Chapter 8 #2
Ten minutes could be a lifetime in trauma. Ten minutes could be too late. Ten minutes could be the difference between a man waking up angry and a man becoming a phone call no one wanted to make.
Because I was surgical, because I had trained for this, because I knew the team and the procedures and the brutal rhythm of cutting time away from death, I went up with them.
No one asked if I could handle it.
Maybe they should have.
Maybe they saw my face and decided not to.
Maybe Albuquerque General had seen enough staff treat their own that it no longer believed in clean boundaries.
Or maybe fate had a cruel sense of symmetry and wanted me in that room.
Scrub.
Mask.
Gloves.
Gown.
The transformation was ritual.
Destiny came apart in pieces and Nurse Rourke took her place.
Hair covered.
Hands sterile.
Eyes clear.
Heart locked behind bone.
The OR lights were bright enough to erase mercy.
Dylan lay beneath them, draped and prepped, too still for a man who had once filled every room like trouble with a pulse. Machines breathed and beeped and monitored. Blood products moved. Instruments passed. Voices stayed clipped.
Precise.
Cold.
Necessary.
I assisted where I was needed. Anticipated. Passed. Counted. Held. Moved. Watched. Did not think of his mouth on mine at a grave. Did not think of Cabo. Did not think of him calling me Beautiful under palm leaves. Did not think of him walking away in Santa Monica.
Did not.
Did not.
Did not.
Except the human mind was a traitor, and mine had always loved knives.
I thought of everything.
His hands washing red paint off mine.
His face when Nate shaved his beard in Cabo and he looked younger, sharper, almost too beautiful to be real.
His voice saying, You’ve got blank pages.
His eyes in Santa Monica when he admitted he knew about Cupcake and matcha and my Dean’s List.
His back as he walked away.
Again.
“Pressure’s dropping.”
The surgeon’s voice cut through the memories.
I snapped fully back.
The monitor changed tone.
Not enough.
Too much.
The room tightened.
“Come on,” someone muttered.
Blood moved faster.
Hands moved faster.
The body on the table did not care how much I loved it.
That was the horrible truth of medicine.
Love did not clot blood.
Love did not repair tissue.
Love did not restart a heart.
But love could make a woman refuse to blink.
“Losing pulse.”
No.
“Start compressions.”
No.
“Dylan,” I whispered before I could stop myself.
The line went wrong.
Flat.
For one second, I was seventeen again and the world was burning.
Then something inside me went hard.
Not cold.
Hard.
Mandy was in me.
Regan was in me.
One mother blood and bone, wild and tragic and impossible to bury. One mother will and steel, the woman who had taught me that love could survive shame, rage, bad choices, and men who did not know how to come home.
Both of them forces of nature.
Both of them loud in my blood.
No.
Not him.
Not like this.
The surgeon called orders. The team moved. Compressions. Medication. Time called. A nurse counted. Someone adjusted lines. The room became a machine built around one command.
Bring him back.
I held my place.
I did my job.
I did not cry.
I did not beg.
Not out loud.
Inside, I made promises to every god, ghost, mother, desert, and saint that had ever watched over foolish girls and dangerous men.
Then the monitor changed.
A rhythm.
Weak.
But there.
“Got him.”
Air left the room in one collective breath.
I looked down at Dylan’s face above the drape, pale beneath the tube, lashes dark against skin that had no business being that color.
“You don’t get to leave,” I whispered.
No one heard me.
Or if they did, they were kind enough to pretend they hadn’t.
The surgery lasted three hours.
Three hours of blood, repair, pressure, counting, adjusting, fighting the body’s stubborn desire to surrender. Three hours in which I became nothing but hands and eyes and a voice that answered when spoken to.
By the time they were done, my legs felt hollow.
The surgeon stepped back, his gown marked with the battle.
“He’s alive,” he said.
Alive.
One word.
A whole universe.
“But he’s critical. Next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are everything. Fifty-fifty if complications hit. ICU now.”
Fifty-fifty.
People thought medicine gave clean answers.
It didn’t.
Sometimes it gave a coin toss and asked you to be grateful the coin was still in the air.
I nodded because I was staff.
Because I knew how to receive ugly information without making it harder for the person giving it.
Because if I opened my mouth, I might make a sound that belonged to the girl at the grave, not the woman in the OR.
They moved him to ICU.
I went with him as far as I could.
Then there were lines I could not cross. Tasks that belonged to other hands. Policies. Handoffs. The machinery of care moving him away from the surgery that saved him and into the fragile hours that would decide whether it had been enough.
