Chapter 2 Isaiah
ISAIAH
The hospital waiting room tastes like metal and antiseptic and sin.
It’s too bright. Too clean. Too quiet in the way that makes your skin itch—like the walls themselves are holding their breath, waiting for the next tragedy to roll through those automatic doors on a stretcher.
The fluorescent lights hum overhead, steady and unforgiving, buzzing like a swarm of insects gnawing at the edges of my sanity.
I sit slumped in the hardest plastic chair known to mankind, elbows digging into my knees so hard the bones ache, hands clasped together like I’m trying to squeeze blood from stone.
My spine is a crooked question mark.
My chest is a cage with something feral pacing inside it.
Every time those automatic doors hiss open—that pneumatic wheeze like the building itself is sighing—a cold gust rushes in and I flinch like it’s gunfire.
Can’t help it.
My body doesn’t know the difference anymore between wind and violence. Hasn’t for years.
I’ve been here for hours.
Long enough that the blood drying on my knuckles—Xavier’s blood, the same blood I tried to keep inside his body while we waited for help in the middle of nowhere—has begun to crack when I move my fingers.
It flakes off in rust-dark crescents onto the linoleum, quiet as the kind of confession no one wants to hear.
Long enough that the shirt I wore when Valentina and I tore down those back roads—arriving minutes after the gunshots, too late to stop them but early enough to drop to our knees beside him—has gone stiff with sweat and the copper-bright smear of his life leaking through my palms.
The ambulance should have taken twenty minutes to reach that stretch of empty county road, but it took twenty-five.
I remember pressing my hands to the wound, feeling the warmth drain away, hearing Valentina whisper his name like the sound alone might tether him here.
I remember steadying his head when his breathing hitched, trying to keep him conscious, telling him to look at me even though he couldn’t focus on anything at all.
By the time the EMTs arrived, my hands were soaked past the wrists.
And now, sitting in this too-bright hallway, my thoughts have built a cathedral around guilt and locked me inside it—forced me to kneel beneath its hollowed arches and confess every failure, even the ones I haven’t earned yet.
Xavier shouldn’t be alive, not after what we saw.
The fact that he is feels less like a miracle and more like a debt I’ll never stop paying.
This is my fault.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Not in that soft, abstract way people assign blame when they want absolution more than accountability.
Literally.
I can feel it in the marrow of me—guilt threaded into bone like rebar through concrete.
My ribs are made of it.
My spine is shaped by it.
Xavier—my brother, my king, the only person alive who gets to call me family without me breaking their jaw for the presumption—was shot last night.
Two bullets. One in the chest, one in the spine, and enough blood loss to paint a crime scene.
And instead of being where I should’ve been, instead of standing at his back like I was born to do, like I’ve done since I was thirteen years old, I was across the damn city.
Obsessing over a girl who should’ve been a job. A contract. A nothing.
Valentina.
Her name sits in my mouth like a prayer I shouldn’t dare speak.
Sweet on the tongue, bitter in the throat, dangerous in the belly where it settles and burns like whiskey.
A temptation that feels like blasphemy.
I kidnapped her three weeks ago—three weeks that feel like three centuries—and I haven’t been able to think straight since.
Haven’t been able to sleep without seeing her face behind my eyelids. Haven’t been able to focus on anything except the way she looked at me in that dirty bathroom light, hair a mess, mascara smudged, eyes bright with fury as she kicked at me, cursed at me, fought me with everything she had.
She should’ve been terrified. Should’ve been pliant. Should’ve been like every other mark I’ve ever grabbed—crying, begging, breaking down into something small and manageable.
Instead, she looked at me like I was the one who should be scared.
And maybe she was right.
I bow my head and press my fists to my forehead, squeezing my eyes shut as if darkness can quiet the noise in my skull.
It doesn’t.
It only sharpens it—turns the volume up instead of down, makes every memory louder.
Because all I can see is Xavier on that stretcher, pale as a corpse, unconscious, blood soaking through white gauze as they rushed him past me.
The fluorescent lights had caught in the wetness, made it gleam like something alive.
Like something still dying.
I remember the paramedic shoving me back when I tried to climb into the ambulance.
A flat palm against my chest, firm but not unkind.
I’d almost broken his wrist for it.
Would have, if Asher hadn’t been there—wrapping both arms around my chest, hauling me backward, choking me out against the SUV just to keep me from ripping those ambulance doors open with my bare hands.
