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But all it did was drive home the fact that his teammate, his friend, was gone.

Buck hadn’t been able to save him.

He wanted to go under.

Wanted the world around him to go dark.

Fate gave him the middle finger.

He stayed conscious long into the night until they forcibly put him under and took him into surgery.

Part of him hoped that he’d never come out.

The rest of him felt that he didn’t deserve that mercy.

That part of him was right.

Heath Derringer survived that long night and try as he might, he couldn’t seem to live again.

ONE

MARI

It was another day at the Pacific Isles Rehabilitation Center and honestly, when Marikit DeLima stepped inside, she started to breathe free again.

It wasn’t just her own feeling.

The cat that had been pacing in the pet carrier in the passenger seat of her car was now cuddled up against her chest, purring happily, tail swishing against her arm as they walked up to the sign in desk.

“Mari!” The receptionist stepped out of the back office with a smile. “Good to see you back again. The patients have been waiting to see you.”

Ebi lifted up her head and yowled indignantly.

The receptionist looked contrite. “Sorry. They’ve been waiting to see both of you.”

Almost as if Ebi understood her words, she twisted her body and using Mari’s arm as a springboard, she leapt up onto the desk and leaned her head down.

The receptionist obliged and gave the sassy cat some scritches between her ears.

Mari almost shook her head.

Since her parents passed away, she’d been taking care of their cat, Ebi, and while they’d become a pair of grudging housemates like the two men in the Odd Couple, they weren’t quite friends.

That meant that holding and touching Ebi could be an experiment in a kind of feline warfare.

The scars on the backs of Mari’s hands and on her forearms were evidence enough of their ever-evolving relationship.

“Who’s the pretty baby?”

Ebi leaned into the scritches and purred, her tail lazily flipping in one direction and then another.

Someone cleared their throat a few feet away. “Morning, Mari.”

She turned to look at Doctor Haslet. “Morning, Doctor.”

He shook his head with a smile.

He’d been trying to get her to call him by his first name for a few weeks, but she hadn’t done it yet. It felt... oddly disrespectful to call him by his name like that.