Chapter Fourteen
Knight
I shifted in the hospital recliner that had been molded to my ass over the past five days, ignoring the burning ache radiating from my own surgical scar.
The nurses had stopped trying to enforce visiting hours with me around day three, as well as trying to keep me in the fucking hospital bed.
Maybe it was the tattoos on my face or the permanent scowl that made my dissent clear, but more likely it was because I’d made friends with the night shift supervisor by ensuring the staff break room never ran out of decent coffee.
Whatever the reason, they now worked around me like I was just another piece of medical equipment in Brynn’s room.
Brynn stirred restlessly in her sleep, her face pale against the white hospital sheets.
IV lines snaked from her thin arm like translucent vines, feeding her the cocktail of anti-rejection meds and painkillers the doctors insisted she needed.
Her blue hair had lost some of its vibrancy, lying flat against the pillow.
I leaned forward, resisting the urge to brush a strand from her forehead. We weren’t quite there yet.
The monitors beeped steadily, a reassuring rhythm I’d come to rely on.
The surgeon had taken my kidney five days ago, and technically I’d been discharged two days back, but there wasn’t a chance in hell I was leaving.
Lavender had reluctantly returned to the hotel for a proper shower and change of clothes, promising to be back by evening.
That left me on watch duty. Exactly where I wanted to be.
Brynn’s eyelids fluttered, then opened. She blinked several times, orienting herself, before her gaze landed on me.
“Water?” I asked, already reaching for the plastic cup on her tray.
She nodded, wincing as she tried to sit up.
I pressed the button to raise the head of her bed, then held the straw to her lips.
She took several small sips before pulling back.
She’d been up and moving around and hoped to go home either today or tomorrow.
The disgruntled way she refused help sometimes made me smile.
The independence was fierce with this one.
“You look like shit,” she muttered, her voice raspy from sleep.
I snorted. “Thanks. Good to see you, too.”
There was something different in her tone, less of the sharp hostility that had marked our early interactions. Maybe it was the drugs. I hoped that, by fighting to give her what she needed, maybe she’d finally started to believe in me. Either way, I’d take it.
“Mom coming back soon?” she asked, picking at the edge of her blanket.
“I told her this afternoon, the reality is she’ll likely be here before ten. Whenever she gets here, Ada’s making her eat some actual food before she heads over.” I reached into my backpack at my feet. “Got something to pass the time.”
I pulled out a battered paperback, its spine cracked and pages yellowed with age. The cover showed a dragon coiled around a mountain fortress, the once-vibrant colors faded from years of handling.
Brynn eyed it skeptically. “What’s that supposed to be?”
“Book I read when I was about your age,” I said, flipping it open to the dog-eared first page. “Thought maybe you’d like it.”
“Fantasy?” She wrinkled her nose. “Seriously?”
“Listen to a chapter before you judge. If you hate it, I’ll find something else.” I cleared my throat and began reading, my gravelly voice filling the small room.
I’d always been a big reader. The words came easy, and I found myself falling into the familiar rhythm of the story. I snuck glances at Brynn between paragraphs. She maintained an expression of bored tolerance, but her eyes remained fixed on me, alert and following every word.
Three chapters in, a nurse came in with Brynn’s lunchtime meds. I paused reading, marking my place with my finger.
“Don’t stop on my account,” the nurse said cheerfully, checking Brynn’s IV lines. “I love hearing stories. Makes me almost want to stay and listen.”
“It’s stupid,” Brynn muttered, but there wasn’t any real conviction behind it.
“Sure it is,” I agreed, exchanging a knowing look with the nurse as she handed Brynn her pills.
After the nurse left, Brynn took one look at the sad tray of hospital food -- some kind of beige mush masquerading as chicken casserole -- and pushed it away with a grimace.
“Got you covered,” I said, reaching into my backpack again and pulling out a paper bag. Inside was a container of Ada’s homemade chicken soup, still warm in its thermos, and a slice of chocolate cake wrapped carefully in wax paper.
Brynn’s eyes widened. “How’d you smuggle that in?”
“Nurse Martinez has a weakness for Knuckles’ espresso beans.
We worked out a deal.” I transferred the soup to a bowl and handed it to her with a plastic spoon.
“Besides. Ada was careful with what she put in it and followed the dietary guidelines. She said she needed to make sure we could feed you when you got home anyway.”
She took it without comment, but the speed with which she dug in told me everything I needed to know about how hungry she actually was.
And so our day went. I read more chapters, pausing when Brynn needed her meds or when her eyes grew heavy. Around mid-morning, the day nurse came in for vitals check, her tablet tucked under her arm.
“So, how’s Miss Brynn doing today?” she asked, wrapping the blood pressure cuff around Brynn’s arm.
“I’d feel better if people would stop asking me how I’m doing every five minutes,” Brynn grumbled.
The nurse just smiled, used to Brynn’s prickly responses by now. She checked the various monitors, made notes, and then looked at me. “Bloodwork from this morning came back looking good. Dr. Patel is very pleased with her progress.”
I tried to keep my face neutral, but I felt my shoulders drop several inches from where they’d been permanently lodged around my ears.
“That’s good,” I said, my voice rougher than I intended.
“That’s excellent,” the nurse corrected, giving me a knowing smile. “Keep doing whatever you’re doing. It seems to be working.”
After she left, Brynn picked at the edge of her blanket again, not meeting my eyes.
“So,” she said after a long moment, “guess your kidney doesn’t completely hate me.”
