Chapter 63 Harper
HARPER
My hospital room had transformed into a waiting room of sorts. I could only imagine how many regulations Blake had bent to make that happen, but somehow, Blake, Axel, Jace, Faith, and Ryker had all crammed themselves into the small space.
Knox’s parents had been here, too, his mother’s wheelchair parked right beside the door, his father standing over her with his hand on her shoulder, both of them gray-faced and quiet.
Ryker had finally convinced them to go find something to eat, promising he’d call the second anything changed.
I didn’t think either of them actually wanted food.
I think they just needed somewhere to put their hands and their fear for a little while.
Tessa was home, resting on Blake’s orders, and Dakota and Scarlett had gone on a coffee run, insisting the hospital cafeteria’s version was criminal and they needed “real provisions.”
Like we were just hanging out. Like this was a normal day.
Like Knox’s life wasn’t hanging in the balance, and we weren’t sitting here, waiting to hear his fate.
“Let’s talk logistics,” Faith said, her voice taking on that aggressively cheerful tone she used when she was trying to fix things. “Your house burned down. We need to find you somewhere to stay.”
“The mansion,” Jace offered. “Plenty of room.”
“Totally.” Faith jumped on it like a lifeline. “The upstairs bedrooms are just sitting there, collecting dust. It’s practically a crime against architecture. Really, you’d be doing the guys a favor.”
I nodded, but the word came out hollow. “Yeah.”
Because how could I imagine staying anywhere without Knox?
Axel shifted in his chair, breaking the quiet with a slight teasing sound to his voice. Deflecting with sarcasm. His love language. “So, on a completely unrelated note, if you do stay at the mansion, maybe Rainbow could room with you.”
Faith’s head snapped toward him. “Absolutely not.”
“I’m just saying. Fresh start. New people. Maybe she’d imprint on them instead.”
“She has imprinted on you, Axel. That ship has sailed. It has sailed, docked, and built a permanent residence anytime she sees you.”
“Maybe she just needs exposure therapy. Like those videos where they introduce cats to new family members, and eventually, the cat stops hissing.”
“Rainbow has never hissed at you a day in her life. She literally sleeps on your feet.”
“She doesn’t ask permission!”
Ryker snorted. “Axel, last week, I watched you carry her up the stairs because she looked ‘too tired’ to walk.”
“She has short legs! It’s a lot of stairs! That’s not affection; that’s basic logistics.”
“Uh-huh.” Faith arched an eyebrow. “And the gourmet dog bakery?”
Axel’s expression flickered. Caught. “I was driving by.”
“You drove forty minutes out of your way.”
“They were having a sale.”
“You bought her a custom cake shaped like a rubber chicken because she ‘seemed sad’ about destroying her last toy.”
“She was moping! It was pathetic! What was I supposed to do, let her wallow?”
“You love her,” Faith said flatly.
“I tolerate her. There’s a difference.”
“She farted on Jace last week, and you laughed so hard, you cried.”
“That was objectively funny. Jace’s face was—” Axel caught Jace’s glare and coughed. “I mean, terrible. Very tragic. Poor Jace.”
Despite everything, I felt my lips twitch. Just barely. Just enough.
These people. This chaotic, fiercely loyal family I’d somehow stumbled into.
Months ago, I was counting down the days until Silas found me.
Accepting my fate like it was inevitable.
Telling myself I’d figure it out while, deep down, I wasn’t figuring out anything.
I was just … dying. Slowly. One shift at a time, one sleepless night at a time, one flinch at every slammed door.
Then I met a convicted murderer who looked at my scar and growled, Who hurt you?
And everything changed.
A knock on the door made everyone tense.
I stopped breathing. My eyes locked on the handle as it turned, as the door swung inward, as a woman in a white coat stepped through.
She was tall and angular, with steel-gray hair cropped close to her head and the kind of face that had probably never delivered good news gently. Her gaze swept the room, cataloging the crowd with visible surprise.
“Dr. Ellery,” Blake said, rising from his chair.
Knox’s neurologist.
I tried to read her expression, searching for any tell, any flicker that would hint at what she was about to say. But her face was stone. Unreadable. Professional.
