Chapter 6
HAWK
My stomach churned, my bloody hand throbbing as I paced the hospital waiting room, a generic box separated from the rest of the hospital by a glass wall. Chairs with cheaply upholstered seats were lined up along the walls, and a TV displayed an old episode of Supernatural, the volume on low.
Vigo flipped aimlessly through one of the magazines scattered across the end tables, his face and clothes smudged with dirt, while Jagger stared into space like a zombie.
A middle-aged man and woman who looked like siblings sat near an elderly man at the other end of the room, but I hardly saw them.
My head was still back at the bottom of the ravine where Cassie’s car had landed.
Everything had moved quickly once the rescue team arrived, but the time before that — the time when Vigo and I had been alone with Cassie in the ravine — had seemed infinite.
I could still feel Cassie’s small hand in mine, could still hear the shallowness of her breathing (I was pretty sure she had at least one broken rib), could hear her voice, small and terrified from the twisted confines of the car.
I’m scared.
I’d wanted to lift the Subaru off her body like a superhero, had wanted to pull her forcibly from the car, gnaw through her seat belt if I had to.
But this time, my recklessness couldn’t save me. Couldn’t save Cassie.
I can’t see.
I’d been forced to wait, to do nothing but hold her hand, murmur comforting, pointless, useless words through the shattered glass of the Subaru’s windshield.
It had been a form of torture, one I’d endured because the alternative — hurting Cassie worse than she’d already been hurt by trying to get her out — was unthinkable.
Vigo threw down the magazine he’d been aimlessly flipping through. “Not gonna lie, I’m freaked that she can’t see.”
“Same,” Jagger said.
“It could be temporary,” I said. “A symptom of a head injury.”
It wasn’t just wishful thinking. I’d looked it up in the bathroom after we’d gotten to the hospital during a frantic ten minutes when I’d paced the antiseptic-smelling room like a caged animal before finally stopping to punch the tile wall until my knuckles had bled.
Jagger and Vigo hadn’t even asked about my hand when I’d joined them in the waiting room.
They felt it too.
I could rob a bank without so much as a butterfly in my stomach, but waiting for one of the doctors to give us an update on Cassie was enough to make me want to puke all over the linoleum floor.
I stopped pacing when Jagger and Vigo turned their heads toward the hall, followed by the middle-aged couple and the old man. There was a disturbance in the air, like a rush of cold wind before a storm, and I followed their gazes just in time to see Bram stalk into the waiting room.
He held Maeve’s hand, his face a mask of fury as Poe and Remy followed close behind them.
I’d called Bram myself, but somehow I was still surprised to see him in a setting as mundane — as human — as a hospital.
He didn’t even slow down as he approached me, and I saw his arm swing as if in slow motion, didn’t even try to dodge the hammer of his fist as it hit my jaw.
I deserved it.
My teeth snapped together and warm blood spilled onto my chin from my split lip.
Jagger and Vigo were on him before I realized what was happening, hauling Bram off me as Poe and Remy moved to join in.
Bram kept on coming, a freight train held back by a piece of dental floss.
I was preparing to take it, preparing to let him pummel me into dust, when Maeve stepped between us.
“Bram.” There was something surprisingly tender in the firmness of her voice. “Stop.”
He froze, his hands fisted at his sides.
She stepped toward him, took his face in her hands, and spoke softly. “This isn’t going to help Cassie.”
He tipped his forehead against hers and for a moment they stared into each other’s eyes, some kind of unspoken communication passing between them.
Then Bram straightened and looked at me. “You deserve worse.” He looked at Jagger and Vigo. “All of you.”
“We know,” Jagger said.
He shook his head. “I trusted you with her.”
“We fucking know,” Vigo said, his voice anguished.
Maeve glanced at the middle-aged couple, who’d edged to the far corners of the room like they were hoping for an exit. “Let’s sit down.”
