Sadie
Sound comes first.
A distant, heavy cracking. Wood splintering. A man's voice, low and urgent, saying something I can't assemble into words. My name, maybe. My name repeated like he's trying to pull me out of a hole with it.
The floor is cold under my cheek. That's the only thing I know for certain. Cold, the smell of copper, and a pain at the back of my skull that pulses in time with my heartbeat.
I try to open my eyes. The light is wrong. Too bright. Daylight, which means it's morning, which means I've been on this floor for hours.
Something warm closes around my face. Both sides. Hands. Large hands, tilting my head, and I hear the voice again, closer now, almost inside my ear.
"Sadie. Open your eyes. Look at me."
I know this voice. I know the shadow of an accent underneath the consonants, the careful control of a man who is holding himself together by force. I try to find his face but my vision is a smear of grey and light, and the effort of focusing makes the room lurch sideways.
"She's cold." His voice, but not to me. To someone behind him. "She's freezing. Get me a blanket. Get Mikhail on the phone right now."
Hands on my wrist. Fingers pressing for a pulse.
His fingers, I think, because I know the weight of them from the sedan, from the diner, from the sidewalk under the streetlight where he kissed me.
He's checking me the way I checked him, and somewhere in the fog of my brain the irony of that registers and almost makes me laugh.
Only my mouth won't move.
"Sadie, can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me."
I squeeze. It's barely anything. My fingers close around his thumb and it's the most effort I've ever spent on a single movement.
"Good. Stay with me. You're going to be fine."
I want to tell him about Jason. I want to tell him about the knife and the blood and the way Jason's chin dropped to his chest. I want to say he needs help, but my tongue is thick and useless and the words dissolve before they reach my mouth.
Something sharp stings my arm. An injection. I flinch, and his hand tightens on mine.
"Glucagon," says a voice I know. Calm, clinical, efficient, female. "We need to move her. Her sugar is dangerously low, and I don't like the look of the head wound."
"Then we move her. Dmitri, bring the car to the back."
Something slides beneath my knees and under my shoulders, and my face is pressed against something that smells like coffee and wool and something underneath that's just him. The movement sends the room spinning and my stomach clenches, and I make a sound that comes out thin and pathetic.
"I know," he says against my hair. "I know. Stay awake for me."
I try. I hold onto his voice the way I held onto the glucose tab, like a foothold at the edge of a cliff. I feel cold air on my face and know we're outside, and then warmth again, the leather seat of a car, and his hand is still on mine and his voice is still in my ear.
A beeping sound wakes me up in a room I don't recognize. Clean, warm, too bright. Something is attached to my hand, tape and tubing, an IV line running up to a bag of clear fluid. There's a second bag beside it, smaller, with a label I can't read from this angle.
I turn my head and the pain flares from the base of my skull down through my neck, a hot wire that makes me hiss through my teeth.
A man is beside me. Not Nick. Older. Glasses. He's reading something on a clipboard and he looks at me over the top of the frames with an expression that's equal parts professional concern and quiet relief.
"There she is," he says. "Welcome back, Sadie. My name is Dr Volkov. Can you tell me where you are?"
"No," I manage. My voice sounds like sandpaper on gravel.
"That's fine. You're safe. You've been unconscious for a while. Your blood sugar was critically low when you were brought in, and you have a concussion. I've stabilized your glucose with an IV dextrose drip and I'm monitoring you closely. I need you to try to stay awake for me. Can you do that?"
I nod, which is a mistake, because the room tilts and my stomach rolls. He catches my chin with steady fingers and holds my head still.
"Don't move your head. You took a significant impact to the occiput. You're going to feel nauseous for a while. That's normal."
"Nick," I say.
"He's here." Dr Volkov says it like it's self-evident. Like it would be absurd for Nick to be anywhere else. "He'll be back in a moment."
I close my eyes. The beeping is steady and rhythmic and I want to count it, but I lose the numbers somewhere around seven.
It’s dark now. Or dim. A lamp somewhere to my left, warm and low.
I'm in a bed. A real bed, not a hospital gurney. The sheets are heavy and soft, the kind of sheets I've never slept on, and there's a blanket over me that isn't mine.
The IV is still in my hand. The bag has been changed. There's a monitor clipped to my finger, and its green light pulses with my heartbeat.
