Chapter 46
Cade
Three weeks after Luke Dempsey tried to kill me in a service hallway beneath The Furnace, the hospital finally decided I could leave.
Which was generous, considering I still felt like shit.
Improved shit, according to the doctors, which apparently counted as medical progress.
I had two healing stab wounds, a lung that had recently attempted to quit its job, an abdomen stitched and repaired in places I preferred not to think about, and a medication schedule so complicated Bliss had color-coded it, laminated it on pink glitter-edged paper, and threatened three separate nurses with emotional violence if they deviated from it.
I could walk short distances if I moved like an old man with a bad hip and trust issues.
I could breathe without a machine. I could sleep for more than forty minutes at a time if my mind stopped remembering the hallway long enough to let me.
I could eat bland food without wanting to kill Luke Dempsey all over again.
Miracles everywhere.
Still, leaving the hospital felt wrong.
Not because I wanted to stay. I had spent three weeks trapped in rooms that smelled like antiseptic, flowers, fear, and my father’s money trying to fix everything he couldn’t physically control.
I wanted out more than I wanted most things, but the outside world felt larger than it used to.
Brighter. Sharper. Full of people and noise and doors and corners and all the stupid little vulnerabilities I had never considered before one man with a knife reminded me skin was not armor, no matter how good you were at taking hits.
Bliss stood at the foot of my hospital bed in one of my hoodies she had cropped because—fashion—arms crossed while she stared at me like she had personally invented discharge paperwork and was prepared to fight anyone who disagreed with her interpretation of it.
“You’re doing that face,” she said.
I looked at her from where I was sitting on the edge of the bed while a nurse explained things I had already heard six times. “What face?”
“The emotionally constipated one.”
My mother, seated near the window in a cream sweater that probably cost more than Briggs’s car, made a soft sound that might have been a laugh.
My father did not laugh, but his mouth moved like it had considered the option and rejected it for brand consistency.
“I’ve been stabbed,” I said. “I’m allowed a face.”
“You’re allowed many faces. This one is just annoying.”
The nurse wisely pretended not to hear any of that while Bliss took the folder from her hands and immediately started reading it like my recovery was a hostage negotiation.
Her hair was pulled up today, messy and soft, little blonde pieces falling around her cheeks.
She wore leggings, Nikes, and my KFU sweatshirt like she had claimed joint custody of my wardrobe somewhere around day four in the ICU and never looked back.
Almost dying had done terrible things to Bliss Bennett’s boundaries.
Before the attack, I had been prepared to bribe, manipulate, and sexually compromise her into never leaving my bed again.
Turns out, getting stabbed twice expedited the process.
“I’m moving in,” she had informed me two days ago, while I was half-asleep and apparently not too wounded to enjoy the hell out of her bossy voice.
“You can have a male nurse because I support modern medicine but not the female nursing population giving you sponge baths. Plus, a male nurse won’t be distracted by your looks and accidentally kill your healing organs.
But I’m still staying until it’s safe for me to be your nurse. ”
She quirked her eyebrows like the sexual deviant she was.
I had opened one eye. “Is this you admitting you can’t live without me?”
“No, this is me admitting you are too valuable to be alone with stairs and a walker.”
“Same thing, Pip.”
“You almost died.”
“Still hot though, right?”
She had cried then, which had been shitty of me, but she had laughed through it, and I had decided that counted as a win because laughter from Bliss lately felt like being handed oxygen.
She cried over tiny things now, never the big ones.
The first time I stood up and screamed in agony, she was strong as an oak, telling me I could do this, telling me to breathe.
But me telling her she could give me the sponge baths put her into hysterics, her arms around me in the small hospital bed, terrified to let me go.
Now she stood in my hospital room with my discharge folder clutched to her chest, daring me to make one wrong move.
My father had bought the penthouse three days after I woke up fully.
Bought.
Not rented.
Not arranged temporary housing like a normal person with a mildly reasonable relationship to real estate.
Bought.
A high-rise outside Kimball Falls, close enough to Saginaw that he could pretend the location met his standards, far enough from campus that reporters had to work harder, and secured enough that my mother stopped flinching every time someone stepped too close to the private hallway.
