Chapter 33
Bliss
The words hit my chest and stayed there.
Not like a punch. Not like a bruise. More like somebody had slipped them carefully beneath my heart and left them glowing there, bright and terrifying, warm enough to burn through every defense I had spent years pretending was my personality.
You love me anyway.
Even with the bruises. Even with the panic.
Even with Luke’s fingerprints still carved into my throat like proof of every ugly thing I had survived.
Even with the broken ribs and the hospital gown and the fact that I was currently one emotional inconvenience away from crying into a pudding cup I had absolutely earned because, once again, taxes.
Cade watched me from beside the bed with his hand wrapped around mine, thumb moving slowly over my knuckles like he had nowhere else in the world to be.
His face was calm in that Cade way that was not actually calm at all.
It was control. Discipline. A man holding a loaded weapon inside his chest and choosing, for me, not to pull the trigger.
Which was rude.
Devastating.
Very on brand.
I swallowed carefully because my throat hurt, my ribs hurt, my face hurt, and somehow the worst injury in the room had become this six-foot-something hockey captain looking at me like he already knew the answer to questions I hadn’t been brave enough to ask out loud.
“I was getting there with the marble,” I whispered.
His thumb stilled. Just for half a second. Long enough for me to notice and for the room to change.
The heart monitor kept making its tiny electronic sounds beside me. The air conditioner hummed overhead. Somewhere in the hallway, a nurse laughed softly at something another nurse said, and the world kept being the world even though mine had just tilted straight off its axis.
Cade’s eyes stayed on mine. “I know.”
I tried to nod, immediately decided that was a terrible medical choice, and settled for blinking at him with as much dignity as a battered girl in a hospital bed could manage. “It was going to be a whole thing.”
“A whole thing.”
“Don’t mock my process.”
“I’m not.”
“You are internally mocking. I can feel it.”
His mouth twitched. “I’m listening.”
“No, you’re doing that thing where you look all quiet and hot and emotionally unavailable, but really you’re collecting information to weaponize later.”
“That’s specific.”
“You’re specific.”
“I don’t think that was an insult.”
“It was emotionally adjacent.”
His smile softened, and that was worse than the smirk.
The smirk I could fight. The smirk made me want to throw something at him and then maybe kiss his stupid face depending on how my pain meds felt about it.
But the softness? The quiet attention? The way he looked at me like he could hear the words I was too scared to say?
That was not fair.
“I had a plan,” I said, because if I stopped talking, I was going to start crying again, and I had already cried enough in front of this man to qualify for a loyalty punch card.
“I picked the marble. I rehearsed nothing because I am deeply against preparedness when feelings are involved, but I had the vibe. The vibe was strong.”
“The vibe.”
“Yes, Cade. The vibe. Try to keep up.”
“I’m trying.”
“You are not. Your face is doing condescending cheekbone things.”
“That’s just my face.”
“That’s the problem.”
He looked down at our joined hands, and his thumb started moving again, slow and steady. “Tell me about the marble.”
My chest tightened.
For a second, the jokes slipped out of my reach.
I looked at his hand around mine instead of his face because his face was a problem.
His face had always been a problem, but now it was also safety and heartbreak and the exact kind of thing a girl could survive hell for and still not feel ready to trust completely because losing him would not be a normal kind of pain.
“It was perfect,” I said softly. “Ice blue like your eyes. Not the exact color, but close enough. It made me think of your eyes this morning, which is embarrassing and very girl-with-feelings-coded, and I hate that for me.”
His fingers tightened faintly.
“And there was black in it too,” I continued, voice going thinner. “A little swirl of it. It looked messy, but pretty. Chaotic, honestly. Like it had no business working, but it did anyway.”
“Sounds familiar.”
I glanced at him. “Are you calling me messy?”
“I’m calling us chaos.”
My breath caught before I could stop it.
Us.
He said it so easily. Like the word already belonged there.
I stared at him, and he stared back, and oh my gosh, I was absolutely not stable enough for this. I was injured. I was vulnerable. I was wearing a hospital gown that had definitely seen too much of humanity. This was not the correct environment for romantic emotional escalation.
“You can’t say us like that,” I muttered.
“Like what?”
“Like you own the word.”
“I do.”
