Chapter 21
chapter twenty-one
WILLOW
Some idiot is beeping at me. Loudly. Persistently. Rudely. It takes me a second to realize the idiot is a machine and the reason it’s beeping… is because I’m apparently not dead.
I try to open my eyes and instantly regret it. The light feels like knives. My skull throbs. My throat is dry, raw—like I swallowed sand and regret. There’s an IV in the crook of my arm, tape biting into my skin. I smell antiseptic, metal, and something faintly floral.
Hospital. Perfect. I’m still on earth, then. Hell would probably smell more like Axe body spray and shame.
It takes me a second to realize I’m not alone.
Lucky’s slumped in the chair beside me, his upper body resting against my bed, his hand clutched around mine.
There’s a darkening bruise on the left side of his jaw, and a smaller, lighter one in the middle of his forehead.
His shirt is torn at his shoulder, and beneath it, I see blood.
His hair’s a disaster, wild and tangled, like he’s been running his hands through it for hours.
For a moment, I just stare at him. My brain tries to piece together the last thing I remember: lights, screaming, chaos, Phoenix, and his family.
Oh, fuck. So much was going wrong. Lucky fell. And there were other people there too, each of them just as blond as Lucky. And the gunshots. Fuck. The gunshots. Who got shot? My eyes flash over to Lucky. That tear in his shirt might have been a graze, but beside that, he doesn’t look shot.
I let out a breath, my eyes fixing on the ceiling. I thought I was going to die. My body was in full on revolt. The taste of that foul drink flashes back, sour and metallic and wrong. My stomach clenches hard enough to make the monitor beep faster as everything that just happened rips through me.
Lucky stirs. His eyes snap open, and for one dizzy heartbeat, I swear I see his whole soul in them. Fear. Relief. Love so fierce it borders on madness.
“Hey, handsome,” I croak, and it sounds like I’ve gargled gravel.
He laughs, broken, breathless, and presses the back of my hand to his lips like I might vanish again if he doesn’t anchor me. “You’re awake.” He presses his lips to my hand, over and over, holding my eyes the whole time like he’s scared to look away. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Me? You’re the one who looks like he lost a fight with a concrete mixer.”
He grins. “I won.”
The laugh that slips out of me hurts my ribs, but it feels good anyway. It feels like life returning.
He brushes a thumb over my cheek, careful, reverent. “You’re okay,” he whispers. “You’re really okay.”
“I feel like death reheated in the microwave, but… yeah. Still breathing.”
The memory of Phoenix’s eyes, calm and calculating as he forced that thing down my throat, flashes behind my eyelids. My stomach turns. The IV pump clicks beside me, reminding me that modern medicine is currently fighting off whatever hell cocktail I was forced to swallow.
I glance at Lucky again—the bruises, the exhaustion, the sleepless red rims around his eyes. “You didn’t leave. You could have gone home and slept.”
He shakes his head. “Not a chance. They tried to make me. I told them they’d have to sedate me first.”
The words, the love, the devotion, they shake something in me. As I meet his eyes, my own well. I’ve never had someone who fought for me. Literally. Who refused to leave my side, no matter how hard or dangerous it got.
“Seeing you like that,” Lucky says, his voice dropping low and rough. He shakes his head, and he looks… haunted. “I’ll never unsee it. They would have had to drag me out here dead, Willow. That’s the only way I would have left you.”
I can see it in his face. Every second of the night replaying behind his eyes. Every fear. Every ounce of devotion. I can’t stand to see him so heavy and dark.
I reach for his hand, tracing a cut across his knuckles. “Guess I’m hard to kill.”
It works. Lucky’s mouth curves, the kind of smile that feels like prayer and profanity at once. “Good thing,” he says. “Because I’m a long way from being done with you, Dagger Kitten.”
The door suddenly opens, and a man in scrubs and an easy, practiced smile steps in, clipboard tucked under his arm. He’s got the kind of calm voice people probably hire him for—the medical equivalent of a lullaby that says you didn’t die, congratulations.
“Ms. Vale,” he says. “Good to see you awake. How are we feeling?”
“Like I was bulldozed over toxic gas and barbed wire,” I rasp.
He chuckles politely. “Descriptive. Ten points for creativity.”
Lucky sits up straighter beside me, and I wonder what lie he told them when he brought me in.
The doctor glances at his chart, then back at me. “You presented with acute metabolic acidosis and severe gastrointestinal distress. Essentially, your body thought you’d been poisoned. Which, technically, you had.”
I blink. “Technically?”
