Chapter 28
Chapter twenty-eight
Zac
Death doesn’t leave silence.
It leaves static. It buzzes in your ears and crawls under your skin. Your breath is deafening, your heart beats too slow, and your body can’t remember what comes next now that the thing you were fighting to stop is… over.
Alex is still on the ground.
Slack.
Gone.
And I keep staring at his chest, thinking it might rise again—as if I imagined his final exhale, or somehow misread the moment his pulse went still beneath my fingertips. But I didn’t. I felt it. The warmth vanished. The life left him like a flame pinched between fingers.
And yet I stare anyway. If I stop looking at him, reality will sink in.
The ER lights are back to full brightness. Everything feels exposed. I have to squint against the illumination of the fluorescents bouncing off the walls and linoleum.
Somewhere nearby, Chloe is in a bay as a patient. Where she shouldn’t be. And around us, the hospital resumes its chaotic life.
Nurses appear in the hallway, sleeves rolled up, hair re-tied. Orderlies straighten equipment and pull cleaning supplies from the closet. Someone huffs a laugh that’s quiet and stunned. The brittle, hollow sound of disbelief you make when adrenaline starts to leave the body.
The air is starting to smell like antiseptic again. Chaos is being wiped away with a lemon-scented cloth and the right brand of floor polish. To me, it smells like erasure. And I hate it. Chloe’s still bleeding, and they’re already prepping for the next patient.
I push myself off the floor and step into the corridor.
Heads turn—police, security, nurses, the team I’ve worked with for years—and I don’t blame them.
I must look like a ghost emerging from the wreckage, scrubs soaked in blood that isn’t mine.
I keep moving. Drifting past open bays and whispered voices, searching for Chloe.
She’s perched on the edge of the bed in bay five, and Kara—one of my night shift nurses—is already peeling back her torn top to reveal the wound beneath.
It’s not as bad as I let myself imagine.
Four inches across, jagged and angry, a weeping red canyon carved into skin that never should’ve been torn.
Chloe sucks in a breath through her teeth, her fingers clutching the bed frame tight enough to blanch the knuckles. She doesn’t make a sound beyond that.
I can’t take my eyes off the wound.
“You need to sit,” Olivia directs from behind me, but I don’t. I move closer instead.
Closer to Chloe.
Closer to the damage I caused.
She doesn’t meet my eyes or speak. But she doesn’t stop me, either.
Kara presses fresh gauze onto the wound, and Chloe flinches. Her breathing stutters, her jaw tightens. But she swallows the pain whole.
It makes me feel worse.
Because she’s hurting, and she thinks she has to hide it. Because she thinks I’ve earned so much guilt, I can’t carry hers, too.
She shouldn’t have been in that room in the first place. She shouldn’t have had to stand between me and a man with a knife. She shouldn’t have bled for me.
I should have stopped it.
“Zac.” Olivia’s voice is softer this time. “You’re covered in blood. You need to get checked out.”
I shake my head once.
She doesn’t argue again. Just walks away.
Kara works quickly, disinfecting and taping a pressure dressing in place. Chloe winces again.
“Do you think he wanted to die?”
It’s a simple, terrible question, said in a voice gone distant around the edges.
I think for a long moment before answering. “I don’t think he knew how to move past it.”
She nods slowly.
“He looked so young,” she murmurs.
“I know.”
Another moment of quiet. She flexes the hand of her uninjured arm, as if testing what her body still remembers how to do.
Kara finishes bandaging and slips out of the bay, leaving us alone.
“You look like hell.” She catches me off guard.
I let out something between a laugh and a groan. “Thanks.”
The adrenaline has crusted into salt at my temples, and sticky residue behind my neck. I smell like sweat and old blood.
“I mean it.” Her warm gaze meets mine, unwavering. “You’re pale. Your hands are shaking. Your pupils are blown. When was the last time you had something to drink?”
“I don’t know,” I reply honestly.
She exhales breathily, and it sounds like it hurts her to do it. She shouldn’t be worrying about me. I wasn’t the one who got stabbed. I was the one who let it happen. And now all I can do is stand here with blood on my hands and nothing to offer but regret.
I move to the edge of the bed.
My knees fold slowly, and I sit beside her without touching, careful not to shift the dressing.
The silence between us isn’t empty. It’s thick. Full of things neither of us knows how to say.
I think she’s waiting for me to speak. Or maybe she’s giving me the opportunity to fall apart.
I don’t want to. But I’m not sure I can hold it back, either. I rest my hands on my thighs and stare at them. My hands are covered in scrapes and scratches.
