Chapter 3
Before I go downstairs and face whatever fallout awaits me for technically dying again, and before I have to unpack the metaphysical equivalent of “hey guys, sorry about the temporary corpse moment”, I want to do the most basic, human thing I can.
I want to get dressed.
Naturally, this means I make a pilgrimage to the nurse’s office to raid the lost-and-found again.
Instead?
I find a crime scene.
Not the blood-and-gore variety I’ve become disturbingly desensitized to, but a different violation entirely. A targeted attack.
The box is empty.
Not a single tragic sock. No glow-in-the-dark scrubs. Not even a pair of jeans with suspicious stains. Just one folded index card sitting at the bottom.
LOST-AND-FOUND RELOCATED. All items are washed, folded, and stored in the Department of Intensive Care.
P.S. Pun intended.
I stare at the card for a full three seconds.
Then I mutter, “Of course.”
The ICU. The land of medical Lazarus-ing. The place with the highest statistical rate of ‘arrived dead-ish, left alive-ish’ in the building. A transitional halfway house between comatose and ‘please sign here to acknowledge you didn’t technically flatline.’
Apparently this is where my things live now.
I don’t know whether the guys expected me to wake up again, or they just wanted somewhere to stash my would-be wardrobe in case I did pull off the impossible and die for real this time, but bless their ridiculous hearts.
They prepared for me.
They held space for me.
My guys planned for me.
That thought lands strangely, hot and heavy and startlingly gentle all at once.
My guys.
I have never called them that, not even internally. I’ve called them a lot of things: reckless, violent, god-playing, insufferable, emotionally constipated, catastrophically selfish… but never mine.
It doesn’t actually sound bad.
…Kind of sounds terrifyingly right.
So. Fine. I go.
The walk to the ICU is easier than the bathroom trek, but still slow going, partly because I forgot the floor plan of this godforsaken hospital. The halls look mostly the same, the same beige color everywhere and signs half-faded from the years of misuse.
But the ICU… The ICU is different.
Two corridors down from the old surgical wing (which immediately makes me think of Nathaniel, of crisp scrubs and steady hands and whatever surgeon-ghost lingers in the bone marrow of him), the air shifts. The lighting shifts. It feels…awake here. Alive.
The bulbs actually work.
All of them.
The walls are freshly painted in a warm, buttery cream color. There’s no mold. No grime. No peeling seams where paint gave up.
It’s jarring.
By the time I reach the far wall, I spot a paper taped to a door. My name. Block letters. Sharpie. And a tiny skull doodle beside it.
I push open the door, expecting… hospital detritus.
Instead, there is a freaking welcome basket.
An actual basket like you’d give a new mother, except instead of diaper samples and formula, it contains a travel bottle of mouthwash, a pack of wet wipes, a hairbrush, and a pair of sweatpants.
There’s a hoodie reading PROPERTY OF COUNTY MORGUE in cheerful font, plus novelty socks covered in tiny cartoon skulls.
And tucked between them: a can of instant coffee with a single plastic spoon, accompanied by little sugar packs and instant creamer.
Instant creamer.
That is such a Talon signature that I don’t even need a psychic tether. He absolutely staged a coup against Nathaniel’s unholy sludge and decided this girl was not going to be subjected to it.
And it’s all new. Not scavenged. Not looted from the abandoned belongings of the recently deceased. They actually went and bought this for me.
I just stand there. One hand braced on the doorframe. Breathing.
It hits harder than I expect. Because I can see it. Them assembling it. The grump, the gremlin, and the surgeon, all conspiring in their own incompatible, insane little way. A tiny slice of care carved into reality.
I step fully in.
The room matches the hallway: warm walls, repaired blinds, carpet (actual carpet), a humming space heater like this is a place meant for the living, not a Grim Reaper.
There’s a small desk under the window. On it: folded towels, a battered but clean mug, and—
a cactus.
A cactus in a chipped terracotta pot.
There’s a sticky note stuck to it.
Don’t kill me, please.
I laugh under my breath.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
I drift to the closet next.
The closet door opens smoothly, and to my pleasure, I find that the hinges were recently oiled and inside, there’s a mix of new and “recovered” belongings stacked one upon the other.
At the very bottom of the stack is a cardboard shoebox labeled: Don’t kill us, either.
I open it cautiously.
Inside: lingerie. Ten—maybe more—full matching sets. Black lace so sheer it might as well be transparent, red satin, gold shimmer, pastel, velvet trim, polka dots. Like someone did a high-speed raid on every lingerie subgenre known to mankind.
