7. Cassie
CASSIE
I didn’t know how I was going to get in to see Hawk, but I knew I wasn’t leaving until I saw for myself that he was alive.
Until I let him know I was there.
The elevator was empty, but Bram and I didn’t talk on our way up to the ICU. There was too much to say, both of us grappling with our old dynamic: Bram as protective older brother, me as the little sister who was still a child.
I think we both knew none of that was going to work anymore.
I was almost relieved when the elevator door opened and we stepped out into the ICU. Somehow talking my way into seeing Hawk seemed less complicated than trying to sort things out with Bram.
The floor was hushed, the nurses speaking in low voices, machines beeping softly from the private rooms, their glass doors extra wide to accommodate specialized equipment.
“I don’t know which room he’s in,” I told Bram, trying to keep my voice down.
“I’ll take care of it.” He scanned the people in scrubs behind the nurses’ station and homed in on a guy in his thirties, his brown hair thin and beginning to recede from his hairline. “Let me do the talking.”
He stalked toward the nurses’ station.
I clocked the moment they spotted him, saw the familiar recoil, as if Bram were surrounded by some kind of palpable dark energy.
Most of them looked away, something people did a lot with Bram. I was convinced that was one of many reasons my brother had fallen in love with Maeve: she’d seen him from the start.
But the guy with the receding hairline couldn’t look away. Bram’s gaze had him in a death grip, and he stood there, terror written all over his face as Bram approached with me on his heels.
“Um… hey… Bram.” The guy cleared his throat, and one of the other nurses — a blond woman wearing scrubs with trees on them — stared at him in surprise, like she was shocked the guy could know someone like Bram.
“Hey,” Bram said. “Looking for a guy named Hawk.”
I guess Bram didn’t know Hawk’s real name either.
“Uh… sure thing.” The guy walked to a whiteboard on the wall and searched the names.
I followed his gaze, saw Hawk’s name — first name only — with a bunch of shorthand that may have been vitals and other medical info.
“He can’t have visitors,” the guy said, turning to face us.
There was genuine regret in his voice, although I suspected that had more to do with the consequences of telling Bram no than with turning away a visitor in the ICU.
“Room number?” Bram asked.
“Uh… 4328,” the guy said. “But he can’t have— ”
Bram was already walking.
I followed him, trotting along at his heels.
I dared one glance back at the nurses’ station, half expecting to see security headed our way, but the guy with the brown hair was just standing there, shaking his head at one of the other nurses, an expression on his face that said going after Bram would be a very bad idea.
I trotted to catch up to Bram, then read the numbers next to the doors.
4324… 4325… 4326… 4327…
4328 looked like all the other rooms — wide doorway, shadowed interior, half-glass wall that looked out onto the hall.
But it wasn’t like any other room because a third of my heart was inside.
Hawk.
I still didn’t know his real name, didn’t know where he went when he disappeared alone, didn’t know hardly anything about his family.
But I belonged to him.
To him and Jagger and Vigo.
And he was in room 4328 fighting for his life.
“I’ll be right here,” Bram said, leaning against the wall.
“What if the nurses call security?”
“No one’s calling security, Cass.” Bram sounded as sure about that as he did about everything, and I wondered what it was like to be Bram. To be sure things would go your way because you would make them go your way.
Because no one dared to defy you.
It had been lonely for him before Maeve, I knew that much, but I was grateful for his power now.
Grateful to have him on my side.
I rushed into his arms and inhaled the scent of safety.
Of family.
“Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me, Cass.” His voice was gruff. “Anything you want, you get. You know that.”
I looked up at him. “Even them?”
“They laid their lives on the line for you. So yeah… even them.”
I stood on my toes and kissed his cheek, rough with stubble, then stepped through the glass doors leading to room 4328.
It was a big room, but I immediately understood why. There was a lot of equipment, some of it large, all of it surrounding a hospital bed against the far wall. Hawk almost looked small on the mattress, and I knew how hard it was to make Hawk look small.
