Chapter 43
Chapter
Forty-Three
FALLON
After work, I point my car toward the hospital, the drive passing in a blur of stoplights and autopilot turns.
The fluorescent lights buzz overhead as I navigate corridors that smell like antiseptic and stale coffee, that particular institutional scent that coats the back of your throat and never quite washes out.
Daniel's room is quiet when I arrive—peaceful in a way our home never is.
He's asleep, and he stays that way the entire time I'm there.
Motionless except for the slow rise and fall of his chest, machines beeping their steady rhythm beside him like mechanical sentries.
His face is a palette of violence—deep purples blooming across his left cheekbone, sickly yellows spreading beneath both eyes like grotesque watercolors.
His jaw sits swollen and misshapen, the symmetry he was always so vain about completely destroyed.
Dried blood still crusts the corner of his split lip despite the nurses' attempts to clean him up.
A white cast encases his right arm from knuckles to elbow, elevated on pillows.
I lower myself into the uncomfortable vinyl chair beside his bed and try to feel something.
Guilt. Relief. Fear. Love. Anything. But there's only numbness, that hollow emptiness that's become my default setting.
I'm a ghost haunting her own life, going through the motions because that's what dutiful wives do.
Around six, a nurse bustles in to check his vitals—young, efficient, clipboard tucked under her arm like armor.
"How is he?" The question feels automatic, required. Words I'm supposed to say because I'm wearing this wedding ring, because my name is on his emergency contact forms.
"Stable. Much better than yesterday." She adjusts something on the IV drip with practiced hands, makes a note on her chart. "The doctor saw him this morning, actually. He was awake, asking for you."
My stomach clenches, muscles tightening involuntarily. "He was?"
"Mmhmm. Pretty insistent about it too." She smiles like this is sweet, romantic—the devoted husband asking for his beloved wife. If only she knew what devotion looks like behind closed doors. "In a day or two they'll lower his pain medication. He'll be awake more when that happens. More alert."
I nod along to everything she says, hands folded in my lap like a dutiful wife receiving good news.
Making the appropriate expressions. Widening my eyes at the right moments.
Saying "that's wonderful" and "thank you for letting me know" in all the correct places. The performance is second nature now.
When she leaves, I pull out the book I brought—some thriller I grabbed from the staff lounge—and try to read.
But the words swim on the page, letters rearranging themselves into meaningless shapes.
I can't focus. Can't get past the same paragraph I've read four times now, each sentence dissolving before it reaches comprehension.
All I can think about is Kade's hands. Those destroyed knuckles. The purple-black bruising spreading across his skin like storm clouds, the split flesh over bone.
He did this. To Daniel. For me.
I knew he was dangerous. Of course I did—you don't survive in the Wicked Gods without violence written into your DNA.
But seeing the evidence, the physical proof of what brutality looks like when it wears someone you care about, is different.
Knowing something intellectually and witnessing it viscerally are two separate realities that don't quite align in my mind, like parallel lines that shouldn't intersect but somehow do.
When it's almost eight, I close the book without marking my page and gather my things—purse, keys, the jacket I never put on. Daniel hasn't stirred once. Part of me is grateful for the continued silence. Part of me wonders what will happen when those eyes finally open again.
"I'll be back tomorrow," I tell his unconscious form, the words falling into the quiet room like stones into deep water. Then I walk out before the guilt—or relief, or whatever this tangled emotion is—can catch up with me.
The parking garage is cold, my footsteps echoing off concrete walls and low ceilings. I slide into my car and start the engine, pulling out onto the street on autopilot. Turn left at the light. Merge onto the highway. Exit at—
Wait.
I blink at the familiar street, at the cabin coming into view through my windshield.
I'm not going home. Haven't been driving toward the house at all.
My hands turned the wheel without consulting my brain, taking me to Kade's place like my body knows where it needs to be even when my mind hasn't caught up.
Like gravity, pulling me toward the only person who makes me feel real.
