Chapter 19 #3
We follow the doctor through the double doors. Down a hallway that smells like antiseptic and exhaustion. Past rooms with closed curtains and the quiet beeping of monitors.
Room 412. The doctor stops outside. Looks at us.
“She woke up briefly about twenty minutes ago. She was disoriented. Asked for someone named Kaiden, then asked for her father. She’s sedated again for pain management, but she’s responsive, which is very encouraging.”
She asked for me. In a hospital bed, in pain, coming out of sedation—the first word was my name.
Thomas pushes the door open. The room is dim. The machines beep. The IV drips. And in the bed, under a thin hospital blanket, surrounded by monitors and tubes and the clinical architecture of medical care—
Cat.
She looks small. That’s the first thing. She looks small in a way she never looks in the world—the ice princess takes up space, commands rooms, makes hallways part. This girl is diminished. Reduced. The hospital bed makes her look like a child.
Her face. The swelling is worse under the fluorescent lights—the left eye a purple crescent, the lip crusted, the jaw mottled with bruising.
Her arms are bandaged from wrist to elbow—the chemical burns dressed, the old cuts underneath presumably treated too.
A monitor clips her finger. An IV feeds into the back of her hand.
Thomas goes to one side of the bed. Takes her hand. Bends over and presses his forehead to her fingers and makes a sound that’s not crying—it’s the sound past crying, the sound a person makes when they’ve used up every tear and what’s left is just the raw, stripped engine of grief.
I go to the other side. Pull the chair close. Sit.
Her hand is right there. On the blanket.
The IV taped to the back of it. Her fingers are limp.
Her nails—the black polish she always wears—are chipped and broken, and there’s dirt under them, and the sight of that detail—the dirt from the basement floor still under her fingernails—breaks me more than anything else.
More than the bruises. More than the bandages.
The dirt. Evidence that she was on the ground. That they put her on the ground.
I take her hand. Careful. The IV. The bruised fingers. I hold it the way I’d hold something made of paper—like pressure alone could damage it.
“Hey, Kitty Cat.” My voice. Wrecked. Barely there. “I’m here. I found you. I told you I would.”
No response. The monitor beeps. The IV drips. The room holds its particular, terrible quiet.
“The doctor said she asked for you,” Thomas says. From the other side. His voice is raw. “When she woke up. Before she asked for me. She asked for you first.”
He looks at me over his daughter’s hospital bed. This man who found a boy in her bedroom and lectured him about being safe. Who shook my hand in his kitchen and said “You earned the chance. Don’t waste it.”
“You found her,” he says. Simple. Absolute. “You and your friends found my daughter when nobody else could.”
“Ryan found the address. The police found her.”
“You found her.” He doesn’t argue the correction. “And I will never forget that, Kaiden. For the rest of my life.”
I nod. Can’t speak. My throat is closed.
My eyes are burning. I’m holding the hand of a girl who is lying in a hospital bed because a family of monsters decided she belonged to them, and I’m sitting across from her father, and between us is the body of the person we both love most in the world, and the machines are beeping and the IV is dripping and she’s alive.
Alive. Alive. Alive.
The word is the only thing left in my head. Not anger. Not plans. Not revenge. Just the word, on repeat, like a heartbeat of its own: alive.
I lean forward. Press my lips to her knuckles. The ones that are bruised. The ones that hit Jon at a party. The ones that are chipped and dirty and still the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen.
“I love you,” I whisper. Against her skin.
Not for Thomas. Not for the room. For her.
Even if she can’t hear it. Even if she’s somewhere deep and sedated and miles from this room.
The word needs to exist in the space between us, because I almost lost the chance to say it, and I am not wasting another second pretending it’s too big or too new or too terrifying.
“I love you, Cat. And when you wake up, I’m going to say it to your face. And then I’m going to say it every day until you’re tired of hearing it. And then I’m going to say it anyway.”
Thomas is quiet. If he heard, he doesn’t show it. He just holds his daughter’s other hand and stares at her face and breathes. The room beeps. The IV drips. The night continues outside the window. And I hold on.
Because holding on is the only thing I know how to do.
It’s the thing my body learned in a basement at twelve—not from the monster, but despite him.
The refusal to let go. The animal, stubborn, unreasonable insistence on staying alive, staying present, staying connected to the person beside you even when the dark is absolute and the pain is unbearable and every rational argument says to give up.
I didn’t give up at twelve. I won’t give up now.
She’s alive. She asked for me. And when she opens her eyes, I’ll be here. I’ll always be here.