Chapter 36 #2
She glances down again. “It looks like parents are still noted under ‘family’ but not as the first call,” she says. “We still have to notify them, though, since it’s a serious incident. Usually, we’d do both. We can call them if you’re not up to it.”
I almost say yes; I almost let some detached stranger make that call, and wrap the whole thing in neutral professional language. But then I remember Brendon’s text, and the fact that my mother sent them a video of us doing fuck knows what.
“I’ll do it,” I say quietly. “Give me the numbers, and I’ll call them; they know who I am.”
She hesitates, then nods, disappearing briefly before returning with a sticky note. “Take your time,” she says. “I’ll let the team know you’re the point of contact.”
I nod without really seeing her, then as soon as she’s gone, I pull Brendon’s phone from my pocket and input the code I know by heart. His background is Jericho, of course. Notifications pepper the top—missed calls mostly from me, emails, and some group chats.
I scroll through his recent calls, find the numbers labeled Mom and Dad, and my jaw tightens at the fact that they’re near the top with a bunch of unanswered calls from yesterday.
The phone rings twice before his father picks up.
“Brendon, we told you—”
“It’s not Brendon,” I cut in. “It’s Dominic Volkov.”
There is a pause. “Dominic?” he repeats. “What are you doing with my son’s phone?”
His mother’s voice floats faintly in the background, a worried murmur. “Is that him? Is he calling to apologize?” she asks.
Apologize?
“Where is Brendon?” his father demands, ignoring her.
“In surgery,” I say flatly. “At Lakehaven General. He was stabbed tonight and nearly died.”
There is a sharp intake of breath on the other end. For a moment, everything goes quiet. Then his father clears his throat, the sound brittle.
“How did that happen?” he asks, voice strained but not in the way I want. He sounds inconvenienced, not broken.
“In an alley,” I lie smoothly. “Wrong place, wrong time. Some asshole with a knife thought he looked like an easy target. I happened to drive past just as it happened, chased the guy off, and got him here.”
His mother gasps. “Oh my goodness, is he… is he going to be alright?”
“We’re waiting on updates,” I say, jaw tight. “They’re working on him right now, but he lost a lot of blood. That’s why I’m calling. Because out of respect for the fact that you are his parents, I think you should know that your son almost didn’t make it tonight.”
There is another pause, longer this time. When his father speaks again, the words make my free hand curl into a fist.
“We told him we want nothing to do with his choices, so we cut him off,” he says. “He has made his bed. If this is some attempt to guilt us into changing our minds—”
“You’re kidding me,” I say, and the anger that has been simmering all night finally spikes. “He’s lying on a table, fighting for his life, and you’re worried I’m trying to emotionally blackmail you.”
“We have made our position clear,” he says, and I can hear him retreating into that preacher tone, the one that sounds righteous and hollow at the same time. “He chose his sin over his faith, over his family. We cannot condone that. We will not enable him.”
My voice, when it comes, drops into the register I use when I’m about to end someone—calm, quiet, and absolutely lethal.
“Listen to me very carefully,” I say. “I’m calling you because he almost died, and out of respect for what you were supposed to be to him. That’s it. That’s the only courtesy you’re going to get from me.”
“Watch your tone, son,” he snaps. “You expect us to rush to the bedside of a son who turned his back on everything we believe, who—”
“You know what your own Bible says about parents who don’t take care of their family?
First Timothy five, verse eight. ‘Anyone who doesn’t provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
’ You want to talk about who’s in rebellion, Pastor Lane, maybe look in the mirror. ”
He splutters, caught off guard. “You have no right to—”
“I have every right,” I cut in. “Because he changed his emergency contact to me and trusted me to show up. I did—I got him here. I’m sitting outside the OR covered in his blood because I refused to let him die in a dirty alley.”
“We did what scripture commands,” he says stiffly. “We corrected him. We refused to condone sin. The prodigal son returns when he’s ready, not while he’s still wallowing in the pigsty.”
“You want to weaponize scripture at him, fine,” I go on, the words coming out steady, vicious.
“But understand this: you just disowned your son because he loves the wrong person, and you did it knowing exactly how much it would break him. You left him without support in a place where he’s already drowning, and when a stranger called to tell you he almost bled out, your first instinct was to hang up.
