Chapter 43
Bliss
Hospitals had a sound.
Not one sound. A hundred of them layered together until they became their own kind of weather.
Wheels whispering over polished floors. Monitors chiming through half-open doors.
Voices lowered by fear. Rubber soles moving fast, then faster.
Distant intercom announcements that meant nothing to most people and everything to someone waiting for the wrong doctor to walk through the wrong door with the wrong look on their face.
I had never understood how cold waiting rooms were until I sat in one with Cade’s blood somewhere in the building and no part of my body capable of getting warm.
The ICU family room was small enough that everyone’s grief had to overlap.
My dad sat beside me with one arm around my shoulders and one hand wrapped around mine so tightly it should’ve hurt, but pain belonged to some other version of me now.
The one who had ribs and bruises and a body that still understood where it ended and the rest of the world began.
This version of me had gone somewhere else.
Somewhere thin and bright and terrible, where every breath felt like something I was borrowing from Cade.
Ryker stood near the door because sitting had become impossible for him sometime around the first hour.
Knox kept stepping in and out with his phone pressed to his ear, switching between brother, detective, and the only person in the room still capable of understanding what the police were telling us.
Lyon and Emmitt sat shoulder to shoulder against the far wall, silent in a way Bennett men almost never were, while Kellen stayed bent forward with both elbows on his knees and his hands clasped behind his neck like if he let go, something inside him might come apart.
Aura sat on one side of me. Charm sat on the other.
They had not let go of me since we got to County.
Sometimes their hands shifted. Sometimes Aura rubbed circles over my wrist. Sometimes Charm pressed a tissue into my palm even though I didn’t remember asking for one.
But they stayed tucked against me like if they moved too far away, I might disappear into the thin, bright hospital air.
Briggs, Rider, Easton, Coach Little, and half the Fury were somewhere near the opposite wall and bleeding out into the hallway because the room was too small for a hockey team and this much fear.
I knew they were there. I knew Briggs looked destroyed.
I knew Easton hadn’t spoken in almost an hour.
I knew Rider’s jaw was probably locked so tight his teeth hurt.
But knowing did not mean I could hold any of them clearly in my head.
All I could hold was Cade.
Cade was in surgery.
That was the fact my brain kept circling because everything after it felt too big to understand.
He had been stabbed twice. One wound had collapsed his lung, and the other had gone deep enough into his abdomen that Knox’s face had gone pale when he tried explaining what the doctors were saying.
There was internal bleeding. Too much blood.
Too little time. They had flown him here because an ambulance on regular roads had not been fast enough for whatever was happening inside Cade’s body.
Those were the facts Knox had given us in pieces, and every piece landed inside me like it belonged to someone else’s life. They were words I understood separately, but together they became a language my body refused to translate.
Collapsed lung.
Internal bleeding.
Critical.
Surgery.
Ventilator, maybe.
Trauma team.
I kept waiting for someone to admit they were wrong.
That this was another Cade overreaction.
That he would come through the doors irritated, pale, and dramatic about someone ruining his suit.
That he would look at me with that exhausted, arrogant face and say, “Pip,” like my panic was personally inconveniencing him.
Because Cade Mercer was not supposed to be critical in anything other than critically wrecking every boundary I had put in place before him.
Cade Mercer was supposed to be arrogant and impossible and leaning against a counter somewhere with that stupid mouth of his, calling me Pip like I was both his favorite problem and his entire religion.
He was supposed to be outside the arena with damp hair, tired eyes, and a smug grin because he had scored twice and kissed me through glass like a menace with zero respect for my nervous system.
He was supposed to be making my brothers hate him for being too pretty and my dad hate him for being too easy to like.
He was not supposed to be open on an operating table while strangers tried to put his body back together and keep his heart beating.
I cried without making noise.
That was the part that felt strangest. Tears kept falling down my face, steady and warm and endless, but the rest of me had gone quiet. No sobbing. No screaming. No big dramatic collapse. Just tears. Just my chest splitting open in a way no one could see unless they looked too closely.
I would’ve thought this was a bad dream if the screaming in my own ribs wasn’t the only thing keeping me awake.