I park in front of his house and sit there, engine ticking as it cools in the evening air.
What the hell am I doing? This is insane.
Reckless. Wrong on every conceivable level—my husband is in a hospital bed and I'm driving to my student's house, to my lover's house, like some character in a Gothic novel who can't help rushing toward her own destruction.
But my hands are already reaching for the door handle.
I'm out of the car before I can talk myself out of it, walking down the driveway to his front door with my heart hammering against my ribs. My fist hovers in the air for three long seconds before I knock—two sharp raps that sound too loud in the quiet evening.
Ash opens the door almost immediately, surprise flickering across his face before settling into something more knowing.
"Teach?" His eyes scan me, questioning, reading all the things I'm not saying. "You okay?"
"Where is he?" The words come out steadier than I feel, my voice finding strength I didn't know I still possessed.
Ash steps aside without hesitation, jerking his head toward the interior of the house. "In his room."
I walk inside, past him into the familiar living room with its worn furniture and motorcycle magazines scattered on the coffee table.
Beck is sprawled on the couch, controller in hand, some video game paused on the TV.
His head turns when he hears my footsteps, confusion crossing his pretty features.
"Who's here—" Kade's voice cuts off abruptly when he emerges from the hallway and spots me standing in his living room. "Peaches."
He moves toward me cautiously, carefully, like I might bolt at any sudden movement. Maybe I should. Maybe I should turn around and walk back out that door, drive home to my empty house and pretend none of this ever happened.
But I can't move. Can't do anything except stand there watching him approach, taking in every detail.
"You did that for me." The words come out as a whisper, barely audible over the blood rushing in my ears.
He nods, and there's no regret in his eyes. No apology for the violence, only certainty. "I just—I can't have you in that house with him when he can hurt you. Can't stand the thought of his hands on you, of you going back there every night where I can't protect you."
The words break something loose in my chest, some final barrier I've been maintaining between feeling and surviving.
I crash into him, and his arms come around me immediately, holding tight.
I bury my face against his shoulder and just breathe, letting him anchor me when everything else feels like it's spinning out of control.
After a minute—or maybe an hour, time moves strangely when you're this close to someone—I look up at him. He's so close our foreheads touch, green eyes searching my face like he's trying to memorize every detail.
And I realize, right here in this moment with his heartbeat under my palm and his breath against my skin, that I love this man.
I love him. Not just the desperate attachment of someone drowning grabbing onto the nearest float, but real love—the kind that sees every flaw and broken piece and chooses anyway.
I don't care how wrong it is, how many lines we've crossed, how many more we'll shatter.
Nothing in my carefully constructed life has ever felt this right, this true.
"I love you." The words whisper against his lips, confession and surrender all at once.
"I love you too." His voice breaks on the words, raw and honest.
Then I'm crashing my lips into his and he's picking me up in one fluid motion, hands gripping my thighs as I wrap my legs around his hips.
My fingers tangle in his hair as he carries me—still kissing me frantically, desperately, like we're running out of time—across the living room and up the stairs.
I barely register Ash's low whistle, the sound of a door closing somewhere in the house.
All I know is Kade's mouth on mine, his hands holding me like I'm his everything instead of broken, the way he kicks his bedroom door closed without breaking the kiss.
He lays me down on the bed and comes down over me, his weight settling against mine—not crushing, not threatening, just solid and warm and real.
Everything about this feels different from what I've known.
I reach for the hem of his shirt, fingers impatient, needing to close the distance between fabric and skin.
He reads me perfectly, pulling it over his head and dropping it somewhere on the floor without breaking our kiss for more than a breath.
I drag my own shirt off, fumbling with my bra clasp while his hands are already working at my waistband, tugging my pants and panties down with an urgency that mirrors mine exactly, like we're both terrified the world will find a way to interrupt this before it becomes real.
Then his mouth is moving down my body, and when his tongue brushes my clit—barely a whisper of contact—I gasp so sharply I startle myself.