He gives Lucky a knowing look. “Your partner explained everything. The ‘cleanse smoothie’ you drank at that private retreat outside the city. It was clearly contaminated. We’ve seen similar cases before.
Too many ‘natural healing’ compounds mixed together can produce dangerous reactions—blood sugar crash, organ stress, sometimes even convulsions.
You’re lucky he got you here when he did. You were in bad shape.”
I glance at Lucky. His face gives away nothing, but the twitch in his jaw tells me he rehearsed his story. Probably between punches.
The doctor keeps going. “We ran a full tox panel. Nothing synthetic, but some high concentrations of alkaloids, and traces of… well, substances that don’t belong in a smoothie.
We’ve stabilized your blood pH, treated dehydration, and flushed your system with IV fluids.
You’ll feel weak for a few days—soreness, dizziness, probably a raw throat.
But your labs are trending back to normal. ”
“So, I’m going to live?”
He smiles. “You’re going to live.”
Lucky exhales, like he’s been holding his breath since the Stone Age.
“Try to avoid any detox drinks or powders for a while,” the doctor adds. “And maybe… stick to regular smoothies. Bananas, strawberries, yogurt. Not… whatever this was.”
“Yeah,” I say, dryly. “No more smoothies. Got it.”
He makes a few notes on his clipboard. “We’re going to keep watching you for a little longer, but you should be good to go home in a few hours.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Lucky says as he offers a smile. The doctor gives one in return and exits the room to check in on his next patient.
Silence fills the room again. The IV pump hums softly, the heart monitor ticks steadily.
Lucky’s still sitting there, watching me like I’m made of glass and lightning at the same time. His thumb traces slow circles over the back of my hand.
“You really told them I got poisoned by a wellness smoothie?”
He shrugs. “Technically true.”
I laugh, and it burns my throat, but I can’t stop. “Did they really not ask questions about these?” I raise my wrists. They’re bruised to shit from Phoenix tying me to the chair.
“It’s Vegas,” Lucky shrugs. “Weirder shit walks through those doors every night. There was a guy out there with a rope tied around his wrists and neck. His whole body was painted yellow. And he was wearing a diaper. The way he was walking? Pretty sure he’s in here with something stuck up his ass.”
I scoff and shake my head. “Why do we live here?”
Lucky smiles in return and steps forward, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “’Cause Vegas is home to the psychos like us.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I say with a smile.
He looks down at me, and I meet those green eyes. He’s trying. He’s trying to keep it light, to joke with me. But it’s obvious, what happened to me has hit him hard.
He looks wrecked—bruises on his jaw, cuts on his hands, one sleeve of his shirt torn. But the way he looks at me… It’s devotion distilled to its purest form. Raw and reckless and terrifyingly real.
“I thought you were gone, Willow,” he says, voice cracking for the first time. “When I found you, you weren’t breathing right. I—” He breaks off, jaw tightening, forcing the words through. “I’ve seen a lot of shit in my life, Willow. But I’ve never seen anything that scared me like that did.”
My whole body aches for him. For this man who loves me so fiercely that he walked through a nightmare to save me. I squeeze his hand. “Hey. Look at me.”
He does, his face pale.
“I’m still here,” I whisper. “You didn’t lose me.”
He leans down, resting his forehead against mine. “You can’t do that again. You can’t almost die like that.” His voice is a rough confession.
“I’ll put a reminder in my phone,” I say, because humor is the only thing that keeps the tears from winning.
He laughs through his nose, and I feel it vibrate against my skin. He smells like smoke and hospital soap.
“I love you,” he says into the space between us.
I don’t say it back right away. I just let the silence stretch until my chest aches, and then I whisper, “I know. I feel it.” I open my eyes, and his green ones are right there, staring straight into my twisted soul. “I love you too, Lucky.”
For the first time since Phoenix grabbed me, my pulse doesn’t sound like a countdown.
It sounds like coming home.
But, it’s us, so the peace does not last.
It starts with voices in the hallway. And they’re not quiet.
A woman says, “I don’t care if visiting hours haven’t started, that’s my daughter-in-law and my son back there, and I’ve already waited two hours.”
A man responds, “Marit, she’s a nurse. You don’t have to threaten her.”
Then the same woman, sharper: “I wasn’t threatening her. I was clarifying the hierarchy of power.”
Lucky groans softly beside me. “Oh no.”
“Oh no?” I echo, already bracing.
“My parents.”
The door opens before I can respond, and in sweeps a woman who looks like she could calm a storm and start one in the same breath. Tall, dark-blond hair in a neat braid, sharp eyes that take in every detail.