Chapter 23 Until I Die
Until I Die
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
— ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Iswam in darkness with nothing but stars sparkling above me. Cold water crept into the cracks of my very soul. Like a vacuum, it lured me toward a looming void beneath.
Despite the cold, I burned. Every move stung and scorched, cauterizing me from the inside out. The water grew colder the deeper I went.
The void promised relief, and I swam toward it.
A jolt, a bright flash of pain, had me crying in protest.
“Stay with me, Sophia!”
I pushed the voice away. I wanted the void.
My heartbeat throbbed in my arms and knees, sharper in my leg and abdomen. Agony ebbed and flowed with the waves around me.
“Sophia, can you hear me? Don’t you fucking let go.”
I sank into the cold ocean, drowning, languishing in the knowledge it would end soon.
Meaningless words drifted through the water—a voice I recognized, but couldn’t place.
I bobbed in and out of the abyss, floating in freezing waves until the burning began to ease.
A different sort of warmth enveloped me, enticing me away from the cold.
“Sophia, please. Open your eyes.”
I groaned, begging wordlessly to go back under.
“No, sweetheart, don’t fight. You’ll rip the stitches.”
Was I fighting? I let my muscles relax, and the pain of my various wounds eased. Again and again, a warm, worried voice coaxed me into obedience.
I liked that voice.
Comforting.
Safe.
At some point, the timelessness converted back to seconds and minutes. My body beached itself somewhere on the shores of consciousness.
“Please,” the voice whispered. “Please open your eyes.”
Powerless to disobey, my lids cracked. The world swam into focus. An IV line sprouted from a vein on my hand. The tubing led to bags of fluid hanging on a hook above the bed. I focused on the letters. Saline and antibiotics. The bedside table was littered with empty vials.
“Sophia?”
Disoriented, my gaze traveled toward that voice, the one that had coaxed me back to life again and again.
Unkempt and brittle, Lucas Scott stared with a blank expression and a rainbow of emotion in his eyes. “Can you hear me?”
At my slow nod, he released a breath.
He sank to his knees by the bed, where I lay tucked under covers in his master bedroom. His forehead fell onto the mattress beside me.
“Thank you,” he whispered to the floor.
Stiff and sore, I lifted my hand to scratch my fingers into his hair, counting his breaths.
One, two, three…
We stayed like that for a long time, one of his hands resting on my leg, the other on my ribs.
After a while, he shifted onto the bed, his weight dipping the mattress. “Can you speak?”
“I—I think so,” I said, my voice rusty.
“Will you tell me how this happened?” The lethal calm in his voice prickled along my spine, surging my veins with adrenaline, but I still tripped over the memories thanks to the drugs in my system.
Frozen beside me, Lucas stared at the wall above my head while I stuttered out a mess of a story.
When I finished, my eyes fluttered closed, fatigue dragging me back toward the void.
“You were almost dead by the time I got here,” he said, tone lifeless. “I was sitting in my living room, and the light turned red, and—”
My eyes popped open. Skin flushed, he wouldn’t look at me again. As I set my hand atop his, he turned his palm to grasp my fingers.
“They stabbed you sixteen times. Thank god they didn’t hit anything important because I wouldn’t have— The bleeding—” His words grew harder, angrier. “You were pale as death, your pulse so faint. I can’t believe I got the bleeding to stop. You’re fucking lucky I’m O negative.”
“Y-you gave me your blood?”
He ignored me. “You left a trail of red breadcrumbs leading here, so I had to wash away the evidence. When I made it back, you were burning up. I had to steal antibiotics.” He lapsed into a long silence, staring down at my hand on his.
“You’ve been in and out for six days—and I—” He shook his head.
“But I had to leave so no one suspected.” His gaze lifted to mine. “What if you’d died while I was away?”
The fear in those words reminded me of a caged animal, threatened and feral. His voice wavered, then neutralized. “Can you please tell me why you were sent on a raid like that?”
I swallowed against my thick tongue. “It was a rescue mission. They needed medics.”
“And they were willing to sacrifice you for it?”
My heart lurched a slow, throbbing beat, and I fought against the narcotized confusion. “Theo wasn’t there. He couldn’t—”
“Is your life worth nothing to them?” he hissed, like a cornered cat. “I told you. I told you I wouldn’t tolerate threats against your safety.”
I blinked heavily at him.
“They’re supposed to protect their vulnerable, not throw them out to be eaten by wolves.”
“Lucas, it was a misunderstanding.”
His gaze turned sharp, his voice cutting. “You will not leave this house until I say so. You’ll stay until you’ve recovered.”
Nerves tickled my insides. The same danger I remembered from those first weeks with him radiated toward me, but it formed an invisible shield around me. Protective. Possessive.
Those intense eyes focused on mine, furious and devastated. “When you go back to them, you can tell Harrison my continued loyalty depends entirely on your survival. If something happens to you, Sophia, I will kill him.”
I blinked as his words filtered through my brain and settled into the place I processed dangerous things.
Because this… this was perilous. If I told Theo that Lucas was issuing threats…
“If threatening him is how I make you matter to him, I will.” A bloodthirsty anguish deepened his voice, each consonant honed like a knife raised to protect me.
I attempted to sit up, but I couldn’t do it. Healing stab wounds illuminated with pain like neon lights. “You can’t do that,” I rasped.
“I assure you I can.”
I tried to form a counterargument, but it was useless. If he wanted, this man could ninja his way into our headquarters and murder everyone inside. Lucas was the most lethal person I’d ever met, and I had no doubt that if he wanted someone dead, they would be.