“They’re all family,” Blake assured her before she could comment on the audience.
Dr. Ellery nodded once, accepting this. She closed the door behind her with a soft click that somehow sounded deafening.
“Well”—she slid her hands into her coat pockets—“we’ve completed the CT scan and the MRI. Mr. Blackwood does have a linear fracture at the base of his occipital bone, along with a grade two concussion.”
I gripped the bed rails. Linear fracture. Occipital bone. My nurse brain translated automatically: a crack at the back of his skull where it met his spine. Serious. Painful. But linear fractures were cleaner than depressed fractures, less likely to drive bone fragments into brain tissue.
Okay. Okay. What else?
“He also sustained smoke inhalation and second-degree burns on both forearms and his lower legs. They’ve been cleaned and dressed, and we’ll monitor for infection, but they should heal well with proper care. And he should recover from the smoke inhalation as well.”
Burns. From the fire. From carrying me out while the house collapsed around us.
My chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with smoke inhalation.
“However …” Dr. Ellery’s gaze found mine, and something in her expression shifted. Softened, just slightly. “There’s no epidural or subdural hematoma. No subarachnoid hemorrhage. No midline shift, and the ventricles are normal. We see no evidence of diffuse axonal injury on the imaging.”
The breath I’d been holding escaped in a rush.
No brain bleed. No swelling. No catastrophic damage. The second concussion was serious, the skull fracture was serious, but it wasn’t … it wasn’t the worst-case scenario my mind had been constructing for the last three hours.
“We’ll be monitoring him closely,” she continued.
“But you think he’s going to be okay?” I pressed.
Dr. Ellery paused. Measured. “It would be premature to make guarantees with any head injury.”
“It’s okay,” Blake said gently. “They understand. They just want to know what you think, not what you’d put in a chart.”
She considered this. Weighed whatever professional caution she’d been trained in against the desperate hope on my face. Then, slowly, she nodded.
“Based on the imaging, I’m optimistic. His neurological exam was intact when he arrived.
He knew his name, the date, where he was.
He was … quite insistent about seeing someone named Harper actually.
” The ghost of a smile crossed her lips.
“I believe his exact words were, ‘I’m not doing a damn thing until someone tells me she’s okay. ’ ”
The tears spilled over. I couldn’t stop them.
That stubborn, impossible man.
“Well”—Axel broke the silence with his signature deadpan—“Knox sure knows how to keep us all teetering on the edge of cardiac arrest. It’s really his best quality.”
Ryker elbowed him, smirking. “Read the room, man.”
“What? I’m relieved. This is my relieved face.”
“Your relieved face looks exactly like your annoyed face.”
“They’re versatile.”
I barely heard them. My mind was already racing ahead, already doing the math. If he was stable. If he was awake. If he was asking for me—
“Is there any chance,” I said, my voice thick, “that we could share a room? For observation, I mean. Since we’re both here anyway.”
Blake’s expression softened. He exchanged a glance with Dr. Ellery.
“I think we can arrange that,” he said. “Let me make some calls.”
Twenty minutes later, an orderly was wheeling my bed down the corridor. The fluorescent lights passed overhead in a steady rhythm, one after another, and I counted them the way I’d counted ceiling tiles earlier. Something to focus on. Something to keep me from flying apart.
The door to room 412 was already open.
And there he was.
Knox lay propped against the raised hospital bed, his head wrapped in white gauze that made his silver-blue eyes stand out even more than usual.
Those eyes tracked to me the instant my bed crossed the threshold, and something in his expression cracked open.
Relief. Desperation. A rawness I’d never seen him show around anyone else.
White bandages wrapped both his forearms from wrist to elbow. More gauze peeked out from beneath the hospital blanket where it covered his shins. Evidence. Proof. The cost of loving me written on his skin.
The tattoos on his upper arms disappeared beneath the hospital gown, and without the prison orange, without the walls and the guards and the weight of fourteen years pressing down on him, he looked almost … vulnerable.
The orderly positioned my bed beside his, close enough that our hands could touch if we reached.
