Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Noemi
Hands drag me out of the rubble. Hale's, I think. The world is muffled and tilting and gray with dust, and my ears won't stop ringing from the blast.
They pull Rian out next.
He doesn't move. His face is slack on one side, burned and wrong, and there's so much blood that I can't tell what's his and what belonged to the room. His chest doesn't rise. I stare at it and will it to rise and it doesn't, and a sound comes out of me that I don't recognize as mine.
He looks dead. He looks exactly like a dead man.
"No." I crawl to him over broken concrete I can't feel. "No, no, get up. You promised. You promised me, you can't—"
Hale drops to his knees beside us. He puts two fingers to Rian's throat, then lowers his ruined ear to Rian's mouth and goes very still. The longest few seconds of my life pass while he listens.
"He's breathing." Hale's voice is a low rasp. "Barely. But it's there. He's got a chance."
I break. There's no other word for it. The tears come all at once and I press my hands over my mouth to keep the rest of it in, and I shake so hard my teeth click.
A chance. He's got a chance.
I make myself look at him, really look. This is the man who turned into something else twenty feet from me.
I saw the Beast take over. I watched him do what he did to Kathleen, and to Andreas, right up until I couldn't anymore.
Then I shut my eyes and clapped my hands over my ringing ears and waited for it to be done.
I should be afraid of him. Some sensible part of me knows that.
But before the world came apart, he found his way back. He came to me through all that red, and he pressed his head into my hands like an animal that wanted to be touched. He kissed me. Beast, or Rian, or whatever you want to call the thing that loves me. I didn't pull away.
I never pull away.
Because he always finds me. He found me at the auction, in a room full of monsters. He found me in the rubble, just now. He found me from across a dark street, back when he was still a shadow I wasn't supposed to look at. He saw me, when nobody else in my life bothered to.
I love him. I told him so, right before the first bomb went off. I'd tell him again now if he could hear me.
"Noemi." Hale already has Rian half off the ground, gathering all that dead weight against his chest like it's nothing. "I'm taking him. You ride with Ransom."
I don't want to let go of his hand. I do it anyway, because Hale moves faster without me hanging on.
The drive is absolutely silent. Two men up front, Ransom beside me in the back. All of them on high alert, scanning the road. The darkened city slides by behind tinted glass. I sit with my purse clutched in my lap like it's going to save me.
"Will he make it?" I ask.
Ransom keeps his eyes on the window. "I don't know. Bernard's good. That's the most I can give you."
I nod. My hands won't stay still, so I fold them together. I keep seeing it behind my eyes, the thing Rian became, the way he moved. I don't say it. Ransom was outside. But I think he knows anyway.
"You saw him go under," Ransom says. It isn't a question.
"Most of it." My voice comes out small. "I closed my eyes for the end."
"Smart." He's quiet for a beat. "I've seen it a handful of times. He comes back wrong for a while after. Slow. You'll need patience."
"I have patience."
"I'm starting to believe that."
We drive for a minute without talking. Watching the streetlights pass in quick blurs, I think about Rian bleeding somewhere I can't reach him. My chest tightens painfully.
Needing a distraction, I ask Ransom, "Have you ever lost someone you loved?"
Ransom exhales a long breath. "Yes. A long time ago."
"And now?" I ask. "Is there someone you're scared of losing?"
At my words, his hands clench and unclench.
"There's someone. A girl," he admits. "I keep my distance. My life is a wreck and I don't have any business dragging someone into it. She's better off not knowing I exist."
"Hmm. That sounds like an excuse," I tell him.
Ransom turns his head and looks at me. He raises an eyebrow. "Sorry?"
"You're not protecting this girl. You're protecting yourself from finding out what happens if you let her matter. If you have feelings for her, do something about it."
He snorts. "And what makes you such a font of wisdom?"
"The last month has taught me a lot." My cheeks heat.
"I hate the way Rian came into my life. I hate the auction.
I hate the Gloss. I hate that I didn't get a say in any of it.
But I can't sit here and regret a single second of it.
Every awful piece led me to him." I wave my hand.
"Fate, I guess. I don't know how else to explain it. "
"Fate." He spits the word out like it just bit his tongue.
"Whatever you want to call it. Just don't wait until something blows up to figure out you wanted her the whole time."
"Hm." His gaze snags on me. Appraising me, perhaps. "Thanks for the advice."
Then Ransom turns, looking back out the window. We ride the last couple of minutes without talking. When the SUV pulls into an unassuming parking lot, Ransom opens his door. "Ready?"
I nod and follow him.
The private hospital doesn't have a name on the outside. Ransom slides me a look. “This place is safe. We own it.”
“You own it?” I echo.
“Yep. Two floors, six beds, a full surgical suite, a helipad on the roof for the days the front door won't do.”
“I’d say I don’t believe you, but I’ve seen more unbelievable things in the past month. You guys have so much money.”
A smile lifts the corner of his mouth. “Fucking right.”
From the street, the hospital looks like a beige office building nobody works in. The sort of place I'd walk past a hundred times without looking directly at it. The bodyguards that accompany Ransom hustle us into a side door.
