Chapter thirty-seven
Riven
The blood wouldn’t come off my hands. I scrubbed so hard my skin split open at the knuckles, pink water swirling down the stainless steel sink in the emergency room bathroom.
It still wasn’t enough. Her blood sat in the cracks of my fingers as it belonged there.
Under my nails. Across my wrists. Dried into the sleeves of the hoodie I changed into.
I could still feel her head in my lap. Could still hear the wet, choking sound she made when she tried to breathe.
I braced both palms against the sink and stared at my reflection.
I looked fucking insane. Bloodshot eyes, split lip, dirt streaked across my cheek.
Blood everywhere. Mine. Hers. I didn’t know anymore.
My chest hurt so bad it felt like my ribs were collapsing inward one by one.
The bathroom door creaked open behind me.
“Riv.” It was Shane. I ignored him.
“You gotta come out.” I gripped the sink tighter.
“No.” Silence.
“They’re workin’ on her.” He quietly informed me.
Workin’ on her, like she was a machine. Like she was one of the fucking cars she rebuilt with grease on her hands and music blasting in the garage.
Nadia hated hospitals. The thought hit so violently I nearly doubled over.
She hated fluorescent lights. Hated the smell.
Hated people touching her when she didn’t want to be touched.
Hated needles. Hated losing control. And now strangers were cutting her clothes off while she lay there broken.
My stomach twisted so hard I thought I might throw up.
“I need to see her.” I stared at him in the mirror, eyes red.
“You can’t right now.” He sighed. Wrong answer. I turned so fast Shane instinctively stepped back.
“You gonna stop me?” His jaw tightened.
“No.”
“Then move.” I grit.
“Riven-”
“Move.”
Something in my face must’ve convinced him, because he stepped aside. The second I walked back into the hallway, the hospital noise hit me all over again. Monitors beeping, nurses rushing around, phones ringing. It was too fucking bright. Too fucking loud.
Abby sat in one of the waiting room chairs with her elbows on her knees and blood on her jeans.
Deck stood nearby on the phone, barking at somebody from the LBC, Isla sitting stockstill beside him.
Pop leaned against the wall, motionless, cigarette tucked behind his ear despite the signs plastered everywhere that said not to smoke.
Nobody spoke when they saw me. Nobody knew what to say. Because Nadia Slade was dying upstairs, and everybody knew if she died, Stonebridge would never recover from it. A doctor shoved through the double doors. Everybody stood immediately.
“How is she?” Abby asked before anyone else could. The doctor looked exhausted already. Mid-fifties, balding, and still wearing bloody gloves. That sight alone almost sent me over the edge again.
“She’s lost a significant amount of blood.” He carefully started.
“We’ve stabilized the internal bleeding for now, but the next twenty-four hours are critical.”
For now. Critical. Words designed to sound hopeful without actually promising shit.
“What injuries?” Pop asked gruffly.
“Multiple fractured ribs. Punctured lung. Pelvic fracture. Severe lacerations.” He hesitated.
“Significant head trauma.” The room went silent, but my pulse was pounding in my ear.
“What does that mean?” I asked. The doctor looked at me.
“Brain swelling.”
No.
No.
No.
“She’s being placed into a medically induced coma to reduce pressure and give her body a chance to heal.”
Abby made a broken sound beside me. Deck swore violently under his breath.
I didn’t hear anything after ‘coma’. Everything around me became muffled, distorted.
Like I was underwater. Because that word meant one thing.
I could lose her. Again, but not like before.
Not her taillights disappearing down the highway while I screamed her name into the fucking night. This would be permanent. Forever. Dead.
“You can see her soon.” The doctor continued.
“But only briefly.”
Then, he walked away as if he didn’t take a sledgehammer and beat the shit outta my soul. And the second he disappeared around the corner, Isla burst into tears. Deck immediately pulled her against his chest. Pop just stared at the floor. I turned around and walked away.
“Riven.”
I ignored Pop calling after me. My boots echoed down the hallway as rage clawed through my chest hard enough to split bone. That wasn’t an accident. I knew it. The second that SUV came flying out of the mining road, I fucking knew it. Somebody tried to kill my wife.
The doors to the stairwell slammed open so hard they cracked against the wall. I barely made it down one flight before Pop grabbed my shoulder and yanked me backward.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re goin’?” I shoved him off me instantly.
“To find who did this.”
“With what proof ?”
“I don’t need proof.”
“That’s the fuckin’ problem.” I started down the stairs again, but he quickly blocked me.
“Move.”
“No.”
My vision blurred red.
“Move.” I sneer.
“You go tearin’ through Stonebridge tonight, and there’ll be bodies in the fuckin’ streets by morning.”
“Good.” That made him pause. Not because of the word, but because I meant it.
“I don’t care anymore.” My voice sounded wrong. Hollow.
“I’ll burn every side of this town to the ground if I have to.” Pop stared at me for a long moment.
“She’d hate you for that.” I laughed, a sharp ugly sound.
“She ain’t awake to stop me.” That hurt him; I saw it. Pain flashed across his face before anger replaced it.
“You think you’re the only one hurtin’ right now?”
“My wife is upstairs fightin’ for her life.”
“And my daughter is too!” He roared back.
The stairwell went dead silent afterward. Both of us breathing hard. Both of us furious. But something shifted in his expression then. Not softer, just… tired and terrified. He scrubbed a hand over his face.
