Chapter Thirty-Four
TOREN
I wake up to the sound of beeping.
Steady. Rhythmic. Annoying.
My throat burns like I swallowed glass. My lungs ache with every breath. My entire body feels heavy, wrong, like it doesn't quite belong to me. I try to open my eyes, but the light is too bright.
Someone moves beside me, I hear the rustle of fabric, the scrape of a chair.
“Toren?” Harper's voice, sharp and worried. “Finally. Don't move, I'm getting the nurse—”
“Wait,” I croak, and my voice sounds like I gargled gravel. “What—”
“You're in the hospital,” Harper says, no warmth in her tone. “You've been in and out of consciousness for hours. They said you weren't breathing when they found you. That he had to—”
She stops herself, jaw clenched.
Xaden.
The name cuts through the fog even though she won't say it.
Memories slam into me all at once.
Masen.
The fight.
The skillet.
The blood.
Fiona appearing, trying to kill me too.
Setting the fire.
Sitting in that kitchen, waiting to die.
My hand goes to my stomach instinctively, panic flooding through me.
“The baby,” I gasp. “Is the baby—”
“Stable,” Harper says, her tone softening slightly. “The doctors checked. They're monitoring, but so far everything looks okay. The baby's heartbeat is strong.”
Relief makes me dizzy.
“Masen?” I ask, even though I know the answer.
“Dead,” Harper confirms flatly. “The fire, they couldn't recover his body. It's just... ash.”
I should feel something.
Grief. Guilt. Horror.
But I just feel empty.
“Fiona?”
Harper's expression hardens. “Alive. Unfortunately. Carnage and his men pulled her out. She's in custody.”
“Whose custody?”
“Alex Denver's,” Harper says, and something in her voice makes it clear exactly what that means. “And apparently your boyfriend is helping.”
I don’t correct her and try to remind her that Xaden isn’t my boyfriend. He isn’t my anything… Just the father to my baby.
“He's there? With Fiona?” I ask.
“According to Carnage,” Harper says stiffly. “Been there for the past three hours. Torturing her with Alex while you've been unconscious in a hospital bed.”
“Harper—”
“Don't,” she cuts me off. “Don't defend him, Tor. You almost died. You were sitting in a burning building ready to give up, and when you got here, when you needed him, where the fuck was he? Torturing someone. Because that's what matters to him. Violence. Revenge. Not you.”
“That's not fair—”
“Isn't it?” Harper challenges. “He saved you. Great. He did the bare minimum of being a decent human being. But the second you were safe? The second you were in that ambulance? He disappeared. And now he's choosing to carve someone up instead of being here.”
Tears burn behind my eyes because part of me knows she's right. Everything she says is true but I keep trying to defend him and that needs to stop.
“He was here earlier,” I say weakly. “You said—”
“For an hour,” Harper interrupts. “While you were unconscious. When you couldn't see him or talk to him or ask him why he keeps doing this to you. And then Cas showed up and they left together. They left you here alone.”
“I'm not alone,” I point out. “You're here.”
“Because I actually give a shit about you,” Harper snaps. “Not because I'm obsessed with my revenge fantasy.”
Before I can respond, the door opens and a nurse enters.
“You're awake and alert,” she says with a warm smile. “That's excellent progress. How are you feeling?”
“Like I got hit by a truck,” I admit.
“That's to be expected,” she says, checking the monitors. “You had significant smoke inhalation. Your oxygen levels were critically low when you arrived. You've been drifting in and out of consciousness for the past six hours, but your vitals are stabilizing now,” she says as she adjusts my IV.
“The baby?” I ask.
“Heartbeat is strong and steady,” she confirms. “We'll continue monitoring, but right now everything looks good. You're very lucky.”
Lucky.
I almost laugh.
Nothing about this is lucky.
“We'd like to keep you for observation for at least twenty-four hours,” the nurse continues. “Make sure there are no complications from the smoke inhalation. And we'll do an ultrasound in the morning to check on the baby more thoroughly.”
“Okay,” I agree.
She finishes checking my vitals and leaves.
Harper and I sit in uncomfortable silence.
Not the comfortable kind. The kind with too much in it.
Harper is sitting in the chair beside my bed and I am staring at the ceiling and we have been doing a lot of talking in the past hour and there is something we haven't talked about and I can feel it the way you feel weather coming, not yet arrived but present, pressure building.
