Page 66

We wait. The clock moves. I drink three more cups of the terrible coffee. Marka falls asleep in his chair sometime after five, arms crossed, chin down, completely out. I find it steadying because a man who can sleep in a surgical waiting room has decided the outcome will be survivable. Lorenzo makes calls in the hallway, his voice low. Adrianos sits across from me for an hour but offers nothing, no reassurance, no small talk, just his presence on the other side of the table, and I find I don’t need anything more than that. Declan watches the sky shift from black to grey to the first thin wash of morning light, his cup long empty, not moving from the window. Santiago paces the far end of the room, four steps one direction, four steps back, burning off whatever he came in with.

The surgeon comes through the door at seven fourteen.

Compact, fifties, mask around his chin, he takes in the room without blinking at the audience.

“He lost a lot of blood,” he says. “The blade missed everything vital. We’ve repaired the damage and transfused him. He’s stable.” His eyes find me. “He’ll be fine.”

My eyes fill before I’ve done anything to invite it, tears running fast down my face. I press my lips together and breathe through my nose, but it does nothing at all to stop them. I let them go because I’ve spent enough of this night fighting things that don’t respond to fighting.

“Can I see him?” I ask.

“Briefly,” the surgeon says. “He’s still coming off the anesthesia.”

He leads me through the door, down the hallway, to a room at the end. I push the door open.

The monitors trace green lines across the screen above the bed. Two IV lines run into his left arm. He’s lying flat and still, which is not how he exists anywhere else. His face has lost the tension it carries every waking hour, every line of readiness gone out of it. He looks younger than thirty-eight, and it hollows something out in my chest to see it. I pull the chair close, sit down, and take his hand.

His fingers are warm. I don’t know why that one detail does what the rest of the night hasn’t managed to do, but it does, and I cry quietly, without sound, just tears running, holding his hand with both of mine.

His eyes open.

They’re glassy, the anesthesia still running through him, but they find my face and hold there.

“Told you,” he says, rough, dragged out slow. “Came back.”

Half a laugh comes out of me from somewhere I didn’t plan to access. “You did,” I say. “You absolute idiot, you actually did.”

“Promise kept.” His mouth moves into something that isn’t quite the full smirk but is headed there. “Never break a promise.”

“You could make an exception for the ones that involve knife wounds,” I tell him. My thumb moves across his knuckles.

His eyes clear by small increments. “Shouldn’t have gotten that far,” he says. “Should’ve had better coverage on that hallway. You shouldn’t have been in that bathroom alone with him.”

“Nothing happened,” I reassure him. “Look at me. I’m sitting here, and I’m fine, and that’s because of you, so I need you to take that and stop torturing yourself over what didn’t happen.”

“If I’d been thirty seconds slower.” His hand tightens on mine, barely.

“You weren’t.” I hold his gaze. “You weren’t, and I’m here, and so are you, and that’s the only version of tonight that I’m interested in.”

He’s quiet. The monitors beep.

“I meant what I said,” he tells me, his voice steadier. “Before I went out that door.”

“I know,” I say.

“Wasn’t the adrenaline talking.”

“I know that too.”

He watches my face. I watch his. He’s seen me cry twice tonight and said nothing about it either time, which is its own form of consideration from a man whose default register is blunt force.

“I love you,” I tell him. My chest pulls tight around the words, and I say them anyway, because I’ve been carrying them long enough and he’s lying in a hospital bed with two IV lines in his arm and I’m done waiting for a better moment. “I’m aware of how insane that is, given every single thing that happened between us and before us and everything we still have to get through. I’m not saying it because you nearly died tonight. I’m saying it because it’s true and I’m done not saying true things to you.”

He’s quiet for long enough that I start building a secondary argument.

“Never expected anything less,” he says.

I stare at him. “I just told you I love you.”