The door opened.
Ryan walked in covered in Cade’s blood.
For one second, the whole room stopped breathing.
He stood just inside the doorway like he hadn’t meant to come in. Like his body had carried him there because he knew where we were, but his brain had not caught up to the fact that walking into a room full of people who loved Cade while wearing that much of him would detonate all of us.
His white dress shirt was ruined. His sleeves were dark to the elbows. Blood had dried in uneven streaks across his forearms and beneath his fingernails. There was a smear of it near his jaw, like he had dragged his hand over his face and forgotten what was on it.
Cade’s blood.
On Ryan’s hands.
On Ryan’s shirt.
Under Ryan’s nails.
The room tilted so hard I thought I might fall through it. His eyes found mine, and whatever was left of him broke open.
“Bliss,” he said, in a way that barely sounded like my name.
I stood without meaning to. My body reacted before my mind decided what to do with the sight of him, before I could stop myself from moving toward the blood like maybe Cade was somehow still inside it.
Aura grabbed my hand, and Charm whispered something beside me that might have been my name, might have been a prayer, might have been nothing at all, because the room had narrowed to Ryan’s ruined shirt, his shaking mouth, and the horror in his eyes.
“He told me to tell you he loves you,” Ryan said, voice breaking. “But I refused to hear it.”
The words did something worse than hurt. They rearranged me.
Cade had tried to leave me a message. Cade, bleeding on concrete, barely breathing, had tried to make sure I knew. And Ryan had refused to let those be his last words.
A sound pushed up my throat, but it got trapped behind the part of me that understood if I started screaming now, I might never stop.
Knox moved instantly, crossing the room in three strides. Not harsh. Not cruel. Just fast. He put one hand on Ryan’s shoulder and turned him away from me before Ryan could say anything else, before I could see anything else on him, before any more of Cade’s blood could become real in my head.
“Come on,” Knox said quietly.
Ryan shook his head once, eyes still locked on me. “I didn’t leave him.”
“I know,” Knox said.
“I didn’t leave him.”
“I know.”
Ryan’s face crumpled so quickly he looked younger than all of them. Younger than a future professional athlete. Younger than a college senior. Younger than the boy everyone said had fought his way out of a life that had tried to swallow him before he got a chance to become anything else.
Knox’s grip tightened on his shoulder. “Come with me.”
Ryan let Knox guide him out of the room, and when the door closed behind them, my legs stopped pretending they knew how to hold me.
I sat down hard.
Dad pulled me into his side, and I turned my face into his chest the way I had when I was little and nightmares still meant monsters under the bed instead of monsters at family barbecues.
His hand cupped the back of my head, and for a moment, he held me too tightly, like there was something inside him that wanted to crush all the broken pieces of the night back into shape through force alone.
“Breathe, Bug,” he whispered.
I tried.
Nothing worked right.
Not my lungs. Not my heart. Not my hands.
“He was breathing, right, Daddy?” I asked for the hundredth time.
Dad’s voice broke. “Yeah, baby.”
“He was breathing when they took him.”
“Yeah.”
That became the only sentence I could survive.
He was breathing.
The first surgery lasted forever. It could have been twenty minutes or four years. Time had stopped behaving normally somewhere between Life Flight landing on the football field and a nurse taking us into the ICU waiting area with soft eyes and a clipboard she kept holding too close to her chest.
A trauma surgeon came out once, not to update us exactly, but to tell us Cade was still in surgery and they were working on the chest injury first because his lung had collapsed and he had lost too much blood.
They had placed a chest tube. They were trying to get him stable enough to deal with the abdominal injury fully.
His abdomen.
That word kept coming up.
Abdominal trauma. Internal bleeding. Possible damage to something they needed to repair before infection or blood loss took another swing at him.
I hated every word.
I hated that his body had suddenly become something he couldn’t rely on anymore.
Cade’s body had been power. Heat. Control.
The solid wall behind me in bed. The arms that carried me when my ribs hurt.
The hands that held mine like letting go was not an option.
The chest I pressed my face into when the world got too loud.
My Cade was not a medical report.