Chapter 9
DESTINY
I should have gone home.
That was the responsible thing.
The sane thing.
The thing Nurse Rourke would have told any other person to do after surviving a shift like that.
Go home. Shower. Eat something with protein. Sleep for three hours if sleep would come. Let the ICU team do their job. Let the fiancée sit in the chair. Let the family wait. Let the doctors handle the next terrifying stretch of numbers, tubes, monitors, and prayers dressed up as medical decisions.
I knew all of that.
I even said it to myself while I stood in the staff locker room staring at my reflection.
Go home, Destiny.
My face looked wrong beneath the fluorescent lights.
Too pale. Too sharp. Eyes too dark. Hair pulled back badly after being shoved under a surgical cap for three hours.
Mandy’s diamond studs still in my ears, catching tiny sparks of light every time I moved.
They looked almost obscene against the exhaustion on my face.
Like my mother had dressed me for heartbreak.
I had scrubbed Dylan’s blood off my skin.
I had changed my scrubs.
I had clocked out.
Punched out, officially, like that meant the hospital could stop owning my body for the night. Like grief respected time cards.
My badge still hung around my neck.
My hands still shook.
Dylan was upstairs in ICU.
Critical.
Fifty-fifty for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
Alive.
Engaged.
Those two words kept taking turns stabbing me.
Alive.
Engaged.
Alive.
Engaged.
I pressed both palms against the edge of the sink and lowered my head, breathing the way Lily had taught anxious patients to breathe when panic tried to climb out of their throats.
In through the nose.
Hold.
Out through the mouth.
Again.
Again.
It did not help.
Because breathing did not fix the fact that Dylan Degan had come back into my life with bullets in his body and my name on his lips.
Breathing did not fix Georgia.
Georgia with her blonde hair, terrified eyes, cardigan buttoned wrong, and that ring on her finger.
His ring.
His promise.
The life he had apparently chosen while I was out there building mine.
I stared at myself until the girl in the mirror blurred.
“You are not Mandy,” I whispered.
The words sounded thin in the empty locker room.
I said them again anyway.
“You are not Mandy.”
I was not going to become the woman in someone else’s love story who mistook longing for permission. I was not going to take a man because I had loved him first. I was not going to romanticize pain until it justified cruelty.
Georgia loved him.
Georgia had the ring.
Georgia had the right to sit beside his bed and cry over him.
Not me.
I had the past.
That was all.
A graveyard kiss.
A bracelet.
A sidewalk rescue.
A name breathed through blood loss.
A collection of almosts so bright and painful they had tricked my heart into thinking they were vows.
I turned away from the mirror.
Then I walked straight to the elevator.
Because apparently knowing the right thing did not make me strong enough to do it.
The hospital was different after midnight.
Not quiet.
Hospitals were never quiet.
But altered.
The daytime noise thinned into something stranger and more intimate. Machines became louder. Footsteps carried farther. Vending machines hummed like tired insects. Families slept folded into impossible positions in waiting room chairs, clutching jackets and phones and hope.
I moved through the hallways like a ghost with a badge.
No one stopped me.
That was the thing about belonging somewhere. Sometimes doors opened even when they shouldn’t.
ICU smelled different from the ER.
Cleaner.
Colder.
Less blood, more plastic.
More machines.
More waiting.
The ER was impact. Disaster. First contact with whatever had torn through a life.
ICU was aftermath.
It was the long bargain.
The place where bodies either decided to keep fighting or quietly gave up while everyone around them learned how little control love actually had.
I paused outside Dylan’s room.
The blinds were half-closed.
Through the narrow gap, I could see him.
Or what was left of him after surgery, blood loss, and the hospital’s brutal machinery.
He lay in the bed beneath white blankets and lines and tubes.
Intubated. Sedated. Too still. Monitors glowed beside him, turning his survival into numbers and waves.
A ventilator moved with cold patience. IV pumps lined up like obedient little soldiers.
Dressings covered the damage I had helped fight inside the OR.
Dylan had always been motion to me.
Even when he stood still, he had never really been still. Energy lived under his skin. Heat. Danger. Leashed violence. A restless kind of life that made rooms feel smaller when he entered them.
Seeing him like that should have made him less powerful.
It didn’t.
It made him human.
Painfully.
Terribly.
Human.
I looked toward the nurses’ station.
The ICU nurse on duty was charting. She knew me. We had survived night shifts together. She glanced up, saw my badge, saw my face, and understood enough not to ask questions right away.
