20. Embry
20
EMbrY
The rest of the journey passed in a blur. Logically, nothing had changed. Mateo was having the same surgery I’d already made peace with—it’d be fucking over before I got there. But that he’d gone under without me there cut deeper than any scalpel ever could, and Cam and Folk’s words of wisdom became nothing but noise.
We pulled up outside a nondescript hospital.
I was out of the car before it stopped, dashing inside, following the directions Decoy had left me to the surgery department upstairs.
A staircase. A corridor.
A nurse who spoke to me as I kept moving through a department that smelt horribly fucking familiar. Past a brother I knew by scent almost as well as I knew Cam.
Fresh-cut wood and lilac flowers.
Decoy .
I was so grateful he’d been here when I wasn’t. But the primal need to reach Mateo overrode my fucking manners and I kept moving, I kept running, until I found my husband.
He was halfway out of bed, hair sticking up in every direction, eyes heavy with the bewildered daze unique to waking up to a reality, a body that, for better or worse, would never be the same as the one you remembered.
I reached him before he got a foot to the floor. I eased him back onto the bed and my hands found his face, my gaze locked to his, searching his amber eyes for every fucking thing I loved about him—which was every fucking thing, including the dazed scowl he levelled me with. “Let me up.”
“No. Lie down.” I spoke with conviction, Decoy’s most recent texts cemented in my brain. “You need to chill until you’re not dizzy anymore.”
“I’m not fucking dizzy.”
Lies. I saw it in how he swayed on the bed, rooting a fist to the mattress to rescue his equilibrium. In the pallor of his olive skin and the slow breath he released as his latest escape attempt caught up with him.
His fingers trembled as he gripped my wrists. “You didn’t have to come.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“That your bedside manner, chaparrito?”
“Depends if you’re in dickhead mode.”
Mateo opened his mouth, but whatever road man sass he’d been about to dole out was derailed by the nausea Decoy had warned me about. The post-op puking I’d always been too near death to worry about.
“Lie down ,” I repeated. “Did you drink anything yet?”
Mateo swung his gaze to the ubiquitous NHS water jug. “I don’t know.”
Looking at him, I could believe it. I filled the cup and pressed it into his hand, reading the room for what would happen if I tried to feed it to him. “If you drink and take a piss, they might let you go home.”
“They’re not letting me go home.”
His words were muffled by the fist he’d pushed against his lips to keep the water down.
I waited for him to elaborate.
He didn’t, but I was saved from interrogating him by a doctor poking her head around the curtain.
She took her place at the foot of the bed, and I was versed enough in medical speak to be reassured by what she said... until she got to the part about his blood pressure tanking from the anaesthetic, which was fucking news to me.
“It’s why you’re so dizzy,” the doctor said. “I’d like to monitor you here for the rest of the day before we send you to a general ward, and you should follow up with your GP in a few weeks.”
Mateo didn’t have a GP. Neither had I until life had kicked me in the nuts enough to need one, but this doctor didn’t need to know that. She talked more about pain relief, and then she left without Mateo giving her more than a couple of monosyllabic grunts.
“I need out of this dress,” he grumbled when she was gone, yanking on the ties of his gown.
I knew better than to argue, and not just because I knew how claustrophobic those gowns were. I found his stuff, thankful Decoy had thought to swap the clothes he’d come in with for clean ones—plain sweats and one of the haulage firm tees we kept in the rigs. They were the same gunmetal grey as Alexei’s eyes, and it suited Mateo.
Didn’t make him any happier, though. “Can we go now?”
“Not yet.”
“It’s the middle of the night. No one will fucking know.”
“It’s daylight.”
Mateo frowned and looked for a window, but he was shit out of luck. All he found was a stained curtain either side of him and he swayed from the annoyance of it all, one foot in his sweats, both hands gripping the waistband instead of holding his balance on the bed.
I caught him.
He pushed me away.
As calm as I wanted to be for him, my temper flared. “Will you just lean on me?”
“No.”
“Why not? You think I can’t hold you up?”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Then what the fuck are we doing? What’s the point of our entire life together if it’s this one-sided?”
“We’re not doing anything.” Mateo shook me off and fumbled through getting his goddamn clothes on. “I don’t need you to fucking dress me.”
On a distant level, a rational one, I knew Mateo was still off his tits from the surgery, combative from the anaesthetic, and sick as a dog from all of it. And I fucking knew it didn’t occur to him to want my help because before he’d become a Rebel King, no one had ever helped him with anything. We called Ranger the lone wolf, but in truth, that title belonged to Mateo, and watching him struggle got to me, my fuse far shorter than his.
I kicked a chair out of my way and got in his face. “I spent a year in a thousand pieces. You’ve seen me on my knees, and you won’t put your hand on my shoulder? What the fuck am I to you?”
Mateo blinked. “What?”
I stared him down, knowing I was fucking this up but unable to stop.
Mateo stared right back, then panic flared in his messy gaze. “I’m gonna be sick.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Then he slept for about six minutes before he was awake and wanting to leave all over again. Still dizzy. Still stubborn in a way that reminded me of how he’d been all those years ago when I’d first met him. How Liliana had been when I’d had to leave her on the doorstep.
