36. Cam
The lights are brutal—searing through my eyelids like I’m lying under a sunlamp. Even with my eyes shut, I can feel the heat of them, pulsing against my skin.
Did we do it?
I can’t remember.
Everything after the gunshot is a void.
“He’s waking up,”
Talia’s voice cuts through the fog—sharp, urgent, too loud for how fragile I feel.
I risk a glance, cracking one eye open just enough to let in a sliver of light. It’s blinding. My vision swims, the world a smear of white and shadow. I blink slowly, trying to force my eyes to adjust.
Talia comes into focus—just barely. Her face is tight, brows drawn together, lips pressed into a grim line. She looks like she hasn’t slept. But my left eye won’t focus, no matter how many times I blink.
“Did you get her?”
My voice is barely a rasp. My throat feels like it’s been sandblasted, and my eyes—God, my eyes. It’s like someone packed them with grit and set it on fire.
Especially the left one. It burns. Not just the eye, but the skin around it feels raw and swollen, like it’s been torn open and stitched back together.
Talia hesitates. That pause says everything.
“No, Cam,”
she says softly.
“I had to get you out. You came off the bike hard—must’ve hit something sharp on the way down. You were bleeding badly. They had to stitch your face, and…”
She trails off and all I can do is wait.
“And your left eye took the worst of it,”
Talia says, her voice tight.
“The cornea’s torn, it’s lacerated and clouded over. They managed to stop the bleeding and stitch the tissue around it, but…”
She hesitates, and that pause hits like a blade.
“The doctor said there’s significant scarring. Deep into the stroma apparently. They don’t know if you’ll regain any vision in it at all.”
I close my eyes—not because of the pain, though it’s there, throbbing behind the bandages and stitches—but because I can’t bear what I already know.
Nell’s still out there.
And now I’m half-blind.
I was a sharp shot. Precise. Controlled. My left eye was my anchor—my depth, my balance. I try to focus now, blinking through the blur, but it’s like looking through frosted glass. My right eye is clear, but without the left, everything feels off-kilter. My aim is gone, and my edge gone with it.
I’ll never shoot the same again.
“And Nell?”
My voice cracks. I swallow hard, forcing the words out like they might change something.
“Did you get her?”
Talia’s face tightens as she looks away.
“They took off. We couldn’t get to her in time.”
The finality in her voice hits harder than the crash. It echoes through me mercilessly.
I failed her.
I didn’t move fast enough. Didn’t fight hard enough. Didn’t protect her the way I swore I would.
Kyla slipped through my fingers, and now Nell has too. But this time, I’m not letting it end here. I don’t care if I’m blind in one eye. I don’t care if I can’t shoot straight. I’ll learn to fight differently. I’ll burn the world down if I have to.
Because if it’s the last thing I do—I’m bringing her back.
They took Kyla. They’re not taking Nell too.
But I’m not just going to lie here and let her vanish. Not again.
I rip the IV from my arm. The machine shrieks in protest, a high-pitched alarm that echoes off the sterile walls. Blood beads at the site, but I don’t care. I swing my legs over the side of the bed, the floor cold beneath my feet as I force myself upright.
The room tilts violently. My balance is shot, and the loss of depth from my ruined eye makes everything feel like I’m swimming. I stagger, catching myself on the edge of a chair, then the wall, dragging my body toward the bathroom like a man crawling out of a grave.
Talia doesn’t try to stop me. She knows better.
I slam into the bathroom door, shoulder first, fumbling for the handle. My breath is ragged, my limbs trembling, but I make it inside. I brace myself on the sink, gripping the porcelain like it’s the only thing anchoring me to the world.
And then I look up.
The face staring back at me is barely mine.
A jagged gash cuts across my forehead, slicing through my eyebrow and trailing down into my cheek—angry, swollen, stitched. The skin around it is bruised and raw, a roadmap of failure.
But it’s my eye that stops me cold.