“Five minutes,” she said quietly.
I nodded.
Five minutes.
A lifetime.
A theft.
A mercy.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The room was dim except for the glow of machines and the muted light above the bed. The air was cool. Mechanical. Every sound meant something. Every beep, every hiss, every soft click of fluid moving through tubing.
I stood at the foot of the bed for several seconds because my feet refused to carry me closer.
Then I saw his hand.
Resting on top of the blanket.
Bruised around the knuckles.
Scarred.
Big.
Warm once.
I had thought about Dylan’s hands more than I ever admitted.
His hands washing red paint from mine. His hands pulling me from panic without making me feel trapped.
His hands stopping when other men might have taken.
His hands giving me the mother-of-pearl cuff like it was nothing, when it had never been nothing to me.
Now one of those hands lay open and still.
That broke me.
Not all the way.
Just enough to move.
I crossed the room and sat in the chair beside his bed.
The chair that did not belong to me.
The thought hit so hard I almost stood back up.
Georgia’s chair.
His fiancée’s chair.
I hovered halfway, heart slamming, shame flooding me hot and fast.
Then Dylan’s monitor gave one steady beep.
And another.
And another.
Still here.
Still fighting.
I sank slowly into the chair.
“I know,” I whispered to the empty room. “I know I shouldn’t be here.”
The machines answered for him.
I reached for his hand, then stopped with my fingers hovering above his.
Permission.
That stupid word.
That impossible word.
How did you ask permission from an unconscious man to touch the hand of someone who had once been the whole shape of your heart?
I touched him anyway.
Just his fingers at first.
Lightly.
Like he might vanish if I held too tight.
His skin was warmer than I expected. Not strong. Not like before. But warm. Alive beneath the bruises and tape and hospital pallor.
A sob rose so fast I had to press my lips together to keep it inside.
“Hey,” I whispered.
His hand did not move.
I curled my fingers around his.
Carefully.
“You’re really bad at staying away from me.”
Nothing.
“Which is funny,” I continued, voice shaking, “because you were so committed to it when you were conscious.”
A tear slid down my cheek and dropped onto the blanket.
I wiped it quickly, ridiculous instinct, like Dylan would wake up offended that I had cried on hospital linen.
“You scared me,” I said.
The words were too small.
He had done more than scare me.
He had ripped time open.
He had turned me into every version of myself at once. The girl in the desert. The birthday girl in Cabo. The woman on the Santa Monica sidewalk. The nurse in the OR watching his heart stop.
“I saw you come through those doors, and for one second, my brain wouldn’t let me know you. It showed me the blood first. The patch. Nate. The stretcher. Everything except your face. Then they said your name.”
My fingers tightened around his.
“Dylan Degan.”
I closed my eyes.
“I hated hearing it like that.”
His monitor kept a steady rhythm.
I stared at it because looking at his face hurt too much.
“I always wondered how I’d see you again,” I said.
“Isn’t that stupid? I used to pretend I didn’t.
I’d tell myself I was too busy, too grown, too healed.
But sometimes I’d catch myself making little movies out of nothing.
You at some gas station when I stopped for coffee.
You outside a concert. You walking into a restaurant in San Diego while I was there with friends.
You at my graduation, maybe, standing in the back like some idiot who thought I wouldn’t notice. ”
My laugh broke.
“I always noticed you.”
The ventilator hissed.
In.
Out.
A machine breathing for the man who had once taken my breath away by saying one word.
Beautiful.
I leaned forward, resting my elbows carefully near the bed rail, still holding his hand.
“You were supposed to show up tall and annoying and alive,” I whispered. “Not like this. Not with surgeons saying fifty-fifty like that was supposed to be comforting.”
My gaze moved to his face.
Even under all of it, he was Dylan.
Too pale. Too still. Mouth obscured by the tube. Dark lashes resting against his skin. Beard rough along his jaw. Hair a mess from blood, sweat, hands, surgery, and probably God himself trying to drag him somewhere I refused to let him go.
I reached up slowly and touched his hair.
Just once.
Then again.
My fingers slid through it with painful tenderness.
“I used to remember your hands in my hair,” I whispered. “At the grave. In Cabo. You were always so careful with me. It made me crazy because I wanted you not to be. I wanted you to forget every reason you had to stop.”
My fingers stilled.
“But you didn’t.”
That was why I loved him.