Chapter Seven The Hospital
Chapter Seven: The Hospital
The first thing I feel is the light.
It presses through my eyelids before I can stop it, a pale, indifferent white that has nothing to do with the mountain or the trees or the smell of burning rubber. My fingers move against fabric that is too clean, too smooth. Not grass.
A ceiling. White acoustic tiles.
I am alive.
"Don't move too fast."
Nessa's voice comes before her face does. When I focus, she is already there, eyes red-rimmed, her hands wrapping around mine before I can ask. She doesn't wait for the question I can't quite form.
"Your mother is alive. She's in the room next door, still sleeping, but she made it through surgery. You both made it."
The breath leaves my body like something that has been held at gunpoint.
My eyes burn. I don't stop them. The tears come quietly, without performance, tracking down the sides of my face into my hair.
The door hits the wall.
Gideon crosses the room in three strides, no jacket, collar open, and the state of him tells the whole story — he ran until the bond pulled him here.
He drops to one knee at the bedside and his arms go around me and pull, and I am lifted half off the mattress against his chest, and the grip is too tight in a way I understand: he is checking that I'm solid. That I'm real.
He presses his face to my hair.
"I should have been there." His lips find my forehead, my temple, my cheek. Once, twice, like he needs to prove I'm still here. "Lysandra. I should have been there with you. I'm sorry."
I let him hold me.
My hand rests against his arm and I don't grip it.
There is no room in me right now to calculate what this is between us. There is only the ceiling, and Nessa's red eyes, and the information that my mother is breathing on the other side of a wall.
After a moment I push him back, just far enough to see his face.
"Was there anyone else at the scene?"
He exhales slowly. Something moves through his expression that I haven't seen on him in a long time. Genuine uncertainty. And it sits on him badly.
"I felt it through the bond. The danger." He says it like he is still surprised by the scale of it.
"I shifted and ran. By the time I reached the road, the car was lodged in the trees on the ledge below the guardrail break." He meets my eyes. "You were lying on the grass above the drop."
"And my mother?"
"Not at the scene." His jaw works. "I brought you here. When I arrived they told me she had been admitted thirty minutes before. Already in surgery."
A pause, weighted. "The doctors said ten minutes later and she wouldn't have survived. They don't know who brought her in. The person who did it didn't stay."
I look at the window.
The memory arrives without being invited. The cold weight of a chest that does not accommodate, and a scent that is not Gideon's.
A scent that is familiar in the way a scar is familiar, close to something I know from four years ago, but not the same. Colder. Something wilder and blood underneath it.
But that person could not have been there. Not at that hour. Not like that.
I make myself stop. None of it leads anywhere.
"The brake failure," I say. "What did forensics find?"
"Nothing." The word is flat. "The fire was thorough."
His phone begins to vibrate.
He looks at it. Looks at me. The pull in both directions is visible on his face. He doesn't want to go, but Gideon is a man who built his power on never letting anything wait too long.
"Go," I tell him. "I'm all right. Make sure there's someone on my mother's room."
He hesitates. Then he cups my face in both hands, presses his mouth to my forehead and goes.
The door closes.
***
The room is quiet. Nessa takes his place at the edge of the bed, and she doesn't say anything for a moment, only watches me.
"Can the Alpha trace it? Find out who ordered it?" she asks, quiet.
I look at the ceiling again. A smile finds my face. It doesn't reach anything.
"There's nothing to trace."
She waits.
"It was my father."
Nessa goes still.
"My recent lies cost him too much." I keep my eyes on the ceiling. "I was careful. I made everything look like outside interference, like bad luck, like things that couldn't be traced back to me."
My hands are flat on the blanket. "But he's been doing this for forty years. He knows the difference between a storm and a hand that opens a window."
Nessa says nothing. The silence is the kind that is listening.
"He knew I was off the board. That I'd stopped playing for him." My voice is very level, which surprises me. "He decided I was more dangerous to him alive than gone. So he made his move."
The steadiness doesn't last.
It goes all at once, the way a held breath releases, and my hands come up to cover my face before I can stop them.
The sound that comes out of my chest is not dignified. It is small and wet and it keeps coming.
"I was too arrogant." The words break on the way out. "I thought I was smarter than him. I thought I'd covered everything. And I almost—"
I feel the cold air on my wrists where Nessa has pulled my hands gently from my face.
Her arms come around me, and she doesn't say anything useful because there is nothing useful to say. She just holds on while I shake, one hand moving in slow circles between my shoulder blades.
My mother almost died. Because of me. Because I was not careful enough, because I underestimated a man I have known my entire life.
Nessa doesn't try to tell me it wasn't my fault.
She just holds on.
It takes several minutes.
When I lift my head from her shoulder, my face is wrecked and I don't care. I look at the window, at the stripe of afternoon light under the blinds, and I let the feeling finish emptying out.
Then I breathe.
She's alive. I'm alive. She's in the next room and she's going to stay there, and he is never going to be able to reach her again.
I have nothing left to be careful about.
"Nessa."
My voice comes out like gravel. She straightens.
"Contact our people inside my father's pharmaceutical research facility. Tell them to pull out. Everyone. Tonight."
Her eyes widen, but she nods.
"Once they're clear." I turn to look at her. "Find a channel he can't trace back to us. Someone trusted. And send everything — every record, every sample log, every name on those illegal drug trials — to the Werewolf Alliance Judgment Bureau."
Nessa stares at me for one second.
"All of it?"
My eyes don't move from hers.
"Every piece they've got."