Chapter 31 #2
One shallow breath brushes my throat, then another.
A small sound leaves him when I get to my feet, barely more than pain forced through exhausted lungs.
His head drops against my shoulder, and blood from his torn hands smears slowly across the front of my white shirt.
His hair falls across his forehead in the same pale mess it always does when he’s been practicing for hours, only now dried blood has glued some of it to his temple.
Guilt rips through me until it feels like physical pain.
I should never have let him leave that pavilion alone.
If I hadn’t stood there frozen inside my own anger and confusion, if I’d followed him instead of watching him disappear into the trees, I wouldn’t be standing here now holding what’s left of him together in my arms.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper against his hair as I hoist him higher in my arms. “Mouse, I’m so fucking sorry. Stay with me, all right? I’m getting you out of here.”
He feels terrifyingly limp. Not boneless the way he usually gets when he falls asleep against me in bed, warm and heavy and safe beneath my hands.
This feels wrong. His body barely reacts at all when I turn back to the door.
I can’t stop staring at his hands. His fingers are swollen, blood streaked across the skin and knuckles, dark against the familiar hands that moved across the Noctis strings so beautifully it almost hurt to watch.
Fury and guilt twist through me again. Somebody is going to pay for this.
They’ll call this a rescue when the families tell it later.
Cassian’s men, the cleared tunnels, the Virel heir losing his mind underground.
Let them. A rescue is what you do for a stranger, someone you mean to carry out and hand back to their own life.
That was never what this was. I didn’t come down into Düren to save Rowan.
I came to take back what was already mine, and to make the world that dared touch him understand exactly what that costs.
“I’ve got you,” I murmur, carrying him carefully back through the corridor. “I’ve got you. I’ll always come for you.”
His breath catches against my throat.
The rest of the tunnels blur together. Gunfire echoes somewhere behind us as Dad shouts orders, Lucan swears at somebody farther down the line, and Rafe calls one of our medics forward beside the guards.
I barely hear any of it. All I can focus on is Rowan’s breathing against my throat and the terrifying pauses between each inhale. I keep adjusting my grip on him like holding him tighter will stop him from slipping away from me again.
I don’t remember the flight back to Sero. I only remember Rowan stretched across my lap inside the shuttle while one of the medics worked frantically over his ribs and hands and head beneath the cold white overhead lights. I refuse to let anybody move him away from me.
The replacement medical band flashes warning colors the second they clip it back around his wrist.
Severe stress response. Arrhythmia risk. Dehydration. Physical trauma.
The words keep repeating through my skull the entire way back from Düren.
By the time we finally carry him inside the estate, I still haven’t let go of my mouse.
Rowan sleeps for almost two days. I don’t sleep at all, until eventually Mom threatens to physically drag me into the shower herself.
Dad leaves food that goes untouched beside the bed every few hours, and Lucan stops making jokes entirely whenever he walks into the room and sees Rowan still unconscious beneath the blankets.
The doctors say he’ll recover. He has several fractured ribs, severe bruising, exhaustion, and damage to his hands from prolonged strain and repeated impact, but he’ll survive. I cling to that with everything I have left.
Dad stops by the second evening while Rowan sleeps. “The last Orlov safehouses were on Düren.” He watches the monitors beside the bed. “After the family collapsed, the survivors disappeared into the Ward districts and spent the last twenty years hiding behind the planet’s instability.”
My jaw tightens.
Dad glances toward Rowan. “They’re gone now.”
That might be so, but none of it stops me from watching my mouse’s chest every few seconds just to make sure he’s still breathing.
His face looks more like itself now. The swelling has started to fade and reveal the familiar shape of his mouth again beneath the bruises, but every mark still looks wrong against skin that was never meant to carry them.
Damaris nearly starts crying the first time he visits.
“I still can’t believe you idiots actually flew to Düren and dragged him back out of underground tunnels like some deranged romance holo,” he mutters, sitting carefully beside the bed and brushing Rowan’s hair back from his forehead.
“Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?”
Lucan snorts from the doorway before crossing the room and leaning down to kiss Damaris hard enough to shut him up. One hand grips his jaw possessively, and despite the offended sound Damaris makes against his mouth, neither of them expects Lucan to stop.
“You were crying in the shuttle,” Rafe says from the couch.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I heard you.”
“You hear too much.”
For the first time since Düren, the room almost feels normal again. Almost.
Aster sends flowers twice, white orchids the first morning and dark blue ones the second. I leave both arrangements exactly where the staff puts them. She doesn’t get to disappear for years and then make him feel better with flowers.
She never comes upstairs herself. According to Cassian, she cried the first time she saw Rowan unconscious and decided she wasn’t going to make his recovery about her.
Every few hours, my multi-slate lights up with another message asking if Rowan woke up yet, if he ate anything, if the fever finally broke.
Let me know the second he opens his eyes.
I don’t realize how exhausted I am until the second night, sitting beside Rowan’s bed while rain moves softly against the tower windows and the estate sleeps around us. For the first time in days, my eyes drift closed.
Then Rowan jerks upright with a broken gasp. He groans in pain, but I’m already grabbing his shoulders and easing him back down onto the mattress.
“Easy,” I say. “Mouse, easy. You have several broken ribs.”
His breathing turns rough, panic and pain tangling together. He stares around the dark room like he doesn’t recognize where he is.
“Rowan.”
His gaze finally finds mine. For a few seconds, he just stares at me, dazed and unfocused beneath the bruising.
“Hey.” My voice breaks as I smooth shaking fingers carefully through his hair. “Can you hear me?”
He blinks again, confusion moving across his face. His breathing stays uneven, his chest heaving beneath the blankets.
A cold knot forms in my stomach. Is he afraid of me?
He lifts one trembling hand toward my face. The second his fingertips brush my cheek, his expression changes. His hand drops back to the bed like touching me was a mistake.
Something inside my chest caves in. Because Rowan always touches me. Always. I don’t think he even realizes he’s doing it half the time.
Half asleep in bed. Sitting beside me at the Noctis. Curled against my chest after sex. Whether he’s nervous, happy, angry, or scared, he’s always reaching for me.
Seeing him pull away now hurts almost worse than finding him underground did.
“Mouse?”
His breathing catches. As confusion drifts across his face, I’m terrified he remembers the pavilion. The tunnels and the woman are bad enough, but not as bad as me standing there looking at him like he was a liar.
I reach for the glass on the nightstand because his lips look cracked. “You need water.”
He watches me for a moment with the same dazed, unfocused expression as I hold the glass carefully to his mouth. He drinks mechanically, swallowing too fast like he’s only now realizing how thirsty he is.
A droplet slides down the corner of his mouth, and I wipe it away with my thumb.
Fuck. I missed touching him even more than I realized.
Rowan pulls back against the pillows. The movement is small and instinctive, but it still cuts straight through me, leaving me struggling for breath. That’s the first time Rowan has ever pulled away from my touch.
Pretending it didn’t just rip something apart inside my chest, I set the empty glass back on the nightstand and force myself to breathe normally. “How are you feeling?”
Rowan looks toward the windows, still disoriented enough that his gaze keeps slipping out of focus against the rain-dark glass and gold city lights below the tower.
“Where are we?” he asks, his voice coming out rough and thin.
“My family’s estate.”