Chapter 20 The Longest Drive
Wren didn't remember most of the drive. She remembered running two red lights she'd never normally risk, remembered bargaining with a God she wasn't sure she still believed in, the desperate, formless way people do when the alternative is sitting with unbearable fear.
She remembered thinking that if she lost him now, after everything, after finally letting herself hope again, she didn't know how she would survive it.
Diesel met her in the waiting room, blood still on his hands he hadn't had time to wash off. "He's in surgery. Shoulder wound, bad, but it missed anything that would've killed him outright. He's going to live, Wren. He threw himself in front of Tomas. Didn't even think about it, just moved."
Wren sat down hard in a plastic chair, the same kind she'd sat in the day her father died, and understood the terrible symmetry of it, another vigil in another hospital.
"Tell me everything."
Diesel told her, the sit-down, the confrontation over the photograph, the rogue shooter, and Wren listened with her hands pressed against her mouth, understanding freshly the specific danger that had always lived alongside loving this man.
"Is it over?"
"Voss disavowed the shooter in front of both crews before the ambulance left.
Handed him over himself. That's about as clear a signal of good faith as you get from a man like that.
I think tonight, ugly as it was, might be the thing that actually ends this.
" The surgeon emerged past one in the morning, tired but steady.
"He's stable. Going to need real physical therapy, months before that arm's back to full strength, but he's going to make a full recovery. He's asking for someone named Wren."
She followed a nurse down a quiet corridor into a recovery room where Cain lay pale against white sheets, smaller and more fragile than she'd ever seen him. His eyes fluttered open at her footsteps.
"Wren. You came."
"Of course I came." She took his hand, careful of the IV, tears finally spilling over. "You threw yourself in front of a bullet for a kid you barely know."
"Didn't think. Just moved." His eyes were heavy, fighting to stay open. "Love you, Wren. Whatever happens with us, I need you to know that. I've been trying so hard to be someone worth it."
"It already proved that," she said softly, pressing his hand to her cheek, feeling the last of her armor finally give way completely. "I already knew you were a good man. Tonight just reminded me how much I never stopped loving it."
His eyes were closing now, exhaustion pulling him under, but his hand stayed wrapped around hers, and the last thing he managed before sleep claimed him was a whispered, "Don't go."
"I'm not going anywhere," she promised, settling into the chair beside his bed.
Somewhere over the past weeks, without fully deciding to, she'd already made her choice.
She just hadn't said the words out loud until this exact moment.Diesel stayed through the night too, in a different corner of the waiting room, arms crossed, watching the doors to the surgical unit like they might reveal something if he stared hard enough.
Around four in the morning he brought Wren a cup of vending machine coffee neither of them wanted and sat down across from her.
"He's going to be furious with himself, you know. Once he's lucid enough to understand what almost happened. Furious that he scared you like this."
"I know."
"He's also going to be different, coming out the other side of this.
I've watched that man change plenty already this past year.
This is going to push it further, whether he wants it to or not.
" Diesel turned the coffee cup in his hands.
"For what it's worth, watching you sit here all night, not leaving, not even considering leaving, that tells me everything I need to know about where this is actually headed. "
Wren didn't answer, too tired and too frightened to manage much more than a small, grateful nod, but she carried his words with her through the rest of the long night, a small steady anchor in an otherwise endless wait.
Lucille arrived at the hospital sometime after two, having heard through the same fast, informal network that carried all of Iron Falls' news, and sat with Wren through the last of the longest hours, holding her hand the same way she had at Walter's funeral, another vigil, another impossible wait.
"He's going to be all right," Lucille said, with the specific certainty of a woman who'd outlived enough hard nights to trust her own instincts about which ones ended in survival.
"I can feel it. Same way I felt your daddy wasn't going to make it, before anybody told me.
This one's different. This one's going to be all right. "
Wren held onto that certainty like a rope through the rest of the night, and when the surgeon finally emerged with good news, she thought, absurdly, of thanking her aunt's instincts as much as the surgical team's skill.
Sometime past three in the morning, Cain's mother's old rosary, which he'd carried in his jacket pocket for years without ever quite explaining why, fell out when the nurses cut away his shirt in the trauma bay, and a kind orderly had collected it, along with his wallet and boots, into a small plastic bag that Diesel now held, unopened, on his lap in the waiting room.
He turned it over in his hands without looking inside, a strange, private vigil of his own, waiting for the moment he could hand it back to his oldest friend and know, for certain, that there would be a hand left to receive it.
Ellis, hearing the news through the club's fast network, drove to the hospital that same night despite having no official reason to be there, and sat quietly in the waiting room a few chairs down from Wren and Diesel, present without intruding, the particular solidarity of a young man who understood, even without fully articulating it, that showing up mattered more than having a specific role to play.
Wren noticed him there sometime past midnight, and felt, despite everything, a small warmth at the sight, evidence that whatever family Cain had built around himself extended its care outward even to her, even in the depths of the worst night in over a year.Reyna arrived at the hospital sometime after four in the morning, having driven the forty minutes the moment Wren called with the news, and found her friend curled in an uncomfortable chair beside Cain's bed, exhausted past the point of proper sleep.
She didn't say anything, just settled into the chair beside her, and the two of them sat together in silence, watching Cain's chest rise and fall steadily under the hospital blankets, until the gray light of dawn finally began creeping through the blinds.
"He's going to be okay," Reyna finally said, quiet, certain.
"I know. Diesel already told me that. The surgeon told me that." Wren's voice was thin with exhaustion. "I think I just need to hear it a few more times before I actually believe it."
"Then I'll keep saying it," Reyna said simply, and did, softly, at intervals, through the rest of the long, gray morning.