I turn my head, slowly this time, bracing for the pain. It comes, but duller. Manageable.
Nick is in a chair beside the bed.
He's asleep. Or close to it. His head is tipped back against the chair, his legs stretched out, and he's still in the same dark sweater from when we met at the diner. One hand rests on the edge of the mattress, close enough to my hip that I could reach it without lifting my arm.
I look at his face in the lamplight. The sharp line of his jaw. The dark circles under his eyes. He looks exhausted. He looks like a man who has been sitting in chairs beside beds for days, and instead of sleeping in his own bed he's sleeping in a chair beside mine.
I reach for his hand.
My fingers find his on the mattress and I curl mine around them. It's a small movement. Weak. But his eyes open immediately, as if he was never asleep at all, just waiting.
"Hi," I say.
His hand turns under mine and closes around my fingers. His grip is careful, measured, the grip of a man who is aware of every pound of pressure and is giving me only enough to feel him there.
"Hi." His voice is rough. He leans forward, his other hand coming up to push my hair back from my face. His thumb traces the edge of the bruise I can feel at my temple, gentle enough that it barely registers as touch.
"Where am I?"
"My house."
I look at the ceiling, the walls. Crown molding. Papered walls in a deep blue. Heavy curtains drawn across what I assume is a window. A dark wood dresser with a lamp on it. Nothing in this room looks like a hospital, except for the IV stand and the monitor on my finger.
"How long?"
"Three days."
The number lands on my chest and sits there. Three days. I've been unconscious, or close to it, for three days. Fragments come back. The white ceiling. Dr Volkov's glasses. The sharp sting of the glucagon injection. Nick's arms lifting me off the floor. Between those fragments, nothing. Just black.
"My sugar," I say, because that's where my brain goes first. It always goes there first.
"Stabilized. Mikhail's, Dr Volkov’s, been managing it. He's been checking your levels every two hours." He pauses. "He told me what hypoglycemia does when it goes untreated for that long. He told me how close it was."
I watch his face. His jaw is tight, the muscle in it working the way it does when he's holding something down.
"Jason," I say.
His hand doesn't move on mine. His face doesn't change. But something behind his eyes shifts, a door closing, and I can feel the weight of what's behind it even though I can't see through.
"Jason isn't going to be a problem," he says.
"Nick." My throat is dry and the word comes out cracked. "Nick, I need to tell you what happened."
"You don't." He says it quietly. Firmly. "You don't need to tell me anything right now. You need to rest. You need your levels stable and your head to heal, and you need to eat something. Everything else can wait."
"It can't wait. There was—" I stop. The memory surfaces and it's ugly and sharp and I can feel the phantom weight of the knife handle in my palm. "There was blood. On the floor. Jason, he was—"
"Sadie." He lifts my hand and presses his mouth to my knuckles.
His lips are warm and his breath is steady and his eyes are on mine when he says it.
"There was nothing on your floor when I found you.
There was nothing in your apartment except you, unconscious, with your sugar at twenty-eight and a head wound that should have put you in the ER.
That's what I found. That's all I found. "
I stare at him.
"Do you understand me?" he asks.
I understand him. I understand what he's telling me and what he's not telling me, and the space between those two things is a place I'm going to have to learn to live in.
"Yes," I say, and goosebumps erupt over my arms, because I know the truth. I know what I did. I know what Nick did.
"Good." He presses his lips to my knuckles again, then lowers my hand back to the mattress.
"Mikhail wants to check you over now that you're awake.
Then I'm going to bring you something to eat.
Then you're going to sleep in this bed until your body says it's done sleeping, and I'm going to be in this chair when you wake up. "
I look at him in the lamplight. At the chair he's been sitting in for three days. At his hand still holding mine on the mattress.
"You stayed," I say. My eyes burn. I blink hard and look at the ceiling, because I'm not going to cry in front of him, even though the pressure in my chest is enormous and my throat aches with the weight of everything I can't say.
His thumb strokes across my knuckles. Small, steady circles. Patient.
"Rest, Sadie," he says. "I'm not going anywhere."
I close my eyes. His hand stays on mine. The monitor beeps in time with my pulse. Somewhere in this house that I don't know, in a room that isn't mine, in a bed I've never slept in, wrapped in sheets I could never afford, I feel something I haven't felt since my mother was alive.
I feel safe.