Chapter 20 #3
I believed her. Nancy had fought for me from day one—had seen something in my application that made her override whatever reservations the front office had about hiring a nurse with a gap in his employment history and a restraining order in his recent past. She'd given me a chance when no one else would, and the thought that my presence was now creating problems for her made the guilt in my stomach curdle into something darker.
Me: I understand. I'll make sure Patel has everything he needs. The text from Nancy sat on my screen for a long time before I locked the phone and slid it into my pocket.
The building was emptying. I could hear it—the gradual draining of energy that happened before every road trip, the particular rhythm of departure.
Bags zipped. Doors closed. Voices fading down hallways toward the loading bay where the bus would be waiting for the equipment, engine idling, ready to carry it to the airport and then to five cities in nine days without me.
I finished the last of the baseline testing for the development squad—three kids who barely needed to shave, all of them healthy enough to make my job feel ceremonial—and locked the medical room.
The hallway was nearly empty. A custodian pushed a mop in slow arcs near the equipment bay.
Someone's phone rang distantly and went to voicemail.
I should go home.
Not to Taz's apartment. To mine.
The thought formed with a precision that surprised me—clean-edged, decisive, the kind of clinical determination I usually reserved for treatment plans.
I would go to my apartment. I would sleep in my own bed.
I would give Taz the space he was clearly trying to create without making either of us say the words out loud.
I knew the locks had been changed. Taz wouldn’t know about Gavin appearing this morning.
Security guards only passed information up their chain.
Taz wouldn’t know. Nancy wouldn’t know. For a brief moment I wondered if I should call Ignatius, but I’d caused him enough trouble already.
I pulled out my phone and texted Taz before I could lose my nerve.
Me: Hey. I'm going to head to my place tonight. You've got an early morning and you need real sleep before the flight.
The dots appeared almost immediately. Then nothing. Then appeared again.
Taz: You sure?
Two words. Not come over anyway. Not I want you here. Not I sleep better with you. Just—you sure?—delivered with the careful neutrality of a man confirming a schedule change. And not the fear that someone had been in my apartment and was the original reason I’d been at Taz’s.
Me: Yeah. You need rest. I'd just keep you up.
I meant it as a joke. The kind of thing that, a week ago, would have earned me a response that made my ears burn—something dry and understated that carried the weight of everything he couldn't say directly, some quiet acknowledgment that keeping each other up was exactly the point.
Taz: Ok. Get some sleep yourself.
I stared at the screen. Waited. For what, I wasn't sure—a follow-up, a contradiction, some crack in the careful facade that would let me see the man underneath. The man who'd pressed his cold mouth to the knob of my spine and whispered I'm counting now.
Nothing came. And it hurt. It hurt so fucking much.
I pocketed the phone, grabbed my jacket from the hook by the door, and walked out of the arena into the March air. It hit me like a slap—cold and dry and carrying the faint metallic tang of coming snow. Denver cold. Not Taz dragon cold. The kind that didn't care about you one way or the other.
The drive to my apartment took twelve minutes.
I spent every one of them not thinking, which was its own kind of performance—forcing my brain into the neutral gear it used during trauma codes, when the only way to survive was to narrow the world to the next task and the next and the next.
Red light. Green light. Turn signal. Parking brake.
My apartment was exactly as I'd left it days ago, which meant it was clean and impersonal and smelled faintly of the lavender diffuser I'd bought in a fit of optimism after reading an article about self-care for healthcare workers. The diffuser was empty. The optimism had been, too, apparently. The shiny new lock only I had the keys to because I hadn’t given one to the landlord yet.
I would probably get into trouble for changing the lock, but I had more things to worry about than that.
I dropped my bag by the door. Hung my jacket on the hook. Stood in the entryway of my own home and felt the silence press against me from every direction.
Taz's apartment had silence too, but his was populated—filled with the ticking of the radiator, the settling of old bookshelves, the particular quality of stillness that belonged to a space someone had lived in long enough to imprint themselves on.
My silence was just empty. The silence of a place I slept in but had never quite managed to inhabit.