How had I handled him back then?
I had no fucking clue, and I knew better than to judge us for who we’d been yesterday, let alone five years ago.
Six.
Seven.
However long it had been.
But as Mateo swayed on his feet for the twentieth time and finally dropped his head to my shoulder, I wondered who we were now.
* * *
It was the afternoon by the time Mateo was recovered enough to move to a general ward.
The hospital kicked me out for a few hours. I took a nap in the car. Ate and drank everything Cam put in front of me. Then we faced evening visiting hours together and got the good news that Mateo could go home.
Cam helped him up.
Mateo allowed it.
But I let the seething monster in me die. He was okay, he was coming home. Honestly, nothing else fucking mattered.
We reached the car. Cam hadn’t slept, so I had to drive, carefully , remembering my own car trips with stitches in my belly. But Cam’s phone rang before I could slide behind the wheel and he stepped away to answer it.
Mateo eased himself into the passenger seat. “I’ll fucking puke in the back.”
“You want water?”
“Nah. Then I’ll have to get up again to piss.”
“It’s good to move around.”
“You do it then.”
He almost smiled.
I leaned in the doorway, loving that faint twinkle, hating his heavy eyes and pale face. “This journey’s gonna be murder.”
“My favourite thing.”
His hair was a wreck, the scent of the hospital clinging to every strand.
I leaned down and breathed him in anyway. “I love you.”
Mateo tipped his head back against the seat. “I thought you were angry.”
“Angry?”
“You’ve got the rage. I can feel it.”
“Maybe your radar’s off.”
“Hmm.” Mateo closed his eyes as I nuzzled his cheek and let my hands wander, massaging his neck and stroking his jaw, all the things I should’ve done in the hospital when he was being so fucking annoying.
“Are you hungry yet?”
“No.”
“When did you last eat?”
“Burger King.”
“Where?”
He mumbled the name of a city the haulage run had passed through three days ago, and his deteriorating communication since then began to make sense.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Fuck off.”
“I didn’t know it was this ,” Mateo amended. “Thought it was a bug, and I didn’t want to bring it home to you. I can’t?—”
Something overcame him. Emotion or nausea, I couldn’t tell.
I let him sit with it for a minute, straightening up and scanning the car park for Cam. He was by the payment machines, smoking, glaring at the sky, which could’ve meant anything and nothing, when whatever my husband was trying to say meant everything.
Mateo fumbled at my hand.
I looked down. “What is it?”
“I was thinking of you,” he said, slowly, as if unpicking the words for himself first. “I know I always fuck everything up or say the wrong shit, but you’re always on my mind, cielito. I need you.”
“So why won’t you lean on me?”
“I do lean on you. For everything but this fucking thing.”
Deciphering that took more spoons than I had left. I leaned into the car again. Found his hands and squeezed them. Pressed my lips to his and kissed him as if he were made of glass until he groaned and pulled me closer, stopping just shy of dragging me on top of him.
Even fucked up and smelling like the hospital, Mateo did something to me no one else ever had. The only man I’d ever loved. My husband . I still woke up most days in awe of that fact, and I’d never get over how alive he made me feel. How his love had saved me long before I took a blade to the gut.
I lost myself in his mouth moving against mine. In his trembling hands gripping my face. His soft breaths as we kissed as if we had the rest of our lives to spend in this car park. As if he didn’t have three keyhole incision wounds in his belly and the hangover of a general anaesthetic rattling through him. As if a snatched car-park entanglement could lead to the one thing in our lives that truly felt undone.
“Hey,” I murmured against his lips. “When you feel better, maybe we could?—”
Footsteps approached.
I ripped away from Mateo and spun around, shielding him, living in the past when everything we’d survived meant the future was fucking bright.
Cam moved past me and opened the driver door. “We need to go.”
“Thought I was driving?”
“Change of plan.”
He got in the car, his profile unreadable, save the muscle ticking in his jaw and an emotion I recognised as grief shading his eyes.
“What happened?”
Cam started the car, staring at nothing, everything about him already somewhere else. “Saint and Alexei are coming in. They’re bringing Rocco home.”
Shock coursed through me.
Rocco St John.
I’d seen his body.
With Saint, I’d hidden it from Folk and Locke before I’d shot Liliana’s grandfather in the face, taking his life for the misery he’d inflicted on Mateo and Juana.
I hadn’t lost any sleep over that.
Rocco, though. I’d be lying if I said seeing him like that hadn’t haunted me. The bones, the rot, the fucking smell . And later bearing witness to Folk, Locke, and Ranger’s quiet grief for him. It was the strangest thing I sometimes forgot he’d ever existed.
I squeezed Mateo’s hands, then let him go to slide into the back, taking the middle seat where I could watch the road, the mirrors, my brother, and my husband from where I sat.
We were a long way from home, a reality Mateo would feel as fatigue and pain got the better of him.
And Cam?
I couldn’t say how he felt. Just that he was quiet, silent , and a few hours passed before Mateo stirred enough to remember his phone.
He plugged it in and powered it on. A few seconds later, a text buzzed through to mine.
Mateo: that thing u were goin 2 say... mayB we can xxx