“That wasn’t random.” Finally, someone fucking said it.
“You saw the road?” I asked immediately. Pop nodded once.
“Mining access road. It goes into the South side.” My stomach clenched. South Side, now Kingsmen territory.
“They were waitin’ for her,” I said.
“Looks that way, yeah.”
Rage hit me so hard I nearly blacked out. The Kingsmen, those fucking snakes. Every territorial dispute. Every weird movement lately. Every shipment. Every rumor about South Side redevelopment. All of it came crashing together at once.
“They’re dead,” I vowed.
“Riven.” Pop cautioned.
“They touched her.”
“I know.”
“No.” I snapped.
“You don’t. You don’t understand what they just did.” Pop’s expression darkened dangerously.
“You think I don’t?”
For one horrible second, I almost swung on him.
Not because I hated him, but because I needed something to hurt as badly as I did.
Instead, I slammed my fist into the concrete wall beside his head.
Pain exploded through my already shredded knuckles.
I welcomed it. Because physical pain was simple. This wasn’t. “
I already lost her once,” I said hoarsely. Pop went still.
“And now I gotta sit upstairs wonderin’ if the last thing I ever said to her was somethin’ cruel.”
His expression shifted. Just slightly. Because he knew.
He knew exactly what kind of goodbye Nadia and I would’ve had before that race.
Anger. Sharp words. Half-healed wounds. Then, the apology.
Her apology. Her promise to stay. Christ, my knees almost gave out remembering it.
The way she looked at me before climbing into her Viper.
Like she was trying to memorize my face.
“I should’ve stopped the race. Called it off.” I whispered. Pop shook his head immediately.
“You couldn’t have stopped that. She wouldn’t have let you.”
“I could’ve tried,” I argued.
“But you didn’t know.”
Neither did Nadia. That was the part killing me. She finally let herself come back to me, and Stonebridge punished her for it. The stairwell door opened again, and Deck stepped inside.
“We got a problem.” I straightened instantly.
“What?”
“The SUV.” Every muscle in my body tightened.
“What about it?”
“They found it burned out near the South side quarry.” The Kingsmen. Had to be. Deck’s expression was grim.
“But that’s not the weird part.”
“Then what is?” Pop asked. Deck looked between us.
“The roadblock cameras were wiped.” That made us pause. “
What?”
“Every camera near the mining roads got scrubbed clean.”
That stopped me cold. The Kingsmen were violent, but they sure as fuck weren’t that sophisticated. This? This was organized. Planned. Professional. Deck continued carefully.
“And somebody cut the emergency lines on Greyveil for almost six minutes after the crash.”
My blood ran cold. That wasn’t a gang hit. No, that was an execution attempt. Designed to delay medical response. Designed to make sure Nadia died before help arrived. Pop looked disturbed too now.
“Who the fuck has access to somethin’ like that?”
Nobody answered. Because suddenly this felt bigger than gang warfare.
Bigger than Stonebridge. A horrible thought crawled into my head then.
The burner phone. Nadia’s fear. The way she’d been acting since she came back.
The panic in her eyes after her brakes were sabotaged.
And that one word Roxy said in the cathedral basement. Olympus.
“Get me, Roxy,” I told Deck. His brows furrowed.
“What?”
“Now.” My nostrils flared.
“Why?”
“Because she knows somethin’. She knows about Olympus.” Pop had a lethal glint in his eye.
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“I don’t know yet.”
That was the worst fucking part. I felt like everybody else had been handed pieces of a puzzle except me. Nadia knew things. Roxy knew things. And now my wife was unconscious while I stood here blind and useless. The realization made rage crawl up my throat again.
I shoved past them and headed back upstairs. This time nobody stopped me. The ICU hallway was quiet when I got there. Too quiet. Machines beeped softly behind closed doors. A nurse intercepted me halfway down the hall.
“Immediate family only.” She said.
“She’s my wife.” The nurse froze, then softened slightly.
“Room twelve.”
My legs felt heavy walking toward it, like my body already knew this would ruin me.
The door creaked open slowly… and there she was.
I stopped breathing. Nadia lay motionless beneath stark white hospital blankets, tubes and wires running everywhere.
Bruises bloomed across her skin in ugly shades of purple and black.
Cuts lined her face and arms. Her shoulder was heavily bandaged. But it was her hands that destroyed me.
Bandaged, broken, and so fucking still. Those hands built engines.
Held knives. Gripped my jaw when she kissed me.
Those hands wore her wedding ring. Now they looked lifeless.
I walked toward the bed slowly, as if I moved too fast, she might disappear.
The chair beside her bed scraped loudly against the floor as I sat down.
She didn’t move. Didn’t glare at me. Didn’t call me dramatic. Didn’t tell me to stop staring. Nothing. My chest caved inward. I took her hand carefully in both of mine. They were too fucking cold.
“You scared me,” I whispered, but got no response. I laughed shakily.
“Actually, no. That’s a lie.” My throat tightened.
“You fuckin’ destroyed me.” Still nothing.
I lowered my head beside our joined hands and for the first time since I was a kid, since I could even fucking remember, I prayed. Not to God and not to heaven. I prayed to anybody listening.
Take everything else. The title, the gang, the town. Take my fucking sanity. Just not her. Please. Because if Nadia Slade died, there wouldn’t be enough left of me to survive it.