So, we reached.
His fingers laced through mine, warm and rough and real. Careful. Gentle. The same hands that had carried me through fire now softened the moment they touched me.
“Well,” Knox said after a long moment, “that sucked.”
A startled laugh escaped me. “That’s your takeaway? That sucked?”
“I’m not wrong.”
“You have a fractured skull. And burns. Second-degree burns, Knox.”
“And it sucked.” He lifted our joined hands, pressed a kiss to my knuckles like the bandages on his arms were an afterthought. “You okay?”
“I’m okay? You’re asking if I’m okay?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You ran into a burning building for me.”
“And I’d do it again tomorrow. You okay?”
I stared at him. This man. This impossible, stubborn, infuriating man, who had just had his skull cracked and his skin burned and was lying in a hospital bed, was asking about my well-being.
“I’m fine. Smoke inhalation. Some bruises.” I didn’t mention where. I didn’t have to. His gaze had already flickered to my throat and away, his jaw tightening briefly before he forced it to relax.
We lay there in silence for a moment, just holding hands, just breathing.
I thought about who I was just a few months ago. A woman running on fumes and fear. I’d convinced myself that survival was enough. That getting through each day without Silas finding me was a victory.
I wasn’t living. I was just … not dying yet.
And then Knox Blackwood walked into my infirmary with a split lip and silver-blue eyes that saw right through me.
Don’t judge a book by its cover. Isn’t that what they say?
Silas had been a correctional officer. A security guard back in Indiana before that. On paper, he was the man trusted to protect and serve. Yet he was the monster. And the tattooed inmate with blood on his hands and fourteen years behind bars?
He was my salvation.
“Faith and the others offered us the mansion,” I said. “Guest room with a bay window. Natural light. No prison bars.”
He exhaled slowly. “I like the sound of that.”
“Me too.”
Another beat of quiet. Then I took a breath.
“I have to tell you something.”
Knox’s brow furrowed. “That sounds ominous.”
“It’s not. At least, I hope it’s not.” I chewed my lip. “I called Gwen.”
Every muscle in his body went rigid. His hand tightened around mine, not painfully, but desperately. Like I’d just handed him something fragile and he was terrified to drop it.
“I figured she’d want to know you were here. She wanted to rush right over, but I convinced her to wait until visiting hours.”
Knox didn’t speak. Didn’t move. His chest rose and fell in uneven breaths, and when I finally worked up the courage to look at his face, I saw something I’d never seen on him before.
Hope. Raw and terrified and blazing.
I squeezed his hand as hard as I could. “She’s coming first thing in the morning. Only reason she stayed back was when I assured her you were okay and needed rest.”
“Thank you,” he choked out. “Harper, I … thank you.”
I brought his hand to my lips and kissed his bruised knuckles.
“That’s what family does,” I said. “And like it or not, you’re stuck with me now.”
He laughed. Wet and broken and beautiful.
“Yeah,” he managed. “I think I can live with that.”
The fluorescent lights hummed. The monitors beeped their steady rhythm. And somewhere in the quiet space between us, I felt something shift into place.
Not an ending. A beginning.
I’d spent so long living in absolutes. Good or bad. Innocent or guilty. Victim or monster. It was easier that way. Cleaner. If I drew hard lines, I’d never make the same mistake twice. I’d never trust the wrong man again.
But absolutes are just fear wearing a disguise.
I’d looked at Knox and seen a cautionary tale. I’d told myself that bad men don’t deserve empathy; they deserve consequences.
But lying here, my hand in his, watching this man who had risked everything to keep me safe … I realized I’d been wrong.
About him. About myself. About all of it.
Compassion isn’t weakness. I knew that now. Forgiveness wasn’t permission. And people weren’t just the worst thing they’ve ever done.
Sometimes, the sin and the salvation really did live in the same heart.
I squeezed his hand tighter, watching his eyes drift closed, and made myself a promise.
I was done living in absolutes. Done letting fear dictate who deserved my empathy and who didn’t. Done punishing myself for trusting the wrong person once.
Knox had shown me another way.
And for the first time in years, I was ready to take it.