aren’t together.”

Her sister made a scoffing sound. “You could have fooled me.”

Her dad swallowed hard. “When they brought you in here, you weren’t breathing.” He took a deep breath, steadying himself. “Deck never left your side. Not once. Even when the nurses threatened to call security on him.”

“You should have seen him.” Margo laughed. “First, he told the guards to back off, then he told them to fuck off.”

“Margo!” Her dad threw Margo a stern look of disapproval.

“Well, he did.” Margo crossed her arms.

This time, it was her dad who laughed. “That, he did.”

Again, Tori glanced at the monitor. The blips and numbers indicated her pathetic heart was back to a sad and steady rhythm. “It still doesn’t mean anything.”

Her dad’s eyes locked with hers, conveying everything she couldn’t verbalize. “Do you want it to?”

Yes. God, yes. But it wasn’t meant to be, and she had to accept that. There was no sense getting all worked up about something that would never happen.

“You know,” her dad began, “your mother and I didn’t see eye to eye on everything. No two people ever do. Right up until the end, we were as different as night and day. There were four things that kept us together. Love, respect, compromise, and acceptance.” He leaned his forearms on the bedrail, giving her a pointed look. “From what I’ve seen and heard, you and Deck have the first two down. Just not the third or the fourth. Not yet, anyway. Those are the hardest ones to get right, but if you want something—or someone—badly enough, you’ll walk through a firestorm to get it.”

He let his words sink in. He’d always given her and Margo sage advice, but this…

“I don’t know if I have the courage it takes to walk through that storm.” A lump formed in the back of her throat. Margo squeezed her hand in a show of sisterly support. “I don’t think I could handle losing Deck.”

“Can you handle living without him?” he asked.

That was the question, one she couldn’t answer.