I made tea because my hands needed something to do. Stood at the counter while the kettle heated and stared at the backsplash tile and waited for the tears to come.
They didn't. Not yet. The clinical part of my brain was still running interference, cataloging observations instead of processing them, converting heartbreak into data points the way it had been trained to do.
Observation: subject withdrew physical contact. Observation: verbal communication reduced to functional exchanges. Observation: subject did not contest separation when given the opportunity.
The kettle clicked off. I poured water over the tea bag and watched the color bloom—amber, then brown, then dark enough to be opaque.
I wrapped both hands around the mug and let the heat bite into my palms the way Taz's cold used to, except this didn't feel like coming home. This just felt like burning.
He hadn't fought for me.
The thought surfaced like something rising from deep water—slow, inexorable, impossible to push back under.
I'd handed him the exit. I'd offered the excuse—you need rest, early morning, I'd just keep you up—and I'd done it deliberately, the way you ran a diagnostic test. Not because I wanted to leave, but because I needed to know what he'd do when given the chance to keep me.
And he'd let me go.
Ok. Get some sleep yourself.
I set the mug down because my hands were shaking too hard to hold it, and pressed my palms flat against the counter the way I'd done in the medical room, and this time the tears came.
Not the clean, cathartic kind. The ugly kind—the ones that came from somewhere structural, somewhere load-bearing, the kind that felt less like crying and more like something foundational giving way.
I pressed my face into the crook of my elbow and sobbed—raw, heaving sounds that I couldn't control and didn't try to, because there was no one here to perform composure for. No patients. No teammates. No Taz.
Just me, and the lavender diffuser that didn't work, and the tea going cold on the counter, and the knowledge that I had finally found someone who made the silence feel like shelter instead of solitary confinement, and I was losing him to the same thing that had defined my entire life: being too much trouble to keep close. Mom and Dad hadn’t wanted me.
Gavin only wanted someone he could control and use.
The hospital hadn’t been able to get rid of me fast enough, and now it was happening again.
I slid down the cabinet until I was sitting on the kitchen floor, knees drawn up, back against the dishwasher.
The linoleum was cold beneath me—not Taz cold, not the living, breathing cold that recognized me and bent around me like a current—just floor cold.
Indifferent cold. The kind that didn't care if I sat here all night.
I cried until my ribs ached and my throat felt stripped. Until the tears ran out and left behind a hollowness so vast I could feel it echoing, like tapping on a wall and realizing the room behind it was empty.
He was letting me go. And the worst part—the part that made me want to scream into the empty apartment until the neighbors called someone—was that I understood why.
I understood it the way I understood triage: sometimes you couldn't save everyone.
Sometimes the math demanded sacrifice. And in this equation, I was the one that had to be let go.
The next day was miserable. I’d texted him once to wish him luck, and he’d replied with a thanks.
That was it. I knew they had a travel day, and I honestly expected a call that evening, and when it didn’t come, I knew it was over.
Whatever I’d been telling myself. Whatever excuses I’d given.
Not calling me when I knew he didn’t have a game was the reason I spent a second evening sitting on my kitchen floor.
Eventually I made myself get up, just as my phone buzzed against my thigh where I'd shoved it into my pocket.
I yanked my phone out so quickly I nearly dropped it.
But it wasn't Taz.
My phone’s screen glowed: Ignatius. My stomach twisted into knots. He never called unless the world had cracked open. I wiped my clammy palm on my jeans and answered.
“Cinder? Are you there?”
I forced out a breath. “Yes.”
Silence stretched, each second measured.
“This had nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with Taranis. Nothing to do with anyone connected to the Dragons or the Council,” Ignatius hissed, the suppressed anger in his voice more terrifying than any blade.
“I told you I would handle Gavin—through legal and financial pressure that drives a man away, not this.”
“Not what?” I whispered in confusion.
“His neighbor called emergency services around eight-thirty. Paramedics pronounced him at the scene. The police are treating it as an apparent suicide, pending toxicology and a full investigation.”
“An investigation of what?” I asked, my brain struggling to navigate through the slush of emotions and words.
Ignatius sighed. I could hear it. “I’m sorry, but Gavin is dead.”