51. Killian
KILLIAN
The oxygen regulator hisses. A steady flow of air vibrates through the thin plastic tube taped to my face, sitting in my nostrils.
My mouth tastes like stale blood and synthetic chemicals. I try to swallow, but the muscles in my throat seize around a dry ache. I blink my eyes open slowly, unsure of what I'm going to see.
The years of training fire up before my mind fully engages. One door. No visible weapons. Restraint points, an IV line tethering the left arm, monitoring leads stuck to my chest, the pull of the oxygen tubing limiting head movement. I'm strapped down, back in that place.
Then the fog burns off, and the physical reality of a hospital room catches up. The threat assessment runs dry. Nothing to kill. For once, nothing to do but be here.
My body starts filing its complaints in order. The catheter quickly makes it to the top of the list. I've survived assassination attempts, torture, and a bullet to the chest. Apparently none of that prepared me for the indignity of a hospital stay and a tube up my dick.
It's too bright in the room. Fluorescent light reflects off the linoleum. I try to lift my left arm, but fuck the movement pulls the skin tight across my chest. A sharp, hot pain rips through the muscle, starting at my collarbone and radiating down to my ribs. He shot me...
Motherfucker
I let my arm drop. The monitors next to the bed beep in a steady rhythm.
Everything before this moment is fragmented.
Impressions bleeding through God knows how long of heavy sedation.
I remember the weight of someone's hand pressing down on my chest before I could open my eyes.
I remember a voice. Her voice, anchoring me when I thought there was no way home, though I can't reconstruct the words.
I remember the violent, scraping pull of the ventilator tube coming out of my throat.
I don't know what day it is. I don't know the exact timeline of what I've missed.
Then I see her.
She's sitting by the window, and I start reading her the way I read a hostile room.
She is wearing a grey hoodie. My hoodie.
The fabric is stained dark around the cuffs.
There's an unopened book on her lap, a spine cracked but unread.
A cold coffee cup sits untouched on the windowsill beside her.
She has her knees pulled up tight to her chest, making her frame as small as possible, the exact, self-protective posture of a trauma patient holding themselves together by sheer force of will.
She pulls the fleece sleeve down over her knuckles, exposing her fingers, then pulls it back up. Over and over. A frantic, silent rhythm.
She isn't looking at me. She's staring at the floor. The skin under her eyes is bruised a deep, sickly purple.
I try to shift my weight to sit up, but the pain bites deep into my side, and the heart monitor instantly spikes in pitch.
Her head snaps up.
She gasps and drops her knees. The hoodie sleeves fall past her wrists as she stands and crosses the space between us in two rapid steps. She stops short of the bed, her hands hovering in the air over my chest.
"Oh my God. You're awake." Her voice cracks.
"Yeah." The word barely scrapes out of my throat.
She lets her left hand drop to the mattress edge. Her right hand grips my forearm. Her fingers are warm, pressing gently into my skin. I focus on the pressure of her grip.
The door opens. A woman in a white coat walks in, holding a tablet.
"Oh, glad to see you're with us." She says, her voice raspy with exhaustion. She finally looks up from the tablet, her eyes sharp and bloodshot. "I'm Dr. Martinez. I'm the one who put you back together in the OR."
She steps up to the other side of the bed, snaps a pair of nitrile gloves onto her hands, and reaches for the dressing taped over my chest.
She peels back the adhesive. The bite of the tape tearing off my skin makes my jaw clench.
"Drainage is minimal," Martinez notes. She presses two fingers to the skin just below my collarbone.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek. Pain I can work with. Pain means I'm still alive. Ellie tracks Martinez's hands on my chest, holding her breath until the doctor steps away.
"Your oxygen saturation is holding steady," Martinez says, pulling the gloves off and dropping them into the biohazard bin. "Lungs are clear. We'll keep you here for another week, minimum."
"A week?" I try to take a deep breath, and the pain cuts me off halfway.
"You had a fragmented bullet in your chest cavity, Mr. Cross. Your lung collapsed, and you crashed in the OR. You've been out for four days. Minimum of six weeks of restricted movement." Martinez looks at the monitors one last time. "Don't push your luck. You are very lucky to be alive."
She walks out.
Mr. Cross. The alias is holding. We always had a back-up plan for an eventuality like this, to stop police and officials from interfering, or the Order from getting wind of our business.