We eyed each other warily, then arranged ourselves in the plastic chairs, Bram and his crew on one side, Jagger, Vigo, and me on the other, like warring factions sitting down to hammer out a cease fire.
“Start talking,” Bram growled.
“She went to see Daisy,” I said.
“And happened to go off the mountain?”
I remembered what Cassie had said when she’d told us about Travis Dorsey: that Bram had been in the car with their parents when it had gone off the road.
What was it doing to him to imagine Cassie going through the same thing?
I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to see Bram as human, but it was too late. I couldn’t un-know what I knew about him, that once upon a time, he’d been not a monster but a scared teenager trapped at the bottom of the mountain in a car with his dead parents.
“We went to Travis Dorsey’s house,” Vigo said.
I scowled at him but he just shrugged.
Bram froze, like he was having trouble processing the words Vigo had said.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” he finally said.
“Cassie wanted to know who’d hired him,” Jagger said quietly.
Bram’s jaw tightened. “And you took it upon yourself to find out?”
I stared him down. “Who else was going to do it?”
He lunged at me but Maeve grabbed his arm and pulled him back into his chair before his fist could make contact with my face again.
“Someday I’m going to fucking kill you.” He looked at Jagger and Vigo. “All of you.”
“I don’t get it.” Poe rubbed at the corner of his mouth with his thumb. “What does Travis Dorsey have to do with Cassie’s accident?”
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Vigo said.
We all stood at the same time as a blonde woman in scrubs entered the waiting room.
“Family of Cassandra Montgomery?” she called out.
We stepped forward all at once.
Bram glared at us, but I just glared right back, because family or not, I wasn’t walking out of there without knowing Cassie was okay.
“I’m her brother,” Bram said.
“I’m Doctor Sterling.” The woman had warm brown eyes and a friendly, open face. “I was one of the attending physicians on her surgery. Cassandra has some internal bleeding, a fractured arm, and two broken ribs, in addition to a concussion and trauma to her occipital lobe.”
“English,” Bram growled.
Maeve grabbed his arm and looked at the doctor. “Can you explain that in layman’s terms?”
The doctor nodded. “She had a minor laceration to her spleen, and the part of her brain that controls visual processing was damaged during the accident. She also had two broken ribs, but those injuries are minor in comparison to the internal bleeding and the head injury.”
It took me a minute to name the tightness in my chest as fear.
“Will she be okay?” I asked.
“The surgery went well,” Doctor Sterling said. “We repaired the laceration to her spleen and taped up her ribs. She also took a few stitches to her forehead, but that will heal cleanly.”
Bram was the one to ask the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
“What about her vision?”
The doctor hesitated. “Occipital lobe trauma can heal with time.”
“Can?” I couldn’t help it. Now that Bram had ripped off the band-aid I had to ask.
Doctor Sterling’s mouth turned down in a sympathetic frown. “Unfortunately there are no guarantees. We just have to wait and see.”
“Wait and see?” Bram’s voice rose, and Maeve put a steadying hand on his arm. “That’s what you’ve got? Wait and see?”
“I’m sorry.” Doctor Sterling sounded like she meant it. “The waiting is the hardest part, but it’s really all we can do. We’ll keep her here for a few days, make sure that injury to her spleen is healing up, and do another MRI in a couple days. We’ll know more then.”
“Can we see her?” Jagger asked.
“Who the fuck is ‘we’?” Bram looked like he wanted to tear off Jagger’s head. “I’m her brother.”
“Anyone else related by blood or marriage?” Doctor Sterling asked.
I’d never had an ounce of interest in marriage, but right then I would have given both my nuts to be married to Cassie just so I could see her.
“No,” Bram said. “I’m her only family.”
“She’s in recovery,” Doctor Sterling said, “but I’ll take you to her for a few minutes. If all goes well she can have more visitors tomorrow.”
Maeve released Bram’s arm and he headed down the hall with the doctor.
And all I could do was watch. More fucking helpless than I’d ever been.