CYAN

I have spent a significant portion of my life carefully curating how I am perceived.

I am a creature of aesthetics, of high-gloss finishes and sharp, witty deflections.

But blood is not aesthetic. It is a messy, visceral truth that refuses to be ignored, and right now, that truth was soaking into the expensive fabric of my shirt, turning it heavy and damp against my skin.

The moment It became real wasn’t on the dock. It wasn’t even when I watched those three shots slam into Cassian’s frame. It was now.

It was the heat. .

Cassian was slumped against me in the back of the car, and the warmth of him, his actual life force, was leaking out of him and into me.

It was too warm. There was too much of it. There is a specific horror in feeling someone else’s blood saturate your clothes; it’s an intimate, invasive theft.

My hands were moving before I could give them permission. I wasn’t thinking; I was just reacting. I grabbed the hem of his shirt and tore.

The fabric gave way with a violent, jagged sound, revealing the damage beneath. I found the first wound, jagged, angry, and I pressed down. Hard.

Then the next. My palms were slick, and I had to adjust my grip as the vehicle swerved through a corner.

First aid lessons from a lifetime ago surfaced through the fog of my panic. My body knew the rhythm: apply pressure, hold, don’t let go. Even as my mind was beginning to fracture at the edges, my fingers remained steady.

"Stay with me," I said. My voice sounded strange to my own ears, stripped of its usual melodic lilt, raw and demanding. "Eyes open, Cassian. I need you to look at me. Look at me right now."

He was breathing, but it was a shallow, hitched thing. Every few seconds, his eyelids would flutter, a ghost of a look passing over his face before the darkness tried to claim him again. Every time they closed, I raised my voice.

"Cassian! CASSIAN!"

I wouldn’t let him go. I couldn’t. I was the only thing keeping the anchor from slipping into the deep.

By the time we hit the emergency bay, the world had become a blur of sirens and shouting.

Charles’s men had swarmed the dock, and now they were swarming the hospital. Hands much more practiced than mine reached into the vehicle, taking over the pressure, lifting him onto a stretcher with a clinical speed that made my chest ache.

I didn’t move back. I couldn’t. I stayed in the pocket of space right beside him until they literally pushed me out of the way.

"He needs surgery," I snapped at a medic who was checking a pulse. "Multiple wounds. He’s been bleeding for... I don’t know how long. You need to move faster. Why are you standing there? Move!"

They moved. I followed the stretcher through the sliding glass doors, my hand still resting on Cassian’s arm. It was the only thing I had left, the physical connection. I’m here. I’m still here. You’re not alone.

In the vehicle, I hadn’t stopped talking. I realized now that I was still doing it. I had spent the entire drive prattling on about absolute nonsense.

I’d talked about the new interior design for the salon, the layout of the spring catalog, the look of pure, unadulterated shock on Noah’s face when he’d first seen the poster wall.

I’d talked about everything and nothing. Because silence was the enemy. Silence meant Cassian had stopped listening, and if he stopped listening, he might stop breathing.

And then there were the voices. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

They started low, humming at the base of my skull. They’re old friends, those voices.

They’ve been there since before I even had a name for the feeling of the world being too loud and too bright. They get louder when things break. They were getting louder now, screaming for my attention.

I pressed them down. Not now. Not here. Later. I will fall apart later. I will shatter into a thousand pieces once he’s safe. But not now.

The emergency bay was a chaotic symphony of overlapping voices. The medical team was already there, a blur of white coats and blue scrubs.

They transferred him from the stretcher to a gurney with a synchronized efficiency that felt both reassuring and terrifying.

"Oxygen! Get the monitors on! I need a line, now! Someone get Dr. Bennett!"

I followed them down the corridor, my boots clicking rhythmically on the linoleum. I watched as they began to work around him.

Someone took a pair of trauma shears and cut the rest of his shirt away, and then I saw them. Under the harsh, unforgiving fluorescent lights of the hospital, I saw the wounds properly for the first time.

The count. The locations. The way the skin looked.

I have seen violence. I have participated in it. I have lived my life in the shadow of men like Charles Wolfe, and I have never once flinched.

But I flinched now. My stomach dropped through the floor, and a wave of specific, cold nausea washed over me. It is one thing to see damage; it is another entirely to see it on a body that matters. On the only body that matters.

I tried to keep up, but a nurse stepped into my path. She put a firm hand on my chest.

"You can’t go any further, sir," she said. Her voice wasn’t unkind, but it was immovable.

"I have to—"

"You can’t. We need space to work. Please."

I looked past her, at the double doors swinging shut, at the swarm of people hovering over him. I watched the red emergency light pulse once, twice, and then I was alone in the hall.

My back hit the wall. I didn’t mean for it to, but the strength had simply left my legs. I slid down the smooth, sterile surface until the floor arrived to meet me.

I sat there, pulled my knees to my chest, and leaned my head back against the wall. The hospital continued to move around me, indifferent, busy, smelling of antiseptic and old coffee.

Hospitals are the only places in the world that don’t care who you are or who you’re losing.

I looked down at my hands. The cut on my palm, the one I’d used to ground myself on the dock, had already dried into a dark, thin line. The blood there was mine.

Everything else? Everything else was Cassian.

It was on my shirt. It was under my fingernails. It was smeared across my forearms. It had gone cold and crusty, losing the heat that had terrified me in the car, but it was still there. I was wearing his life like a second skin.

The fracturing started at the edges. My mind began to do what it always does when I’ve been holding on too tight for too long. The voices were no longer low.

They were no longer manageable. They were speaking in that specific, biting language they only use when I am alone and afraid. They told me things I knew better than to believe, but in the hollow silence of a hospital corridor at night, I believed them anyway.

"He’s fine," I whispered. I said it once, a small pebble against a landslide. "Cassian is fine."

I said it again. "He’s alive. He’s alive. He can’t die."

A promise surfaced then. It was an old one, made years ago in a context that seemed almost ridiculous now. Cassian had said it without ceremony, the way he says everything he truly means.

If I go, you go with me. "You promised," I muttered to the empty air. I pressed my cut palm against the cold floor, the sharp sting of the pressure acting as a temporary anchor.

"You said... you can’t go by yourself. That wasn’t what we agreed on. You have to take me with you. That was the deal, Cassian."

My voice dropped to a jagged whisper. "That was the deal."

I heard him before I saw him. There is a specific quality to the way authority moves through a space. People adjusted their paths, nurses looked up, and the air seemed to grow heavier.

Charles Wolfe appeared at the end of the hall. He wore his composure like a suit of armor, immaculate, cold, and impenetrable. But I read him immediately. I read the slight tension in his jaw and the way his eyes weren’t quite as still as they usually were.

He saw me on the floor. He saw the blood. He saw the cut hand and the state of my hair, which I’m sure was a disaster. Something crossed his face, a brief, real flash of something that might have been pity, or perhaps just recognition.

He didn’t comment on the fact that I was sitting on the linoleum like a broken toy. Instead, he did something I never thought I’d see Charles Wolfe do: he sat down beside me. He leaned his back against the wall, his long legs stretching out into the corridor, and we just sat there together in the dirt.

A doctor appeared a few minutes later. He spoke to Charles in low, professional tones, but I processed every word. Surgery was required. Multiple wounds. The blood loss was significant. But he was stable enough to operate. They were taking him in now.

Charles asked the right questions. He was a man who had managed a thousand crises, and he treated this like any other tactical problem, even if the problem was his own son. The doctor gave his answers and vanished back behind the double doors.

Silence settled between us. It was a heavy, expectant silence.