Page 26

“Stay awake. Harper, stay with me. I need you to stay with me.”

More motion. The give of a car seat under me, his hand gripping mine too tight, grounding in a way that cuts through some of the static even as the rest of me keeps slipping. Streetlights strobing past somewhere above me, too fast, too bright, gone before I can hold onto any single one of them. I catch fragments of his face in the flashes, jaw tight, eyes fixed somewhere ahead, driving faster than any road through this part of the city should allow.

“She’s burning up.” His voice, but not to me this time, clipped, sharp, someone on the other end of a call I can’t fully track. “I need the room ready when we get there. Now.”

My stomach cramps again, and I hear myself make a sound I don’t recognize. His hand tightens around mine even tighter, like he’s trying to hold me here through sheer force of grip alone.

I try to focus on that grip, on the shape of his fingers around mine, using it as the one solid thing left in a world that keeps sliding sideways every time I try to hold still against it.

“I’m right here.” his voice is the one steady thing in a world that’s gone entirely unreliable. “You’re not doing this alone. Do you hear me? Stay with me, Harper.”

I don’t know if I answer.

Bright lights, sudden and overwhelming, the kind that mean we’ve arrived somewhere, doors, voices, more hands than just his now, all of them moving fast, all of them talking over each other in a way I can’t follow anymore.

Someone’s cutting at my sleeve. Someone else is saying words I recognize, but I can’t string them into meaning: vitals, IV, get me a line.

There’s a gurney under me now, wheels rattling fast over a floor that feels too smooth and too cold, nothing like the house I’ve spent the last two months learning every corner of, every locked door and every guard rotation now suddenly meaningless against whatever this is.

Artem’s voice cuts through all of it one more time, close to my ear and low enough that it might just be meant for me alone. “You’re safe. Whatever’s happening, you’re safe. I’ve got you. I’m not letting go of your hand, do you understand me?”

I want to answer him. I want to tell him I heard that, that some part of me is holding onto those words even as everything else slides away from me.

I try to squeeze his hand, some small proof that I’m still here, but I can’t tell if my fingers actually manage the motion or if I only imagine that they do, the line between what’s real and what’s slipping away from me blurring more with every passing second.

The room tilts one final time, harder than before, and the last thing I’m aware of is his hand, still wrapped tightly around mine, refusing to let go even as the rest of the world goes dark around the edges and finally disappears into nothing at all.

17

HARPER

The first thing I register is the beeping of some machine keeping time with my own heartbeat somewhere off to my right.

I open my eyes to a ceiling that isn’t mine, white and featureless, and it takes a long moment before the rest of the room resolves around it.

An IV line is taped to the back of my hand. Soft lighting instead of the harsh overhead fluorescents I’d expect from a normal hospital. Everything quieter than it should be. There are no distant intercom pages, no rattling carts in the hallway, nothing but the beep beside me and my own shallow breathing.

My mouth is dry, my whole body heavy in a way that feels different from exhaustion, more like something’s been scrubbed out of my system and left me hollow in its place. I try to piece together how I got here and only manage fragments: the tray, the cramping, Artem’s voice cutting through static, streetlights blurring past too fast to hold onto. The last clear thing I remember is his hand around mine, and even now, waking up alone, I can still almost feel the shape of his fingers pressed against my palm.

A nurse notices me stirring and steps closer, checking the monitor beside my bed before she checks me, her hands quick and practical against the machines. “You’re okay. You’re stable. Do you know where you are?”

“Not really,” I admit, my voice rough.

“Private facility. You were brought in last night, pretty unwell. We’ve been running you through some standard tests while you were out, want to make sure we understand exactly what we’re dealing with before we treat you any further.” She adjusts something on the IV line, brisk but not unkind, her eyes flicking to the monitor one more time before settling back on me. “The doctor will be in shortly to go over everything with you.”

“What kind of tests?”

“Bloodwork, mostly. Given your symptoms and your age, we ran a pregnancy test as part of the standard panel too, just to be thorough.” She says it so plainly, so procedurally, that it takes a second for the words to land. “Results should be back any minute.”

She leaves before I can ask anything else, the door clicking shut behind her, and I lie there staring at the ceiling with that one sentence looping through my head: pregnancy test, said with all the weight of a blood pressure check, nothing in her tone hinting at how much that particular result could reorganize an entire life.

I start doing the math without meaning to. Weeks counted backward, landing somewhere in the stretch of nights that started after the kiss, after that first night he didn’t leave. It’s barely been long enough, but then again, I never was regular…

My hand goes to my stomach on its own, an instinct I don’t examine.

It could be nothing at all. People get sick for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with that. I try to hold onto that possibility, turning it over like a smooth stone, something to keep my hands busy while the rest of me spins, cycling through every innocent explanation I can think of and finding each one less convincing than the last.

But some part of me already knows. I’ve felt off in small ways the last week that I chalked up to stress, exhaustion, the strange life I’ve been living in this house. A wave of nausea here, a stretch of fatigue there, nothing dramatic enough to flag on its own.