Whatever you want to call that, it sure as fuck isn’t Christ-like. ”
“How dare you—”
“I’m calling you now out of respect,” I say again, cutting across his rising fury, because if I let him spin up any more, I’ll put my fist through the wall or the phone.
“You don’t deserve it, but he would. This is the last courtesy you get.
Don’t think about coming back and playing doting parents when he’s patched up, and you remember how bad it looks to have a gay son you ghosted.
Don’t call to ask if he’s okay. You made your choice tonight as much as he did. ”
“You have no right to—”
“Yeah, I do,” I say, voice softening in that way that makes people who know me go still. “Because from now on, I’m taking care of him. When your God asks you why you hung up on your bleeding kid while you were quoting scripture at me, I hope you have a better answer ready than ‘he loved wrong.’”
I hang up before he can spit whatever self-righteous poison is loading on his tongue.
My hand is trembling, knuckles white around the phone.
I just sit there, staring at the dark screen, hearing my own words echo back at me.
I’ve told a lot of people I was going to end them.
I’ve never told someone I was going to take their place.
I didn’t know they’d cut him off. I knew they’d be shitty about us, but I didn’t know they’d actually pull the plug on his life and call it love.
He’s mine. Fully. Finally, whether he meant it this way or not when he changed that form.
I don’t know how long I sit there spacing out, while two nurses come back, asking me more questions and giving me little updates about Brendon. I have to fill out more forms, and a police officer comes by to take a statement.
I vaguely remember someone sticking a needle into my arm and asking if I was sure.
I remember saying yes, because if my blood can do one fucking useful thing tonight, it should be keeping him here.
I know blood donations don’t really work that way, but it’s nice to be delusional while you’re falling apart.
“Mr Volkov?”
The voice snaps my head up. A doctor stands in front of me, mask pulled down around her neck, dark hair pulled back in a messy knot. She looks tired, but there’s a softness in her eyes that wasn’t there when she pushed me away from the trauma doors earlier.
I’m on my feet before I realize I’ve moved. “How is he?” I demand. “Is he—”
“He’s alive,” she says, holding up a hand. “Take a breath.”
I do, but just barely.
“He lost a lot of blood,” she continues, glancing briefly at the chart in her hand.
“The knife missed his vital organs, which is frankly a miracle, given where it went in. It nicked muscle, but we were able to repair the damage. No perforated bowel, no punctured lung, no liver laceration. He’s going to be very sore and tired, but he will live. ”
My legs go weak again. I grab the back of the chair beside me to steady myself. “So he’s going to be okay,” I press. I need the words.
“With monitoring, yes,” the doctor says. “We repaired the damage, cleaned everything out, and started a transfusion. Thank you for donating your blood, even though it wasn’t going directly to Mr. Lane. Not everyone is willing to roll up their sleeves.”
It takes a while for her words to hit me, and I find myself blinking rapidly and swallowing hard. “So… he’s out of the woods?”
“He’s not running marathons next week,” she says, a hint of a smile twitching at her mouth.
“But yes. Barring complications, he’ll make a full physical recovery.
We’ll watch for infection, monitor his vitals, and manage his pain.
He’s sedated right now, but he’s stable.
We’ve moved him to a private room, partly for security because…
well.” She flicks her gaze over me, clearly meaning my face on posters. “I figured you’d appreciate that.”
I swallow hard. “Can I see him?”
She studies me briefly, then nods. “Short visit,” she says. “He’s still heavily medicated, so he might not wake up. But he’ll hear you. Try not to upset him.”
Too late for that, I almost say, but I keep it behind my teeth and just nod.
She leads me down the hallway, away from the chaos of the ER, into the quieter, more muted hum of the wards.
The smell shifts—less blood and antiseptic, more stale coffee and sleep.
We take an elevator up, and ride in silence.
My reflection in the metal doors looks like someone who lost a fight with a crime scene.
There are still faint red streaks on my hoodie that I missed.
We stop at a door near the end of a corridor. She taps a code into the pad, pushes it open, and steps back to let me pass.
“He’s in here,” she says. “Hit the call button if he seems distressed. Don’t tug any lines. And try to rest yourself at some point, Mr. Volkov. Adrenaline doesn’t last forever.”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “Thanks, Doc.”
“I’ll give you some privacy,” she says. “If there’s any change, we’ll let you know.”
I nod again, not trusting my voice, and step inside.