They seem comfortable with the building. They've no doubt been here before.
A nurse pulls me aside the second we're through the door. She's brisk and kind and doesn't ask why a girl shows up at a private hospital at this hour covered in someone else's blood.
She checks my eyes with a little light. She asks what day it is, and how many fingers she's holding up, and whether I lost consciousness, and I answer on autopilot while my whole mind stays down the hall with Rian.
"Mild concussion," she says. "The ringing in your ears should settle in a day or two. Somebody needs to wake you every few hours tonight." She cleans a cut at my hairline I didn't know I had. "None of the rest of this blood is yours, hon. You're alright."
I don't feel alright. But my hands have finally stopped shaking, and I can walk, and that's enough to get me where I need to be. "Can I see him?" I ask.
"Soon." She nods toward a door. "Wait in there. They'll come get you."
The hallway smells like strong antiseptic and nothing else, which is somehow worse than blood would be. I try not to breathe through my nose as I follow Ransom into a private waiting room.
A dangerous-looking dark-haired man is already there, in a chair against the wall, flipping a small knife through his fingers without looking at it. He's not looking at anything. His eyes find me long enough to confirm I exist, then slide back to the middle distance.
“That’s Talon,” Ransom says. “One of my brothers.”
Talon raises his hand but he still doesn’t look at me.
I shift, whispering to Ransom. “I thought it was just you, Hale, and Rian.”
“You’ve met Talon. Hawke’s around here somewhere, too.”
Knowing that there is another King brother floating around, untethered, makes me nervous.
"Dr. B's in there with Rian." Talon fidgets with the knife. "It's been forty minutes without an update."
"And Hale?”
Talon jerks his thumb. "A nurse came by and yelled at him for bleeding all over the floor in here. She forced Hale and Hawke to let her patch them up."
A door opens, cutting off any more of Ransom’s questions. A man in scrubs comes out, his expression determined. He glances at Ransom first, probably because Ransom is the most 'I'm the boss in charge here' guy I've ever seen. Then he glances at me. His eyes soften.
"He's stable," he says.
"Oh thank god." My knees feel weak. I wobble, and Ransom reaches out and snags the back of my oversized t-shirt. He nods at the doctor.
"He's got a pretty serious concussion. Burns down his left side.
Mostly second degree, one patch closer to third.
His left eardrum's perforated, so his hearing's going to be off for a while.
Weeks at least, maybe longer. He's got some smoke inhalation, so he'll be on oxygen tonight. A previous wound, a bullet wound, was opened. I cleaned it out again and stitched it.”
“Oh my god.” I clutch my chest. “But… but he’s okay?”
“He’s going to be. I want him here at least forty-eight hours, though. I'd prefer three or four days."
"Is he awake?" I blurt out.
"In and out." The doctor arches a brow. "I'm going to assume you're Noemi? He's been asking for you."
"He has?" I squeak.
"Come on." The doctor waves me toward the back. "You can be the first."
Ransom puts a hand on my shoulder, brief and awkward. The way you give strength to someone when you don't quite know how. Then he steps back and I scurry to follow the doctor.
Surrounded by beeping machines and hooked up to tubes, giant Rian is stuffed uncomfortably in the hospital bed.
Stripped of his dark clothing, wearing a gray hospital gown, he looks all kinds of wrong.
The left side of his face is bandaged from temple to jaw.
Gauze packs his left ear and makes his blond hair look gray against the pillow.
His burned arm is wrapped tight. There's an IV in his good hand, an oxygen line under his nose, and his eyes are closed.
Holy fuck. The man I thought was invincible seems anything but.
I cross to the bed and touch his fingers. Rian's red-rimmed eyes flicker open, hazily trying to focus.
"No– emi." His voice is scraped raw by smoke.
He's bandaged half to death with a tube under his nose, so I lift my hand to his face instead and trail my fingers over his jaw. "Hey." He shudders at my touch and it threatens to undo me completely. "I'm here. I'm right here."
Rian relaxes under my hand. His eyes close. I don't mind if he dozes while I pet him. A tear tracks down my face and falls on his arm.
I suck in a breath and start to withdraw, but his eyes snap open. "Don't– go."
Stupid tears. I swipe at them and try to calm him. "Nope. You're not getting rid of me that easily. Just let me grab a chair."
He grabs me with his good arm and hauls me on top of him, into the fucking hospital bed. My head squashes against his chest, my body pressed against his side. "Rian! I can't stay up here! You're hurt."
"Mm." He nuzzles the crown of my head sleepily. "Mine."
I squirm, afraid I'm going to rip out his IV or jar his burns. Ransom chooses that moment to stroll in. He looks at me struggling feebly against Rian's hold, and he laughs.
"Stop fighting him, Noemi. It'll be easier for you if you just give in."
I glare at Ransom. But I also quit trying to wriggle free. It's nice to be touching Rian, after all. He's safe here. He's going to be okay.
I close my eyes and breathe him in.