The last thing I saw before the doors closed was Xavier’s arm hanging off the edge of the stretcher.
Limp. Cold-looking.
The silver signet ring on his finger slick with blood that should’ve never been spilled.
“Fuck,” I whisper, the word scraping out of me like glass. “Please… God… don’t do this.”
My voice sounds wrong in this sterile space.
Too loud. Too human. Too broken.
Catholic guilt is funny like that—no matter how far you run from it, no matter how many sins you stack like poker chips on a table you know you’re going to lose, when the world starts slipping through your fingers, you crawl right back to the kneeler.
You fold your hands like the nuns taught you. You bow your head like the priests demanded.
You beg like a child who still believes in miracles, even though you stopped believing in anything a long time ago.
I press my palms together until they tremble, until the tendons stand out white beneath my skin.
Hail Mary, full of grace…
But the prayer won’t come.
The words get tangled up somewhere between my throat and my teeth, caught in a web of rage and fear and memories I can’t outrun.
I keep seeing Xavier’s hand around the back of my neck—not tonight, but years ago.
Thirteen years old. Bloody. Bruised.
Marcus’s gun pressed to my temple, cold as a kiss from death itself, and Xavier stepping in front of it like I was worth something.
Like I mattered.
“He’s mine,” Xavier had said. Calm. Certain. Like he was stating a fact of nature rather than gambling his life on a half-feral kid with blood under his fingernails. “You want him, you go through me first.”
Marcus had laughed. Called us both dead men walking.
But he’d lowered the gun.
Now Xavier’s lying somewhere behind these doors fighting for his life, and I’m out here useless, drowning in the kind of guilt that tastes like iron and feels like drowning.
“Please,” I breathe, voice cracking. “Don’t let my sins fall on him. Don’t take him because of what I did—because of what I wanted. Punish me. Whatever price you’re asking. Whatever pound of flesh. Just… not him. Not Xavier.”
I think of Valentina—locked in that room across the city, probably plotting a hundred ways to kill me, completely unaware that her captor is sitting in a hospital waiting room praying she doesn’t become collateral damage to his sins.
“And not her,” I add, quieter. The words feel like a confession, shameful and raw. “She didn’t ask for any of this. I took her. I put her in the middle of this. Don’t punish her for what I did.”
The prayer feels wrong. Feels like asking God to protect the lamb while you’re still holding the knife.
But I say it anyway, because I don’t know what else to do.
Because Valentina’s face keeps flashing behind my eyes alongside Xavier’s—her fury, his stillness—and the guilt of wanting her is tangled so tight with the guilt of failing him that I can’t separate them anymore.
Two people. Two sins. One prayer that probably won’t be heard by anyone.
But I say it anyway.
“Sir?”
The voice cuts through my haze like a blade through fog.
I jerk my head up, unprepared for sound, for softness, for anything that isn’t the thunder of my own pulse.
A nurse stands a few feet away, soft blue scrubs too gentle for a place like this.
She looks at me the way you look at a wounded animal—sad, careful, ready to dart back if it lunges.
“You can’t sit on the floor,” she says gently.
I blink. Look down.
I’m on my knees.
In the middle of the waiting room, knees pressed into cold tile, hands clenched around Xavier’s blood-soaked rings like rosary beads.
I’d slipped them off his limp fingers before they loaded him into the ambulance—couldn’t stand the thought of them getting lost, of some nurse pocketing them, of any part of him being somewhere I couldn’t protect it.
I don’t remember sliding off the chair. Don’t remember letting gravity drag me down.
Don’t remember anything except the pressure behind my eyes and the desperate, animal need to bargain with a God I’m not sure I believe in anymore.
“I’m fine,” I rasp.
“You’re not,” she murmurs, stepping closer.
Her shoes squeak against the linoleum—soft-soled, practical.
“Come on. Let’s get you up.”
She touches my shoulder—barely a feather-light brush—but something in my chest snaps apart at the contact.
Not anger. Not violence.
Just something brittle that’s been holding on too long, cracking under the pressure of its own weight.
She helps me stand, and I sway hard enough she grips tighter, her small hands surprisingly strong against my arm.
“Easy. You’ve been here a long time, sweetheart. When’s the last time you had water?”
Sweetheart.
If she knew what I was—what I’ve done, the blood on my hands that isn’t just Xavier’s—she’d be calling security, not fetching me water.
She’d be running.
“I’m not leaving this room,” I mutter, the words coming out harder than I mean them to. “I’m not leaving him.”