Nate made it too.
Lily found me in the corridor after Nate’s update came down.
She looked wrecked.
So did I.
“Chest and shoulder,” she said. “Bad, but not Dylan bad. They repaired what they needed to, chest tube is in, pressure is responding. ICU too. He’s going to be furious about the hospital gown.”
A laugh broke out of me.
It sounded wrong.
Half sob. Half relief. Half hysteria, which was too many halves, but that was how the night felt.
“Nate’s going to make it?” I asked.
Lily nodded. “If he doesn’t annoy death into changing its mind, yes.”
I closed my eyes.
Thank God.
Then I opened them and remembered Dylan.
Fifty-fifty.
Critical.
Twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
Beautiful, is that you?
My body started shaking.
Not much.
Enough that Lily noticed.
“Go take a minute,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I need to check?—”
“No.” Her voice sharpened. “You need to take your mask off before you pass out in a hallway and make me drag you by your scrub pants.”
“I’m fine.”
“If you say that one more time, I’m calling Regan.”
That shut me up.
Lily knew exactly where to aim.
I went to the locker room.
Took off my cap.
My mask.
My gown.
Scrubbed my hands until they burned.
There was no blood on them anymore.
That did not matter.
I still felt it.
I changed into clean scrubs because the ones I had been wearing felt like they belonged to the worst version of the night. I pulled my hair loose, then tied it back again. Checked my ears in the mirror.
Mandy’s diamonds still there.
Tiny sparks of impossible light.
I touched one with a fingertip.
Then the other.
“I didn’t let him die,” I whispered to no one.
My reflection stared back.
Pale.
Older.
Not healed.
Never that simple.
But standing.
I thought I was ready to face the waiting area.
I expected MC men.
Callum. Rafe. A few San Diego brothers trying not to look like exactly what they were under hospital lights.
Maybe men from Santa Fe too, depending how fast the phones had moved.
I expected cuts hidden under jackets, boots planted wide, voices kept low because cops loved gunshot wounds and bikers in the same room.
I braced for that.
I did not brace for her.
She stood near the family waiting area with a Styrofoam coffee cup untouched in both hands.
Blonde.
Pretty.
Soft in a way that looked natural, not weak.
Her eyes were red, her cardigan buttoned wrong, like she had dressed in a panic and not noticed. A woman stood beside her, older, one hand on her back. Mother, probably. There were club men nearby, but their attention orbited her in a way that made my steps slow.
She looked up when I walked in.
For one strange second, I thought I had seen her before.
Then I realized I had.
In my imagination.
In every faceless version of the woman Dylan might choose because she was clean and bright and did not come with a graveyard behind her.
Georgia.
I knew before anyone said it.
But then she stepped toward me, hope and terror trembling across her face.
“You were in surgery?” she asked.
My throat tightened.
“Yes.”
Her eyes filled immediately. “Dylan. How is he?”
The sound of his name in her mouth landed wrong.
Not wrong because she didn’t have the right.
Wrong because she did.
“He’s alive,” I said.
Her knees nearly buckled.
The older woman caught her.
Georgia made a broken sound and covered her mouth.
Alive.
I understood what that word did to a person.
I had been surviving on it for ten minutes.
“He’s critical,” I continued because kindness without truth was just another lie. “The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours matter. He lost a lot of blood. He arrested once in surgery, but they got him back.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
Tears spilled anyway.
“Can I see him?” she asked.
“As soon as ICU clears immediate family visits.”
“I’m his fiancée,” she said.
The air left my lungs.
Not dramatically.
Not in a gasp anyone would notice.
It simply vanished.
Her left hand shifted on the coffee cup.
That was when I saw it.
The ring.
A diamond catching fluorescent hospital light.
Not huge.
Not flashy.
Beautiful in a normal, warm, chosen kind of way.
The kind of ring a man bought when he wanted a life without ghosts.
The kind of ring a woman wore when she believed she had been picked.
Fiancée.
Dylan’s fiancée.
For the second time that night, the world dropped out from under me.
The first time had been when they said Dylan Degan.
This was worse.
Because blood I knew how to fight.
This?
There was no pressure to apply. No transfusion to start. No surgeon to call. No protocol for learning the man whose name had lived under your skin for years had placed a ring on another woman’s hand.
Georgia looked at me with wet eyes. “Did he say anything? Before surgery?”
My body went still.
Beautiful.
Is that you?
Destiny.
Stay with me.
The words were mine.
Not because I had any claim to them.
Because he had given them to me bleeding and half-conscious, and I was selfish enough to want to keep them.