I'm the one who says it.
“You've never told me about your father.”
Harper goes very still. Just for a second. Then she reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear with the particular deliberateness of someone deciding something.
“No,” she agrees. “I haven't.”
I don't push. I've learned with Harper that pushing is exactly the wrong instinct. She is not a woman who responds to pressure, she responds to space. So I look back at the ceiling and I wait.
She speaks after about thirty seconds.
“My father wasn't cartel,” she says. “Not Cosa Nostra. Nothing that organized. More the kind of man who knew people. The kind other men called when things needed to disappear.” A pause. “Favors and debts and the particular currency of people who operate in the space between legal and not.”
I turn my head to look at her.
She's looking at her hands.
“I grew up knowing what it looked like when someone was watching the room without appearing to. Knowing the difference between the men my father trusted and the ones he was afraid of.” Her jaw tightens slightly. “Knowing what it meant when one of them stopped coming around.”
“Harper—”
“I'm not saying it was bad,” she cuts in, and her voice is the voice she uses when she's already had the argument with herself.
“I'm saying it's what I know. The shape of it. The smell of it.” She finally looks at me.
“I knew what Xaden was the first night I saw him.
Not who, I didn't know who. But what. I've been in enough rooms with men like that to read it the way you'd read a weather forecast.”
“Then why—” I stop. Try again. “Why didn't you warn me?”
Something moves through her expression that is not quite a smile.
“Because you needed him,” she says simply.
“Not him specifically. But the thing he gave you, someone who didn't look at you like a sad story. Someone who took you seriously enough to fight you.” She exhales.
“I watched you in Stormsend. The way you stood up straighter every time he was in the room. The way you stopped apologizing for taking up space.” A pause.
“You needed that. Even if the man delivering it was a nightmare.”
I stare at her.
“You could have told me,” I say quietly. “Any of it. You didn't have to carry all of that alone.”
Harper looks at me for a long moment. The fluorescent hospital light is unkind to everyone but she looks, in this specific moment, exactly like herself. No performance, no careful brightness, just Harper. The real one.
“Neither did you,” she says. “But here we both are.”
The silence that follows is different from the one before. Warmer. The kind that exists between two people who have just shown each other something true and are deciding what to do with it.
“My father's gone,” she adds after a moment, quieter.
“Has been for years. I'm not—I don't carry it around anymore. But I know this world, Tor. I know how it works and I know what it costs and I know what it looks like when someone is trying to pull you under while calling it love.” Her eyes hold mine.
“And I will never, for as long as I live, let that happen to you without saying something. Even when you don't want to hear it.”
I reach out and take her hand.
She lets me.
“Thank you,” I say. “For staying. For all of it.”
She squeezes once. Lets go. Reaches for her terrible hospital vending machine coffee with both hands, takes a sip and pulls a face.
“Somebody in this friendship has to have standards,” she says. “It's clearly going to have to be me.”
I almost laugh.
It almost sounds like normal.
Before I can respond, the door opens again.
Carnage walks in, looking exhausted, but his eyes are shadowed with violence.
“Darlin’,” he says, and there's genuine relief in his voice. “Good to see you fully awake.”
“Hey, Carn.”
He pulls up a chair, and I notice Harper's posture stiffen. I choose to ignore it because I know she is pissed and worried Carnage is going to try to make a move on me. What she doesn’t know is we already had a moment. I just haven’t had the chance to tell her about it.
“Fiona?” I ask.
“Alive,” Carnage confirms. “Barely. Alex has been giving her a front row seat to why he was given the name Butcher.”
“And Xaden?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady. “Harper said he's there.”
Carnage's expression shifts, something complicated and uncomfortable.
“Yeah,” he admits bitterly. “He's there.”
“For how long?”
“Since about an hour after they brought you in,” Carnage says, and I can see him choosing his words carefully. “He was here. Sat with you while you were unconscious. But then Alex called, said Fiona was awake and ready to talk. Then Devlin and Cas—"
He stops, jaw clenched.
“What?” I press.
“He left,” Carnage says bluntly. “Told me to text him when you woke up fully. Then went with Cas to meet Alex.”
The words hit like a physical blow.
“See?” Harper says, vindicated. “This is what I'm talking about—”
“It's not that simple,” Carnage interrupts, and the fact that he's defending Xaden, even reluctantly, surprises me.
“Isn't it?” Harper challenges.