He and my mother took the penthouse because, well—Elenore Mercer.
Pip and I would stay in the apartment they rented one floor below them while I recovered. Temporary, allegedly. Though nothing about my father buying permanent real estate in response to a crisis had ever felt temporary to me.
Bliss had accepted this arrangement only after making my father promise, in writing, that she had keycard access to both the hot tub and sauna, control over my medication schedule, veto power over any nurse who looked “too judgmental,” and full authority to ban anyone who tried to discuss hockey before I could walk across a room without sweating.
My father had signed the paper, and Bliss thought she had won.
I had watched Harrison Mercer, real estate titan and corporate executioner, accept orders from a five-foot-two sports media major in pink lip gloss and realized, with deep personal satisfaction, that they loved her more every day.
The actual discharge process took forever.
Nurses came in and out. My mother asked careful questions.
My father asked terrifyingly specific ones.
Bliss asked all the ones that mattered most, writing down what could hurt me, what signs meant infection, what happened if I coughed too hard, how much walking was too much, and whether I was allowed to shower without supervision.
I said, “I vote yes.”
Bliss said, “You don’t get a vote.”
My nurse said, “Supervision is recommended the first few days.”
Bliss looked smug.
I looked betrayed.
My mother looked at the ceiling like she needed strength.
By the time they loaded me into the back of the luxury Escalade waiting beneath the hospital’s “covered private exit”—which was really the back service and delivery bay—I was pretending not to be exhausted.
Badly.
My ribs ached from the wheelchair ride alone, my abdomen burned under the careful pull of stitches and taped bandages, and every breath felt like my chest had to think about whether it was worth the effort.
Bliss climbed in beside me before anyone else could, buckled herself in, then immediately reached for my hand.
I let her, taking her fingers in mine and kissing her knuckles.
My parents got into the row ahead of us, my father already on the phone with someone about security, access, privacy, and words that meant my life had become a controlled operation. My mother twisted in her seat and looked back at me three times before the Escalade even pulled away from the curb.
“I’m fine,” I said.
All three of them answered at once.
“No, you’re not.”
Fair.
The drive into Saginaw took thirty minutes. It felt like three hours as I fought to hide the pain from every slight jostle the SUV made.
Outside the window, late-fall Michigan moved past in dull gray stretches of highway, bare trees, patches of stubborn snow in shaded ditches, gas stations, brick buildings, and wide roads that didn’t care that my entire life had rearranged itself.
Bliss kept hold of my hand the whole way.
Not tightly, not enough to hurt. Just there.
Her thumb brushed over my knuckles in little absent circles, and every time my breathing hitched, her eyes lifted to my face before I could hide it.
“Stop watching me like I’m a science experiment.”
“I’m not.”
“Pip.”
“I’m watching you like you’re a man who thinks pretending pain doesn’t exist makes him hotter.”
“It does make me hotter.”
“No, Cade. It makes you annoying.”
“Same genre.”
Her mouth twitched, but her eyes grew wet, and that did something worse than pain. I lifted our joined hands and kissed her fingers. “I’m here.”
“I know.”
“I’m leaving the hospital.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to be fine.”
She looked out the window fast.
Too fast.
“Pip.”
“Don’t,” she whispered.
So, I didn’t.
I kept my mouth shut and held her hand because sometimes loving her meant shutting the hell up while she remembered the things I hadn’t seen.
I had been in a coma, blind to everyone who loved me suffering around my bed, and letting her carry that without trying to talk her out of it remained one of the hardest things I had ever done.
The high-rise looked exactly like something my father would choose while pretending to compromise.
Sleek glass. Secured parking. Private elevator access.
Marble lobby with too much silence and a concierge who looked like he had signed several nondisclosure agreements before breakfast. The apartment one floor beneath my parents’ penthouse had floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of the city and river beyond it, modern furniture in cold expensive neutrals, and enough space that Bliss immediately narrowed her eyes.
“This is your recovery apartment?”
I glanced around from where I leaned against my father’s arm with a cautious grip, which was humiliating but unfortunately necessary. “Looks like it.”
“This is bigger than my dad’s house.”