I laughed, a short burst of sound that surprised even me. “‘Course not. It’s part of me, isn’t it? And I definitely don’t hate you.”
“Whatever,” she mumbled, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
“Want to hear what happens next?” I asked, holding up the book. “The kid’s about to discover the secret cave behind the waterfall.”
Brynn rolled her eyes but settled back against her pillows. “Fine. But only because there’s literally nothing else to do in this place.”
The paperback worked well. Until day seven.
By then, even dragons and magic couldn’t keep the restlessness at bay.
Brynn got stronger every day. She needed less and less sleep and didn’t tire as easily.
She should have been able to go home the day before, but Dr. Patel, out of an abundance of caution, talked us into a couple more days to give her body time to heal and the graft attaching her kidney time to…
do whatever the hell grafts do to heal. Brynn’s fingers tapped an erratic rhythm against her blanket while I read, her eyes drifting more frequently to the window than to me.
I’d seen that look before. In prison. On the faces of men too long confined in small spaces.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out a small box I’d had Ada bring.
“What’s that?” Brynn asked, perking up at the prospect of something new to break the monotony.
I opened the box and pulled out a compact magnetic chess set, the pieces small but solid. “Thought you might be going stir-crazy. This helped me keep my head on straight inside.”
Brynn eyed the set skeptically. “You want to play chess? With me?”
“Why not?” I arranged the tray table over her bed and began setting up the pieces. “You scared I’ll beat you?”
Her eyes narrowed at the challenge. “I was captain of my school’s chess club in fourth grade.”
“No shit?” I raised my eyebrows, impressed despite myself. “Then this should be interesting.”
“Language,” she muttered automatically in a perfect impression of Lavender, but she was already helping me set up the black pieces on her side of the board.
The first round went great.
“Checkmate,” she announced, not even trying to hide her satisfaction.
I stared at the board. Little imp. “Well, fuck me sideways,” I muttered.
“Language,” she repeated, but this time with a snort of laughter. “Mom’s gonna put a swear jar at home if you keep that up. Ada and Hannah said Knuckles and Jag both keep their swear jars full. And the jars of all the kids. Figured you’d be like them with us.”
The casual way she dropped that little bomb, like we were already a family, hit me harder than I expected. I cleared my throat. “I figure it’s a great way to save for college. Now, I call rematch. I was just warming up.”
“Were you scared?” Brynn asked suddenly, hesitating as she set up her pieces. “In prison, I mean.”
The question caught me off guard. I considered bullshitting her, giving her the tough-guy answer that would make me sound invincible. But the genuine curiosity in her expression made me hesitate. As I studied her, I realized this was the moment I either gained or lost her trust.
“Every Goddamned day,” I admitted, watching her carefully.
“Not the kind of scared that makes you freeze up. The kind that keeps you alert. In there, you can never let your guard down. You learn to sleep with one eye open, to watch the shadows, read people’s intentions before they even know what they’re planning. ”
She nodded slowly, absorbing this. “Did you… did you really kill someone in there?”
“Yeah.” No point sugarcoating it. “He was trying to shank my cellmate over something stupid. I reacted on instinct. One punch too hard, wrong place, wrong angle.” I rubbed my knuckles unconsciously. “Wasn’t trying to kill him, but that doesn’t change what happened.”
“Do you regret it?”
Tough question. I considered it carefully.
“I regret that he died. I don’t regret protecting my cellmate.
” I watched her face for signs of disgust or fear, but she just looked thoughtful.
“Prison isn’t like the movies, Brynn. It’s not about being the biggest badass or having some grand criminal enterprise.
It’s… survival. Pure and simple. Sometimes that means hard choices. ”
“Mom never told me much about why you were there. Just that you got caught doing something illegal with computers.”
“Cyber fraud and embezzlement. Got cocky, got caught. Wanted to provide for your mom, give her everything she deserved. Instead of working hard and proving myself -- which I kind of already had -- I made stupid choices and got stupid results.” I shook my head at the memory of my younger self.
“Turned out what she really needed was for me to just be there. Lesson learned the hard way.”
“I was scared too,” Brynn said suddenly, her voice small.
“When they first told me about my kidneys. Not so much for me, but…” She swallowed hard.
“I kept thinking about how Mom would have nobody if I died. She’d be all alone.
” The raw honesty in her voice sliced through me like a blade.
I set down the rook I’d been about to move, my hand not quite steady.
“I think that was when I started hating you.”
“I can understand that. And it’s nothing I didn’t deserve. When I got that email from your mom, it scared me,” I confessed. “Terrified me that I could lose you before I got to know you.” I met her eyes across the board. “Still am, sometimes.”
She looked down at the chess pieces, blinking rapidly. “That’s stupid,” she muttered, but there was no heat in it. “The doctors said everything looks good.”
“Doesn’t stop me worrying. Pretty sure that’s part of the whole dad package.” The word felt strange on my tongue, but right somehow. “Listen, Brynn. If this transplant ever fails, you know I’ve got a spare, right? I’ll be on dialysis myself before I let anything happen to you.”
She rolled her eyes, but I caught the slight tremor in her hand as she moved her queen. “Pretty sure that’s not how transplants work, but whatever makes you feel better.”
“I’ve done my research,” I insisted. “And I’ve got friends in low places. We’ll make it work if we need to.”
“You’re such a weirdo,” she muttered, but I saw a fragile trust begin to take root right in front of my eyes. And maybe even the beginnings of respect.