Chapter 41 #3
“There you go.” Ryan swallowed once. “Stay pissed at me if you need to, but stay awake.”
“Phone,” I breathed.
“What?”
“Luke… took…”
Ryan’s jaw flexed.
He glanced toward Luke for half a second, and something murderous flashed across his face before discipline shoved it back down.
He looked like he wanted to get up. Like he wanted to check whether Luke was really gone.
Like some brutal, loyal part of him wanted to make sure if I had failed, he would finish it.
But he didn’t move.
He stayed with me.
“I’ll find it,” he said. “Doesn’t matter right now.”
It did matter.
Kind of.
It was the dumbest possible reason to get stabbed. Lost phone. Empty locker. Service hallway. Murderous ex with a knife and the emotional development of a spoiled ten-year-old boy. Briggs was never going to let me live this down.
Assuming I lived.
Important distinction.
“Bliss…”
“She’s safe,” Ryan repeated, and this time his voice cracked on the word before he forced it steady again. “She’s safe, Cap.”
I wanted to believe him.
I did believe him.
But my body didn’t know how to stop trying to get up. Every part of me kept sending the same broken command through muscles that had apparently resigned from duty without notice.
Ryan seemed to feel it because his hand pressed harder against my shoulder. “No. If you move, you’ll make it worse.”
“Need…”
“I know what you need.” His voice broke again, worse this time, sharp enough that his next breath sounded like it hurt him too. “You need to breathe. That’s the whole job right now.”
Breathing felt impossible.
Small.
Shallow.
Ragged.
Each one dragged pain through me so sharp my hands curled uselessly against the floor.
The operator said something I couldn’t follow. Ryan answered. A door banged open somewhere in the distance. Voices rose, still far away but moving closer. Security maybe. Staff. Someone shouting down the hall.
Ryan leaned over me, blocking my view of Luke.
I didn’t want to see him, not because I regretted it, because I didn’t.
Maybe later, if later existed, I would have time for some complicated moral reckoning.
Maybe someone would expect me to lie awake in a hospital bed and stare at the ceiling, horrified by the shape of what I’d done.
Maybe my father would bring lawyers who spoke in bloodless corporate tones about optics and exposure and minimizing damage.
Maybe reporters would say things like promising NHL prospect and fatal altercation and self-defense until my name became something people argued about online while pretending they knew anything about the hallway, the knife, or the girl outside who had spent years terrified of the dead fuck three feet away.
But right now, I felt nothing but relief that whatever came next, even my own funeral, let everyone know I was content knowing he couldn’t fuck with her ever again.
Luke had brought the knife. Luke had stolen my phone. Luke had waited in a corner and stabbed me because I was the obstacle keeping her from him. He had put the world into two columns and forced me to pick.
Him or me.
Or me for her.
I was fine with the outcome.
I would choose her again in every hallway, with every version of myself I had left.
My breath hitched, failed, caught halfway. Pain spread through my chest, heavy and cold now instead of hot. The lights above me haloed strangely, buzzing in long streaks.
Ryan’s hand slapped lightly against my cheek. “Cade.”
I blinked.
“Stay awake.”
“Tired,” I muttered, or tried to.
It came out almost soundless.
“No shit. You played a full game and got stabbed. You can nap after the ambulance.”
That almost pulled a smile out of me.
Almost.
Ryan’s mouth trembled once, fast enough that maybe he thought I didn’t see it. “Don’t make me have to tell her you died, Cap.”
My eyes opened again.
Ryan nodded hard, like I had done something impressive instead of barely managing basic consciousness. “Do not fucking die. Stay with me.” He said it as if the command itself would breathe air for me.
Footsteps pounded closer.
Security burst into the corridor first, voices tangling together when they saw the blood.
Ryan barked something at them to secure the hall, to keep everyone back, to get EMS through the service entrance.
He sounded like someone older than us. Someone who had been waiting his whole life to become useful in the worst possible moment.
One of the security guys swore.
Another voice said, “Is that Dempsey?”
The lights blurred.
The ceiling shifted.
Ryan’s face faded in and out above me, then the corridor wasn’t the corridor anymore.
It was street hockey. It was Luke at the barbecue with that fake smile.
It was Bliss’s voice telling me to read between the lines.
It was her throat, bruised under my fingers when I wanted to kiss every mark he’d left and then rip the world apart for letting him make them.
Ryan looked over his shoulder, getting an eyeful of Luke, then back at me, his face suddenly different. Not just scared but confused. Like the hallway had stopped making sense the minute he looked at his body.
“What happened?” he asked, voice low enough that maybe he didn’t mean for anyone else to hear it. “Cade, what the hell happened?”
I tried to answer. I think my mouth moved, but nothing useful came out.
Ryan’s gaze flicked past me again, toward Luke’s body. “What did you do?”
A broken, useless sound dragged out of my throat. “No.”
That was all my brain could find to explain my why.
Every ignored no that made my girl question her worth.
No.
The word he never learned, the one Pip deserved to keep her safe. The word she needed him to hear. The word I had carved into him because I wanted the world to know he earned that no.
“No,” I rasped.
Ryan’s eyes snapped back to mine. “What?”
I swallowed against blood. “No.”
His brows drew together, and then he looked again, closer this time, and his body went still.
So still.
He saw what I did.
Saw the blood-dark letters cut through the soaked shirt beneath the wound in Luke’s chest.
NO.
His face changed in a way I couldn’t name.
Horror, maybe.
Not at me.
Not exactly.
Something deeper.
Something that understood too much too fast. His eyes flicked to Luke’s face, then back to the word, then back to me.
For one second, Ryan looked like he finally understood what the hallway had really been.
A reckoning.
His throat worked once, then his attention snapped back to me, and whatever he felt about Luke Dempsey dying with NO carved into his chest got locked away behind the part of Ryan that had decided I was not dying too.
“Cade,” he said, voice rough as hell now. “Look at me.”
“No,” I whispered again.
Ryan’s expression broke for half a second. “I know,” he said quietly. “I see it.”
No.
No.
No.
No more.
My eyelids dragged heavy, and Ryan cursed. “Cade. No. Open your eyes.”
I tried, but I couldn’t.
“Open your fucking eyes.”
I dragged them open one last time, and Ryan’s face swam above me, harsh with fear he was trying hard not to show and failing badly now.
Good.
Finally.
I was tired of him being useful and composed. It made dying feel like an inconvenience instead of an emergency.
“Tell Bliss…” I started.
“No.”
I frowned weakly.
No?
I was actively bleeding out, and Ryan Decker had apparently chosen this moment to develop boundaries.
“No,” Ryan snapped. “You don’t get a dramatic message. You can tell her yourself.”
I didn’t have enough air to tell him that was actually very emotionally mature of him. Rude timing, but mature.
The sirens finally reached the building, distant but closing fast, their sound bending through the concrete corridors like something from another world. Red light flickered faintly across the far wall as an exterior door opened somewhere behind Ryan.
My chest tightened again, and this time, the breath didn’t come back right away.
Ryan’s voice dropped low and fierce beside me. “Stay with me, Cade. They’re here. You hear me? They’re here.”
But the hallway tilted sideways, then softened at the edges, and I felt Ryan’s hand still pressing hard against my side, refusing to let go. The last thing I heard before the dark took me was his voice telling someone on the phone that I was still breathing.
And I remember thinking, barely, stupidly, desperately, that my body was failing me.
But I saved the girl.