Chapter 45
Damon
Hospitals are louder than people think.
Not the machines. Not the overhead calls. Not the squeak of rubber soles on waxed floors.
It’s the waiting.
It fills the halls like pressure in a sealed pipe–everyone holding something in, something breaking, something about to rupture if one more second passes without news.
This time it’s the King in the ICU. He lies on the other side of the glass, tubed and monitored, cut open and stitched back together by men who have no idea what will happen to this city if his heart stops beating.
Ever since I carried Arianette out of the tunnel, muddy and soaked in blood–hers, but mostly his–she hasn’t willingly left his side.
She sat by him in the ambulance, hands hovering over him like she could keep him tethered here by sheer will.
There was no fucking way I was letting her out of my sight, not in the yard, not in the ambulance, not when we walked through the emergency room doors and they tried to take the King away.
I thought they were going to have to sedate her, but Graves rushed in, hair disheveled like he just rolled out of bed, and handled it with a look.
They made her shower off the blood and grime and gave her a set of pale blue scrubs that swallow her small frame.
She’s in the room now, curled into the chair beside his bed, her hand wrapped around his forearm where the IV lines thread into him.
Her head rests against the mattress like she’s listening for something under the skin.
Waiting for him to come back.
Graves is with her, sitting stiffly in a chair in the corner, while I’m outside the glass trying to figure out our next moves.
Hunter finds me in that spot, unsure of how much time has passed.
He’s clean, technically. The blood from whatever transpired after he ran into the tunnel washed away.
Clothes changed. But it doesn’t hide what’s underneath.
His face is swollen along the cheekbone.
Lip split. Knuckles abraded and taped. The look in his eyes–caught somewhere between there and here.
“Billy?” I ask quietly.
His gaze lingers on the ICU bed. On the King for a brief second, then on our girl holding onto him. “Taken care of.”
I nod once.
I don’t tell him Liam is down the hall in neuro with a skull fracture courtesy of Killian’s restraint finally snapping. Or that Mateo never made it to a hospital at all, that he’s already on his way to the darkest of places reserved for men who sell out Forsyth.
The kind of prison you enter breathing and leave in pieces.
What’s unspoken is how brN has been infiltrated. Betrayal upon betrayal, and we no longer know who to trust. Worse, we no longer have a leader to guide us forward.
Hunter steps closer to the glass.
The King looks wrong like this. Smaller.
Human. There’s no mask to hide his identity.
No Shadows surrounding him with the force of an army.
No presence fills the air around him. Just a man under blankets, chest rising shallowly beneath leads and tape.
The machines do the work his body isn’t sure it wants to, or can, continue.
Hunter’s jaw tightens. “What happened?”
“Liam got him with the knife in the scuffle. No one realized at first. Blade slipped under the clavicle–front right.” I touch the spot on my body. “Missed the lung by luck and hit the subclavian artery on the way through.”
Hunter’s eyes flick to me. He knows what that means.
It’s fucking bad.
“The surgeons stopped it,” I continue. “For now. He’ll need a vascular repair once he stabilizes. If he stabilizes.”
The silence between us thickens.
Inside, Arianette shifts. Presses her forehead to Maddox’s arm, her lips moving against his skin, words we can’t hear through the glass. Hunter watches like he’s assessing a storm in the distance.
“There’s more,” I say.
He doesn’t look away. “When isn’t there?”
“His mask came off during the fight. Before we got him out.”
That pulls his gaze from the bed to me. “And?”
“Everyone in that tunnel saw his face,” I say.
“Payne and Mercer. Perilini.” Who, now that I think on it, didn’t seem too surprised.
“After we realized how bad it was, Tristian got security to call an ambulance. By the time we got to the surface, the ambulance was there, but so was everyone from the party inside. The man they saw leave the house in the mask came back barefaced. Everyone knows that the man they thought was behind the mask, Clive Kayes? It’s not him.
” Understanding lands in Hunter’s eyes like a dropped blade as I speak.
“The last twenty years have been a charade.”
“They know the King is Maddox,” he repeats, like he’s testing our new reality.
“Yep. And I have no fucking clue what that really means.”
Inside the room, Arianette shifts again. Her shoulders curl tighter around him, like she can hear us from across the barrier.
Hunter watches her for a long moment, raw fingers curling into a fist. “I don’t exactly know what kind of shitstorm is coming from this, but we'd better brace ourselves.” He looks at me and says, “Even though we caught these guys, it’s not over.
Not by a long shot. The girls are still out there, and the ‘Guardian’ will come for Arianette again.
” He swallows, a flash of pain crossing his expression.
“We’ll have to do everything we can to find the person behind it and save those girls. ”
It strikes me that I’m just so fucking tired.
This isn’t what I signed up for when I pledged brN.
Masks upon masks, layers upon layers, unearthing the decay and sorrow and torment that festers beneath this city.
I’m just a fucking kid with a record from the Stacks.
I’m not the kind of man that saves people.
My eyes drift back through the glass to Arianette. She may have showered after the fight, but she carries the signs of the battle she survived. Bruises ghost her throat and there’s dried blood under a broken fingernail. She looks breakable, but we know that she isn’t.
I’ve seen her feral. Seen her crawl out of the ash and bite the world back. Seen her choose us in the dark even though it hurts. The King is the spine of this house but her–
She’s the reason.
I push off the wall. The exhaustion is still there, bone-deep and grinding, but underneath it, something steadier locks into place. I’ll keep going. Through blood, through fallout, through whatever comes next.
For him. For the crown. For what we built.
For her most of all.
I fold my arms. “We’re going to have to close ranks and figure out who is loyal and destroy anyone who isn’t.”
“And once we get the House of Night back in order,” Hunter finally looks at me fully, eyes haunted but certain, “we take on the Guardian.”