His hand was so rigid around mine that my fingers tingled. My voice dropped to a placating whisper. “Lucas—”
“I won’t lose you to this war.”
I sank deeper into my pillows while the confusion spun my head. Hadn’t we been operating under his belief that my presence in his life was the worst mistake he’d ever made?
“I don’t understand,” I said.
A beat passed while he stared at me, jaw twitching. “You are mine. If they take you from me, I’ll kill them all.”
He’d…what?
This man had spent the last several weeks standing halfway across the room, barking information and ordering me to leave, and now he was promising to murder our general for threatening my safety?
My sleepy, drugged brain couldn’t comprehend it. Instead, it threw out a memory I wished it didn’t:
You’re the weapon Williams will choose to end him.
Mysteriously, my life seemed to be all Lucas cared about, and the Defiance, in all their hypocritical wisdom, wanted me to betray him.
I let go of his hand to grip his face. I wanted to see him up close, needed to understand the emotions that drove these desperate words. Flecks of amber blazed from his eyes like flames, and fizzy heat burst to life in my chest.
Lucas Scott was a perpetual enigma, but one thing was abundantly clear: he cared a great deal about me. Maybe he wished he didn’t. Maybe he regretted ever agreeing to let me be his contact.
But I mattered to him.
Lucas had a personal vendetta and a crooked moral compass. He guarded the things he cared for with frank violence. Somehow, in some way, I mattered to him, and he now considered the Defiance a threat to my life.
As the gravity fell on me, hard as a slab of iron, panic followed. He’d tried to push me away, but he couldn’t stop me from falling any more than he could stop himself from caring. We’d both wind up dead in our attempts to keep the other safe…
A sob burst free. “Lucas, they’re already planning to kill you. They want me to do it. If I tell Theo you’re threatening to kill him, he’ll—”
“Try to end me first,” he finished for me, a tad softer. “I don’t care what they try with me, so long as you remain safe.”
I blinked. “Wait. You knew?”
“Of course I did. It’s the strategic move. Take my information, then kill me when I’ve outlived my usefulness. I used to analyze every move you made, wondering when you’d strike.”
“Wh-what?”
“If they try to take you out with me, however, I’m going to have a big problem.”
I blinked, studying the resigned set of his shoulders. “They wouldn’t do that,” I whispered, “and I—I’d never do that to you.”
He rolled his eyes. “You should have done it the day of those executions, but you were still searching for something to redeem.”
“Well, I was right.” I tried to sit up again. He took hold of my elbows, helping me into a sitting position. “I’m alive because of you.”
We stared at each other long enough that things turned hazy, and his face glowed.
He touched my cheek. “If they let something happen to you, Theodore Harrison is a dead man. The NAO destroyed my country. Commander Haynes shot my father. Jack Miller killed my sister. If the Defiance sacrifices you, I’ll burn it all down.”
Warmth spread from my chest to my fingers and toes, and I surrendered to the pounding desire to kiss him.
My dry lips met his, and I pulled him as close as I could. Every little movement hurt, but the pain didn’t stop me. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted the reminder I was alive, that I had lived because of him, that I would continue to live. For him.
I fell backward, and he followed, trying to be gentle. But I didn’t want gentle. I only wanted him.
“Sophia, you’re barely healed.” He spoke the words against my lips.
“I don’t care. I almost died. You saved me.”
“It took me hours to fix you. You’re finally getting some color back. Please be careful.”
I clawed my fingers into his skin, trying to keep him close, even as he withdrew.
Despite the pain medications painting fog over my reality, I still wanted him next to me, on top of me, inside me.
I’d thought those wounds would kill me. This dangerous, morally ambiguous man gave me his own blood to keep me alive.
I wanted him.
But he wasn’t wrong about my wounds.
“How did you fix me?” I murmured as the pain ratcheted up.
“I told you. I’m a doctor, remember?”
My hazy focus landed on him, and I waited for the joke, but it never came. “You—are?”
His mouth quirked in that wry smile. “Another thing you thought I was lying about?”
Words deserted me.
He pressed his palm to my forehead. “You feel feverish again.”
Each blink dragged me closer to the void, my body telling me to rest. “I think it’s you,” I slurred. “You make me hot.” My eyes closed against my will. “Don’t leave.”
I was almost asleep when he whispered, “You’ll never be rid of me now, Sophia.”
When I woke again, the light in the room had changed, and he was gone.
He was gone.
I writhed on the bed, panicking at the loneliness, the abandonment. At my single whimper, he popped up from the bench at the end of the bed.
My body stilled when I found him, the anxiety drowned by a wave of relief.
He hadn’t left.
He’d stayed, like he promised.
His stare froze on my hand when I reached for him. Slowly, he moved to stand next to me, taking hold of my fingers.
With protesting, sleepy noises, I demanded he lie beside me, tugging on his arm with all my failing strength.
Color flickered in his eyes as he caught my meaning. He crawled onto the bed beside me and settled against the pillows while I turned toward him. My fingers interlaced with his on his chest, and exhaustion lulled me back under. I drifted off to him tracing shapes on my knuckles.
The next time, I woke enfolded in his warmth. I’d wiggled my way right next to him, my head on his chest, his arms around me. I turned my face into him, breathing him in.
“Lucas?”
“Mmm?”
“Stay with me.”
He kissed my forehead and let long seconds pass in thick silence. Finally, he said, “I will. Until I die.”