The left one—once dark and alive—is now ghosted over. A milky white cloud has swallowed my iris, leaving it pale and sightless. It looks dead. Like something that doesn’t belong in a living face.
I look like a ghost.
Like someone who’s already lost.
“Mr. Reed!”
The bathroom door bursts open, and a nurse stumbles in wide-eyed, breath catching in her throat. She looks equal parts flustered and horrified, like she’s just walked in on a crime scene.
“You can’t be out of bed! Where’s your IV?”
She rushes to the machines, hands fluttering uselessly as alarms wail around us. Tubes dangle, blood drips, and she’s trying to piece it all back together like she can rewind the damage.
But I’m not going back.
Not to that bed.
Not to waiting.
Not to helplessness.
“There’s only one thing I’m doing,”
I growl, steadying myself against the sink.
“And it’s not sitting in this fucking room.”
I’m going to get my girl back.
She opens her mouth to protest, but I’m already moving—limping, bleeding, half-blind and burning with purpose.
Because I might be broken.
But I’m not done.
They can’t keep me here.
And they sure as hell won’t.
“Talia,”
I rasp, already stripping off the hospital gown, my skin prickling in the cold. I gesture toward the corner of the room, where my bag sits slouched against the wall. It takes me a second to find it—my depth perception is shot, and my finger lands wide of the mark.
The brown leather duffle blurs in and out of focus. No matter how many times I blink, the milky haze in my left eye refuses to clear. It’s like trying to see through thick smoke.
Talia’s already moving, grabbing the bag and helping me into something that resembles normal clothes—jeans, shirt, jacket.
Christ, it feels like I’ve been hit by a bus. All of my muscles ache and protest as I tug on the clothes. And though her hands are steady, her eyes are tight with worry.
Behind us, the nurse is flailing, trying to herd me back toward the bed like I’m some fragile thing she can still fix.
“You’ll get an infection, Mr. Reed,”
she pleads.
“You’ve been in surgery. You need rest. We need to get you an eye patch fitted. You can’t just walk out hours after—”
“Hours?”
I cut in, my voice low and sharp.
She hesitates with a subtle nod.
That’s all I need to hear.
Hours.
I’ve been unconscious for hours.
Which means Manticore has had all that time to vanish with Nell. To move her across the country. Or worse, off the grid entirely. Another continent. Another name. Another cage.
I shove my arm into my jacket, ignoring the pull of stitches and the fire in my ribs, and swipe the eye medication from the bedside table.
We walk out fast, but not fast enough to stop the nurse from slamming her hand on the panic alarm. The shrill wail echoes down the corridor behind us.
Too late.
By the time the doctor and security reach my room, it’s already empty. We’re in the lift, the doors sliding shut with a soft hiss that seals us off from the chaos above. The alarm fades as we descend, replaced by the low hum of the elevator and the weight of my failure that led us here in the first place.
Talia breaks the silence.
“I’ve got a couple of the guys working leads. We tracked one of the vans to an industrial unit on the outskirts of the city. The place was cleared by the time we got there, but there were signs—restraints, food wrappers, blood. They’d been holding girls there for a while.”
She exhales, jaw tight.
“We think we’re onto another location now, but they’re fast. The second we get close, they vanish.”
For the first time, her voice wavers. Not much, but enough to prickle the hairs on the back of my neck.
She’s worried.
For Nell? For me? I don’t know. Maybe both.
“Well, I’m here now,”
I say, my voice low but steady.
“I can help.”
Talia glances at me, but I don’t give her time to argue.
“She’s not going to survive in there, Talia. Not like this. And I can’t—”
I stop, swallowing hard.
“I can’t lose her the way I lost Kyla. If I don’t get her back…”
I trail off. I can’t even finish the sentence. The thought alone guts me.
In the space of a week, Nell turned my world upside down. She cracked something open in me I thought was long dead. She made me feel again, filled me with hope, and she made me want something more than revenge and survival.
And I’m not ready to let that go.