37. Ellie
Ellie
Kade's blood is already soaking the back seat, but I refuse to let myself cave in to the panic that wants to take over and instead focus on assessing his injuries.
"Stay still." I push his jacket open, peeling the ruined fabric away from his already bruising ribs. Holy shit, this is bad. This is really, really fucking bad. "I need to see."
"I'm fine," he groans, the stubborn son of a bitch.
"You're not fine. You look like fucking roadkill!"
He laughs, and it turns into a wet cough.
I press my palms flat against his chest, then his stomach and his sides. I've checked my own body over countless times this way, assessing the bruises and the amount of makeup it would take to cover them, but this is… extensive.
They beat him to a fucking pulp in there. I'm pretty sure the only reason he isn't dead is because they wanted to drag out the torture for long enough to use him as ammo against the Kings.
There are no gunshots or stab wounds at least. I let myself breathe one shallow breath of relief at that.
But the rest of him is an absolute disaster.
His ribs give unnaturally under my fingers, and the touch makes him hiss through his teeth, as gentle as I'm being.
His face is so swollen, one eye won't even open and probably won't for weeks.
There's dried blood smeared and crusted everywhere, and fresher blood on his mouth.
When the streetlights we pass occasionally strobe through the windows, I see just how gray his skin is underneath the bruising and the tattoos.
"You need a hospital," I mutter. "A real one, with real doctors, not Dr. Price."
"Dr. Price works at the hospital," he reminds me.
I grunt. "Well, he shouldn't. No one who makes house calls for kidnappers should have a license."
"No hospitals." His good eye finds me in the dark. "Hospitals mean cops, cops means Todd finds you."
"You could be bleeding internally, Kade. You could have a punctured lung, or organ failure, or—"
"Princess." His hand comes up, and it's shaking, but it finds my cheek anyway. His thumb drags over my cheekbone, leaving a smear of his own blood there that I don't bother wiping away. "I'm fine. You're catastrophizing."
"We're in the back of a getaway car, my evil stepfather is running a fucking gang that's probably coming after us as we speak, you're bleeding out, and I'm catastrophizing?"
Tank gives him a look in the rearview that screams, "She has a point."
Kade just grunts. "So it's a minor catastrophe. You're making it sound like a bigger one."
"Stop talking. Save your air considering your lungs are probably Swiss cheese at this point."
But he doesn't stop, because Kade has never once in his life done the thing I asked him to do.
"Listen to me." His thumb keeps moving on my cheek, exploring my face reverently. "If I don't... if this goes bad, I need you to hear me."
"It's not going to go bad," I say through my teeth.
"Ellie."
"Don't you dare." My voice cracks and I hate it, but I mostly hate that he can hear it. "Don't you dare start a deathbed speech in the back of Tank's car, Kade, I swear to God."
"I'm calling it off."
I forget the rest of my sentence.
"The contract." His breath rattles. "It's done. Over with. You don't owe us a fucking year. You don't owe us a fucking minute."
"Kade, what are you saying?"
"Came close enough tonight." His good eye is wet now, and I don't think it's just from the swelling. "Close enough that I need you to hear it. From me."
"You're delirious. Your head was basically a punching bag for those asshats."
"I never hated you." He gets the words out like he's afraid he won't be conscious enough to say them in a few minutes. "I let you think I did. I wanted you to think I did, because it was easier than the truth, but I never hated you. Not once, Ellie. I never could."
I can't breathe. The car takes a corner and his body sways into mine. I catch him with my whole body, both arms clinging tightly around the wreck of him. I don't even know which wounds to hold pressure on, there are so many.
"I hated me," he says into my shoulder. "For not being enough.
For not giving you a reason to stay with us.
You didn't leave because you were spoiled or shallow or whatever shit I told myself.
You left because the four of us were never gonna be enough to keep you, and that's on me. That was always been on me."
"Kade, that's not—"
"So I'm letting you out." His hand drops from my face, fumbles at my throat in the dark where the collar rests. "If you stay, by some miracle, I want it to be because you want to. Not because I trapped you or because of some collar I had no fucking right to put on you in the first place."
