Chapter 42 #3
“They’re working him now,” Knox said, and I could tell by his face he hated every word.
Hated himself for saying them. Hated that he had to make us understand fast when I wanted him to lie, to soften it, to say Cade was conscious and pissed off and calling everyone incompetent.
“Ryan said he’s barely breathing and one of his stab wounds is the chest, Bliss.
They’re flying him because it’s faster and because they need a trauma team ready. ”
Barely breathing became Cade’s mouth against mine turning blue in my imagination before I could stop it.
Two wounds became my hands pressing uselessly over blood I had not seen.
Trauma team became strangers cutting away his suit, his jersey, his pads, whatever he had been wearing when Luke found him.
It became machines and shouted orders and Ryan’s hands shaking while Cade tried to ask for me.
It became a helicopter lifting him away before I could touch his face and tell him he had to stay because he had promised me without ever saying the words.
He had promised me in every way that mattered.
Every word carved a picture into my head I could not survive seeing.
Cade alone in some ugly hallway while the whole arena screamed his name for goals he had scored for me, while I stood outside laughing with his jersey stretched across my chest, waiting like time was something guaranteed to girls who had already lost too much.
I thought of his mouth against the glass. His glove pressed to my hand. The way he looked at me like I was the only person in the whole arena. I had smiled at him like we had forever. I had let him skate away.
And now my brain kept circling back to that moment with the cruelty of a blade, making me watch it over and over.
His hand against the glass. My hand opposite his.
His mouth meeting mine through something clear and breakable.
The crowd screaming around us while I thought the worst thing that could happen was my brothers teasing me later.
I had been happy while he was walking toward blood and a sound came out of me that didn’t feel human.
Dad pulled me closer, but I fought him because my body did not understand comfort anymore.
Comfort was Cade. Safety was Cade. Air was Cade, and he was somewhere inside the arena being packed into a helicopter because roads were too slow and breathing had become optional and no one would let me run to him.
“I need to go,” I choked out, trying to push myself upright.
“You are,” Knox said.
“To him.”
“To the hospital. That’s where he’s going.”
“I need to see him before they take him.”
“You can’t.”
“I can’t let him leave without me!”
That sentence broke open something so deep in me that for a second, I couldn’t see anything but my mother’s funeral.
The horrible stillness. The finality. The way people kept saying things like she knows you loved her and she wouldn’t want you to hurt, as if love had ever stopped grief from splitting a person down the middle.
I remembered being fourteen and learning that sometimes the world took someone before you were done needing them.
I was not done needing Cade. I had barely started letting myself need him.
I had just let myself believe I could have him.
I had just let myself wake up in his bed and laugh in his kitchen and wear his name without flinching.
I had just heard him say he fell in love with me like it was the easiest truth in his body.
I had just started to understand that maybe love did not have to feel like fear, and now the universe had answered with helicopter blades.
My body folded around that thought.
Ryker caught me before I hit the asphalt, lowering with me while Dad dropped in front of us, one hand at the back of my head, the other gripping my shoulder.
“Please,” I sobbed into Dad’s hoodie. “Please take me to him. Please. Please, I’ll be good. I’ll listen. I won’t fight. Just take me to him.”
He made a broken sound against my hair. “I am. Bug, I am. I’m taking you to him.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“You promise he’s alive?”
The silence afterward ruined me. Dad didn’t answer fast enough. None of them did. I pulled back, and the look on his face told me everything he couldn’t.
“I can’t promise that,” he said, voice destroyed. “But I can promise we are going to him right now.”
Something inside me folded around those words and went cold. The arena doors opened behind us, and Cade’s guys came out.
I knew they were there because the air shifted, because Aura’s hand left my back, because someone said Easton’s name like it was a warning or a prayer.
But they were blurry around the edges. Easton’s rage.
Rider’s locked jaw. Briggs’s voice cracking when he asked if Cade was alive.
Coach Little appearing and giving orders.
Fury players spilling into the parking lot in suits and half-buttoned shirts, some still carrying duffles, some with wet hair, all of them changing the second Cade’s name reached them.
Because Cade was not walking out with them. That was the only thing my brain could hold. The night broke open with the sound of helicopter blades.
Faint at first, somewhere beyond the arena, a distant chop cutting through the postgame chaos. The sound grew louder until it filled the entire sky, until every voice bent beneath it, until the cold air itself seemed to pulse with the truth I did not want to know.
Life Flight was landing on the football field.
For my Cade.
The man who had told me he loved me like it was the easiest thing he’d ever done. The man who somehow ended up bleeding out in the building behind me. The man I hadn’t kissed after the game because I thought I had time.
I thought I had time.
That thought hollowed me out so completely I stopped fighting. Not because I was oka but because there was nothing left in me strong enough to fight with.
Dad helped me into Emmitt’s truck like I was little again, like I was his Bug with scraped knees instead of a grown woman wearing the jersey of a man who might be dying because he loved me enough to stand between me and the monster.
Ryker climbed in on one side of me, Dad on the other, and I sat between them with my hands pressed to the MERCER across my chest because it was the closest thing to Cade I had.
His name under my fingers, his number against my ribs. The proof that ten minutes ago I had belonged to a future where he was supposed to meet me outside.
Aura and Charm did not climb in with me this time.
They followed because my girls would follow me into fire, but this moment belonged to the people who had loved me before I knew love could turn dangerous.
Dad held me against his side. Ryker kept one hand locked around mine.
Knox appeared outside my window before we pulled away, his palm pressed to the glass, his face pale and hard and ruined.
I looked at him through the window.
Emmitt threw the truck into drive, and we tore out of the parking lot toward County with my family around me, Aura and Charm somewhere behind us, and the Fury following like a war party no one had trained for.
The helicopter blades faded behind us. Or maybe they stayed in my head. I couldn’t tell anymore. I pressed one shaking hand harder to Cade’s name across my chest and tried to breathe around the one truth I refused to let go of.
Cade is alive and until someone told me otherwise, that was the only thing I was willing to believe.