There is no universe in which Nathaniel or Cassian picked out polka dots for me.
This was Talon, too.
A sound escapes me before I can stop it. It’s a half laugh, half… something else, caught behind my knuckles. If this is their idea of “welcome back to the land of mortality,” then…
It might genuinely be the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.
Grandmother excepted.
Definitely better than anything my university “friends” ever managed.
Better than Mark.
Better than Pain.
I shove the box back in before my heart starts swelling too much for me to handle and pull on the morgue hoodie and tug the linebacker sweatpants up over my hips. They are hilariously oversized and exactly perfect.
If Pain were here, I just know he would bitch about me getting lingerie in my size but sweatpants built for a barbarian. Which is precisely why it’s a relief he is not currently here to witness any of this.
I shove my feet into the skull socks and take one last slow look around the room. It shouldn’t mean anything. It shouldn’t get under my skin. A bed, clothes, soap, hot water, softness, they’re normal things.
But they’re also evidence.
Someone thought of me, not just the tool I am.
And I don’t know what the hell to do with that.
I square my shoulders.
Time to face the welcoming committee.
Who knows?
Maybe I’ll want to drop to my knees for them anyway.
I don’t even reach the common area before I hear Cassian’s voice. It’s so low that it almost blends in with the generator hum.
“...supposed to tell me when she wakes up,” he’s saying. “Why am I only hearing about it now?”
“Because you were upstairs trying to break the door off the storage room like a lunatic, that’s why,” Nathaniel replies.
“Cut the bullshit,” Cassian snaps. “Move, Talon. I’m going to see her.”
“She should be here any minute,” Nathaniel says. “I told her to meet us in an hour, when—”
“Fuck that.”
The last part is louder—angry thunder walking toward me—and then I round the corner and almost collide with it. A wall of hoodie, muscle, and very controlled fury.
We both freeze.
For one long, silent second, he just stares. His chest is rising and falling like he’s just run a marathon, but his eyes… they’re wild in the softest way, like he can’t believe I’m standing here.
“You’re awake,” he says at last.
I tilt my chin up, forcing my lips into something between a smile and a smirk. Anything to keep my pulse from showing.
“Hello to you too, big guy. Miss me much?”
I expect a grunt. A scoff. Some sarcastic comeback. Not this.
He moves faster than I can breathe, closing the space between us and wrapping me up like I’m something he’s afraid to lose again. His arms are all heat and weight and safety, and for a split second, I forget how to breathe. Cassian doesn’t hug.
But God, when that warmth seeps into my bones, I melt.
“Does that mean yes?” I whisper into his chest.
He doesn’t answer. Just exhales—hard—and then untangles himself, gripping my shoulders like he’s checking I’m solid, real, here.
Then he takes me in. Head to toe.
“You look like hell,” he says flatly, and there’s something almost tender in the insult. His eyes drag over the hoodie, the loose sweatpants, and then I swear I see it. That flicker in his eyes, that stray thought wandering straight to what’s under the clothes.
Joke’s on him. I didn’t wear any of that lingerie they bought me.
I’m bare naked underneath.
“Thanks,” I mutter. “You really know how to make a girl feel special.”
He takes half a step closer, and suddenly, all that warmth from before twists into steel.
“You should’ve sent for me,” he says. “The second you opened your eyes. Told Nathaniel to fetch me.”
I blink.
“I… That’s… I’ll remember it for next time.”
“There will be no next time.”
The finality in his tone makes the walls feel smaller.
Oh, boy.
Is this where I tell him there might be a next time?
But then I see his eyes.
Not the fury. The fear behind it.
And suddenly, all I do is nod.
Without another word, he extends his arm, like he’s escorting me into a ballroom instead of a busted-up hospital mess hall. I look at it, then back at his face. The Cassian I know is not a gentleman.
“You practicing for some Regency-era reenactment or something?”
His mouth twitches. “Just take it.”
So I do.
The moment my hand wraps around his forearm, his muscles shift, taut under the fabric, and there’s that faint, grounding pressure of his grip.
Warm. Surprisingly kind. Mine.
“When I woke up earlier, I could barely walk to the bathroom without face-planting,” I tell him as we start forward together. “Now I’m at least semi-functional.”
We turn the corner.
It doesn’t surprise me that the whole place has gone back to normal. Cartons makeshifting for walls are no more, the floor is so clean it’s shiny, and all the beds that were put together so we could camp from the wraith have gone back to their respective places in the hospital.