“You saved me,” she says.
I blink.
“I didn’t—”
“You did.”
Her voice doesn’t allow room for argument. It silences every protest inside me, cutting through every half-truth I’ve been hiding behind since we left Trauma One. She doesn’t let me minimize it. Or shift the credit elsewhere.
She’s giving it to me—and I don’t know what to do with it.
“I didn’t get to him in time,” I whisper. “I couldn’t stop it.”
“No one could,” she replies, and there’s no softness in it, only truth. “But you stopped it from getting worse.”
I look at her—and God, she’s wrecked. Her lips are dry and cracked, lashes clumped with the remnants of tears she didn’t let fall.
Her hair’s come loose from its bun, tangled with dried blood.
And her eyes… they aren’t angry. They’re tired.
Bone-deep and soul-weary, holding everything together until it’s safe to let go.
“You shouldn’t have been in that room,” I state.
“I know.”
“I should’ve made you leave.”
“You tried.”
I let out a bitter breath. “Obviously not hard enough.”
Kara returns, quickly checking Chloe’s vitals. Her numbers are good, but her blood pressure is still low.
She needs rest. More fluids. And time.
Kara inserts an IV, hanging the saline bag before connecting a line of antibiotics. She tells Chloe that a surgeon will be down soon to assess the wound. Then she slips away again.
“Still hurting?”
“Not the worst pain I’ve had,” she remarks.
“That doesn’t mean it’s okay.”
“No,” she says softly. “But it means I can bear it.” Then, quietly. “Are you okay?”
I should lie. Should nod and say, “Yeah, of course, I’m fine”, shift the focus back to her.
But instead, I admit, “I don’t know.”
Her eyes flick to mine and I don’t look away. I let her see everything.
The exhaustion. The guilt. The fury. The ghost of Casey’s name still lodged in my throat. The moment Alex went still beneath my hands. The blood crusted under my nails. The memory of it slick on my palms.
All of it.
“I didn’t want to remember her,” I whisper. “Not today. Not with him.”
His pain echoed like a shadow of my own—different in shape but made of the same never-ending dark spiral. And I hate how familiar it felt.
We were more alike than I wanted to admit.
He carried his grief like a fuse, burning slow and quiet until it finally reached the charge.
I carry mine like a lockbox—sealed tight, buried deep, hidden under a thousand ER shifts.
I didn’t fall apart, I… stopped showing up.
For the people I cared about, for my patients. Even for myself.
I stopped feeling.
I cauterized the wound.
Called it control.
But that’s not living. That’s survival. That’s a life where you keep breathing but forget what it means to feel anything.
And I saw where that path leads. I saw it in Alex.
He didn’t want to die, not really. He just didn’t know how to keep living with that kind of weight. And somewhere along the way, I started walking the same road, only quieter. Slower. But still heading toward the same destination.
I couldn’t save him.
I couldn’t save his mother.
And I couldn’t save Casey.
Because I don’t get to control the ending. I never have been able to. All I can do is show up. Keep the wound open, even when it bleeds. Because feeling it, that’s the part that means I’m still here. And I want to stay here.
Chloe watches me carefully.
“I miss her,” I admit.
“I know,” she whispers, reaching for my hand.
“I thought I buried it,” I say. “But it’s still there. All of it. Hiding under the surface.”
“That’s where grief lives,” she replies. “It’s not something you put away… it’s something you carry.”
It shouldn’t feel comforting. But it does.
We sit together in the stillness. Outside, the ER keeps moving.
Phones ring. Monitors beep. Footsteps pass behind the curtain.
I want to stay in our little bubble before the rest of the world catches up.
Before someone pulls me away to fill out Alex’s cause of death notice and file an incident report.
Or before I have to explain what happened to the hospital administrator and police.
Chloe shifts slightly and winces.
I reach for her, instinct flaring. “Hey—easy.”
“I’m okay,” she breathes. “Just… sore.”
“Try to rest.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She opens her mouth to argue, but instead the fight ebbs out of her. I help her recline gently, careful not to jostle her shoulder.
She lets me.
“I’m staying,” I say, pulling the blanket higher over her legs.
“You don’t have to.” Her eyes meet mine.
“I know.” I sink into the chair beside the bed anyway, elbows on my knees.
But I have to.
Because I can’t walk away from her. Not after everything we faced, everything we said, everything we nearly lost. Not when she saw the grief, the cracks, the pieces I never meant to show—and stayed.
So I remain by her side. And this time, I don’t try to close the wound. I let it breathe.