Jackson must have embedded the cover identity deep enough into the hospital's database to pass medical scrutiny.
Fabricated patient history, forged insurance records, a next-of-kin contact leading to a dead drop.
It had to be airtight. If Martinez bought it, the guys had bought us time.
Six weeks. I've survived worse waiting. I look back at Ellie. She's tracing the line of a vein on the back of my hand.
"The basement," I say, my voice raw. "Are you hurt? What happened?"
She shakes her head, but she doesn't meet my eyes.
She starts talking, from the first gunshot to the ICU, and everything in-between, filling in the days between me bleeding out and waking up strapped to this bed.
I let the words wash over me. I'm too busy taking physical inventory of her.
Searching for cuts. Bruises. The phantom injuries she'd never admit to.
There's a faint scrape along her jawline.
The dark, sunk-in exhaustion around her eyes.
Dried blood has crusted into the fleece cuffs of my hoodie.
Physically, she survived what happened down there.
But the rigid tension in her posture tells me the trauma made it out with her.
"Gabriel handled hospital security," she says quietly. Her voice is still rough. "Kai wiped the camera feeds. Jackson is monitoring The Order's channels. They've gone completely dark."
Dark. My chest tightens against the medical tape. The Order going dark isn't a retreat. It's a reset. I know exactly what their radio silence means, because for seven years, I was the silence. They don't walk away. They reload.
There's a black matte tablet resting on the windowsill next to an empty coffee cup. Gabriel's. He'd been in the room.
She stops tracing my vein. She pulls the sleeve of the hoodie down over her palm again, gripping the fleece tight inside her fist.
"Reeves is dead," she says.
The man who had her father's secrets, the one she shot to get me out of that place. The name surfaces slowly through the fog.
"Julian is dead, too," she adds. Her voice is completely flat. "Reeves shot him. They were cleaning the house."
I attempt to shift again, but the pain stops me. The Order killing their own asset means they aren't stopping. "What else?"
"They breached the house," she says. "They took angle grinders and torches to the reinforced doors. It's completely trashed." She strokes her thumb over the edge of my IV tape. "We can't go back."
I don't give a fuck about the house. It's only concrete and steel. We can buy a dozen more just like it. The only thing that matters is that everyone is out, alive. And if I had to stay behind to make sure each one of them got out, then so be it.
"Gabe's securing a new safe house," she says, reading my silence. "He told me not to rush it. It's ready whenever we are."
I watch her knuckles strain inside the hoodie sleeves. She isn't crying. She's standing there, carrying the weight of a life she took for me. I dragged her into this. I put her in harm's way. Again. I'm so fucking stupid.
I've killed dozens of men. I've never wanted to undo one before.
Her eyes meet mine. The hazel is more gold than green right now, rimmed in red.
She's exhausted. I watch her pick at the fabric inside the oversized sleeves.
She killed a man to save my life, completely aware that she has rescued her father's murderer.
The dry ache in my throat sharpens. I look at the dark bruises under her eyes, and the guilt gets swallowed back down.
I turned her into this. I know exactly what that makes me.
The only thing I can offer her that isn't built on a lie is still corrupted by what I forced her to become.
"I love you," I say.
The words get caught in the dryness of my throat. They sound harsh.
She stops entirely. The repetitive motion of her hands against the sleeves ceases.
I wait. I know how to survive torture. I know how to read violence before a muscle twitches. But none of my training prepared me for this kind of silence. I stare at her, completely blind. I read absolutely nothing.
My ribs ache with every shallow breath I take, waiting for her to speak.
She looks at me, the golden flecks of her eyes shine with tears. Her chest rises and falls in sharp, shallow breaths.
Then she leans over, ignoring the mess of wires and tubes, and buries her face into the curve of my neck.
She doesn't say it back. But the rigid tension holding her together simply snaps, and the dead weight of her exhaustion collapses against my chest. I feel the hot dampness of her tears soaking through the hospital gown, her warmth sinks into my skin, pushing past the cold drip of the IV and the deep throb in my ribs. It grounds me.
I don't have the strength to lift my arm to hold her. I don't have the words to fix what I broke.
I close my eyes and turn my head until my jaw rests against the fleece of my own hoodie, and let her fall apart.