His fingers find the clasp at the back of my neck. His other hand reaches up between the seats. "Tank. My lighter."
Tank looks confused, but reaches into his pocket and hands something over. The small, familiar metal object drops into Kade's bloody hand and he shakes as he tries to open the case. He gets it on the third try, just as I'm about to tell him to stop, whatever this is.
The case opens and something drops into his palm.
A key?
A dozen competing emotions slam into me at once as he sweeps my hair back with his trembling hands and unlocks the collar that used to feel like a brand of humiliation. But I've grown used to the metal against my skin and it's started to feel like security.
It comes off.
The collar slides away from my throat into his bloody hand, and the air hits my bare neck. I press my hand to the place the collar was supposed to sit for a full year and feel only skin.
"There." He's barely conscious now, the words slurring around the edges. "Free. You're free. You can walk out the second we stop this car and I'll never—"
I kiss him.
I have to be careful, because his mouth is split and his face is broken, so I make it soft, nothing but the press of my lips against the corner of his that somehow isn't bleeding. It shuts him up the way nothing else in the world has ever managed to shut Kade Gallagher up.
When I pull back, his good eye is staring at me, glassy and stunned. Pretty sure the pupil is also blown from a traumatic brain injury, but still.
"I didn't write that letter," I tell him, because that needs to come first. That stupid fucking letter is where everything ended and began between us.
He blinks slowly like he doesn't trust that his brain is processing the words right. "What?"
"The letter. The one you've been carrying for four years." My thumbs find his jaw and frame his broken face as gently as I can. "I never wrote it, Kade. I didn't outgrow you. That's complete bullshit and so is everything else in the letter."
"That's…" His brows pull together in confusion. "Ellie, it was your handwriting. Your lipstick."
"He forged it. Todd. He had my homework, my journals, years of my handwriting to copy.
He intercepted every letter that got sent both ways between us, and he used every word I ever sent trying to reach you to write that one so you'd stop looking.
So you'd let me go." My eyes burn with tears of rage.
"I wrote to you. Every day, week, then every month, until I thought you all forgot me.
And the whole time he was stealing them out of the mailbox and you were sitting in that RV thinking I'd… "
I can't finish the sentence.
But I don't have to. I watch it hit him. Four years of certainty that I didn't care about him or any of them shattering into a thousand tiny pieces, and underneath it is an expression I have never once seen on Kade's face. His good eye floods over and a tear slices through the blood on his cheek.
"You wrote to us?" he whispers.
"I never stopped." I press my forehead to his, careful, so careful. "We were going to tell you when you got back, but… I didn't know how to make you believe me."
"I believe you." His hand finds mine, weak, his fingers barely closing around mine. "God. I believe you, Princess. I'm so fucking sorry."
"Don't apologize. Not now." I force a smile. "You can grovel more later, when you're not bleeding all over Tank's car."
The laugh he gives me is barely anything, but it's there and I'll fucking take it. His grip on my hand loosens.
"Kade?"
His head lolls against my shoulder and he doesn't answer.
"Kade." I shake him, gentle, then not gentle. "No. No, you don't get to do that, you don't get to set me free and then check out."
His chest is still moving. I press two fingers to his throat and find the pulse, fast and irregular but still there. I'm afraid to lift my fingers, afraid it'll stop the second I do.
"Tank." My voice comes out shrill. "He passed out. He's still breathing but he passed out. How far are we from the hospital?"
Tank's hand leaves the wheel for half a second and holds up two fingers.
God, I hope he means minutes.
I zone out as Tank drives like hell, keeping my fingers on Kade's pulse the whole time. I look up when white and red lights finally flash in my peripheral vision.
The lights of the emergency room swim into view at the end of a long street. There's an ambulance that sits angled across the bay with its rear doors yawning open, paramedics moving briskly across the bay. All of it feels so bright and fast I wonder if I'm dreaming.
Or maybe it's a nightmare.
Tank doesn't slow until the very last second.
The car screeches to a halt across the painted lines, the smell of scorched rubber flooding in, and I've got my arms locked around Kade's limp weight. His blood is on my throat where a collar used to be and his pulse is still ticking faintly under my fingers.
The doors fly open.