He was attached to an assortment of tubes and lines that traveled from his chest and arms to the equipment, and his face was half-obscured by the ventilator next to his bed, the room filled with the rush-pump sound of the machine breathing for him.
I felt a moment of panic. Seeing Hawk in the hospital bed made the situation all too real.
There was too much at stake. I wasn’t strong enough for this. Wasn’t strong enough to face what had happened to him.
What might still happen.
But then I remembered. I remembered Hawk going with Vigo and Jagger to Travis Dorsey’s house even after I’d lost the Hunt. I remembered his voice, coming to me from the other side of my shattered windshield at the bottom of the ravine.
You’re not alone.
I remembered the way he’d cared for me after the accident, when I’d been blind. The way he’d cradled me in the hot tub after forcing me into the water.
We don’t let the darkness control us, Cass. That only gives it power. Embrace it. Sink into it.
And then I remembered the expression on his face when he’d shoved me into the elevator after the men at the paper mill had thrown the grenade.
I love you.
I walked toward the bed.
Tears streamed down my face as he came more fully into view.
His chest was bare, several electrodes attached to his skin.
He looked almost gray, and I wondered whether it was the dim lighting in the room or all the blood he’d lost, because Hawk had never been gray a day that I’d known him.
He’d been overflowing with vitality, more alive than anyone I’d ever known, and it almost broke me to see him hooked up to the machines around his bed, not even able to breathe for himself.
Hawk was like a wild animal, meant for fresh air and wide-open spaces. Seeing him like this — the right side of his body covered with the same kind of silver dressing that had covered the burn on Jagger’s arm — was like seeing a leopard in a cage at the zoo.
I was afraid to sit on his bed. Afraid to do anything to disrupt the machines keeping him alive. I settled for holding one of his hands, careful not to interfere with any of the tubes.
For a long time, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to tell him all the things I thought I’d have forever to say.
But looking at him in the hospital bed, hearing the ventilator push air into his lungs, I had to face the fact that I might not have forever.
“I’m here,” I finally said. “You’re not alone.”
It was the thing I most wanted him to know: that I was here for him like he’d been there for me at the bottom of the ravine.
“I wish you hadn’t done it.” I choked on a sob.
“I really really wish you hadn’t done it.
But I know why you did. I know because if I’d had a chance, I would have done it too.
I would have pushed you into the elevator even if it meant dying myself.
And that’s how I know I love you too. I should have told you before, should have told you when you were awake and you could hear me say it.
But… I don’t know. I guess I hope you can hear me say it now.
I hope somewhere in there you know and that it makes you come back to me.
” I was openly crying now, struggling to get air into my lungs around the sobs that felt like they were ripping me in two.
“Because I really need you to come back to me.”
I lay my head on his arm and cried, still holding his hand, hanging onto the only part of him that still felt like it was mine.
And then the machines around the bed went crazy: alarms shrieking and beeping.
I lifted my head and looked around, the sounds filling me with panic even though I didn’t know what they meant.
The glass door slid open and two nurses rushed in, their brows furrowed with concern as they looked at Hawk on the bed.
“He’s coding,” the gray-haired nurse said. “Call for a crash cart.”
The second nurse moved around the bed to press a button and a second later a voice came over the hospital's intercom system.
“Code Blue room 4328. Code Blue room 4328.”
The gray-haired nurse seemed to notice me for the first time. “You have to move.”
I stepped back, my gaze on the bed where Hawk lay, motionless, as the machines around him shrieked.
Two people in scrubs rushed in, pushing a cart covered in machines and instruments I couldn’t identify.
My heart hammered in my chest as another person in scrubs — this time a younger man — entered the fray. Now I couldn’t even see Hawk through the people gathered around his bed.
I took another step back and felt strong hands grip my upper arms.
“Come on,” Bram said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Hawk…”
“We’re not doing him any good here,” Bram said. “We need to let them work.”
I made it into the hall before I crumpled.