My stomach flipped, which was deeply inconsiderate because my ribs were already filing complaints with management. “You’re very arrogant for a man sitting next to someone who can’t physically fight back.”
“You wouldn’t win healthy.”
“I would emotionally confuse you until you surrendered.”
“You do that daily.”
“Exactly. I have a system.”
His laugh came low and quiet, brushing over me warmer than the thin hospital blanket tucked around my waist. It made my throat ache for reasons that had nothing to do with Luke’s handprint and everything to do with the fact that Cade Mercer was sitting there teasing me like my face wasn’t swollen and the world hadn’t nearly ended.
And that was exactly why I needed him.
Not because he ignored the damage. He saw it.
Holy shit, he saw all of it. Every few seconds, his gaze flickered to my throat, my cheek, my lip, and every time it did, the air around him changed.
He looked like violence wearing human skin.
But he kept coming back to my eyes. Kept answering my jokes.
Kept letting me be a girl instead of a crime scene.
I loved him for that.
The thought slipped through me so quietly I almost didn’t catch it.
Then I did, and my entire body went still.
Cade noticed because Cade noticed everything, which was honestly getting old.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Pip.”
“Don’t Pip me when I’m medically fragile.”
“You’re spiraling.”
“I am not spiraling. I’m reflecting.”
“On what?”
“Your many flaws.”
His mouth curved. “Name one.”
“You know when I’m spiraling.”
“That’s not a flaw.”
“It is to me.”
He leaned closer, careful not to jostle the bed. “You were getting there with the marble.”
Right.
The marble.
The lost Never.
The thing I had bought with shaking hands and too much hope.
The thing I had held so tightly while I made my way toward him, toward something real, toward maybe not being a coward for once in my life.
I had wanted to give Cade a piece of my world that wasn’t only pain.
A piece of the weird, sacred, broken-beautiful way I had survived all that shit and still found him.
Wanted him to know that if my mom was here, she would have been my first call after he left me this morning.
The only way I could honor that was with my Nevers.
And Luke had taken that too.
My eyes burned.
“I hate that it’s gone,” I admitted, and my voice didn’t sound like me anymore.
It sounded small. Honest. Serious in a way that made my skin feel too tight.
“I hate that he got to touch that marble and take my moment. I hate that I was finally doing something brave and selfish, and now I don’t even have it to give. ”
Cade’s expression changed. Not softer. Deeper, as if the words had gone somewhere inside him and found all the dangerous places.
“He didn’t get the moment,” he said.
My eyes lifted to his.
“He took the marble,” Cade said, voice low and controlled, “or maybe you lost it. He didn’t take what it meant or the moment. He delayed it because he’s a fucking loser on a tantrum.”
My lip trembled, and I hated it. “That sounds dangerously close to emotional intelligence from you.”
“I’ll deny it.”
“You should. It’ll ruin your brand.”
“My brand survived you calling my face emotionally manipulative.”
“Barely.”
His thumb slid over my knuckles again. “You’ll find another one.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“No,” he said. “It’ll be better.”
I frowned, which hurt, so I immediately stopped. “That is a bold claim from someone who doesn’t understand advanced marble theology.”
“I understand you.”
The room went quiet.
I hated when he did that. Just walked straight through the jokes like they were decorative curtains instead of load-bearing emotional architecture.
“You’re doing it again,” I whispered.
“I know.”
My throat tightened, but he didn’t smile this time. Didn’t tease. Didn’t act smug. He just looked at me with that awful certainty that made me feel seen and cornered and safe all at once.
“You’re the queen of cool marbles,” he said. “You’ll find another one. You’ll make it mean something because that’s what you do. You take the worst parts of your life and turn them into something beautiful enough that people don’t realize, at first, they’re looking at survival.”
My eyes filled again.
“Cade.”
“I want one you pick after this,” he said. “Not before.”
I stared at him.
His jaw flexed once, his grip still gentle around mine. “I want the one from the version of you who got out, because that’s my girl.”
The tears slipped free before I could stop them.
I looked away fast, but he caught me anyway, because he refused to let me run from his truth. His free hand came up carefully, fingers brushing beneath one tear before it could reach the bruise blooming near my cheek.
“You are so annoying,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“No, I mean historically. Like, if scholars studied annoying men, you’d have your own wing.”
“Would there be photos?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Good ones?”
“Don’t make me laugh. I’m injured.”