Kasien
Present
The first thing I notice is the sound.
A slow, steady beeping somewhere above my head.
Not loud. Just constant. Like it’s drilling into my skull, one second at a time.
Then comes the light. Even with my eyes closed, there’s a pale glow pressing against my lids, too bright and sharp.
My head throbs just from that. A heavy, dull pressure sits behind my forehead and at the base of my skull, pulsing with my heartbeat.
I try to swallow and my throat protests, dry and raw, like I’ve been breathing dust.
“Kasien?”
A voice cuts through the fog. Male, calm, professional. Not Adrien. I force my eyelids to open a fraction.
Bad idea.
White ceiling. A chandelier blurred into three copies. The light stabs straight into my brain and my vision swims. I hiss through my teeth and slam my eyes shut again, but the pain has already bloomed. The room tilts sideways even though I know I’m lying flat.
“Good. Stay with me,” the same voice says, closer now. “Don’t try to sit up yet.”
Too late.
My muscles already twitch like they want to move, and my whole body answers with a wave of nausea that rolls up from my stomach and crashes into my chest.
I let out a low, strangled sound. A cool hand lands on my shoulder, steadying.
“You’re home. You’re in the east wing. Second floor.” The man’s tone is low, measured, like he’s done this a hundred times. “It’s a concussion. You took a pretty bad hit. Just breathe.”
I focus on breathing. In. Out.
Every inhale feels like it makes my skull expand a millimeter. There’s something taped to the back of my hand—an IV cannula, tubing tugging lightly when I flex my fingers. My skin feels too tight, my whole body is heavy, like I’m sinking into wet sand.
I crack my eyes open again, slower this time.
The ceiling stops doubling long enough for the rest of the room to come into focus.
Dimmed sconces instead of full lights. Heavy curtains half-drawn.
I recognize the molding on the walls. The third wing.
One of the guest rooms we never use. It’s quiet and far from the main hall.
Four of my guys are scattered around the room. One by the door, one by the window, two leaning against the far wall. All armed, all watching, but none of them Adrien.
And then there’s the doctor, our doctor, sitting on the edge of the mattress by my hip. Mid-fifties, silver hair, stethoscope still hanging around his neck, sleeves rolled up. His eyes are sharp, clinically curious, not sentimental.
“Headache?” he asks.
I let out something like a groan and try to talk but it comes out as a whisper. “Feels like someone hit me with a truck.”
“Close enough,” he says dryly. “Any nausea?”
The word itself makes my stomach heave. I clamp my jaw. “Yeah.”
“Ringing in the ears?”
I listen for a second. Under the beeping and the soft hum of the oxygen concentrator in the corner, there’s a high, steady whine in the background of everything.
“Yes.”
He nods, unsurprised. “All right, look at me.”
I turn my head a few degrees and instantly regret it. The room tilts again, walls sliding sideways. His face doubles, then snaps back into one when I force my eyes to focus.
“Good,” he says. He lifts a small penlight. “Pupils.”
“No,” I mutter, but he’s already doing it.
The light slices straight through my eye and detonates in the back of my skull. I curse under my breath, trying to flinch away, but his fingers are firm on my jaw.
“Pupils are equal, reactive,” he murmurs, more to himself than to me. He switches to the other eye. Same torture. Same explosion.
“Stop,” I grind out.
“We’re almost done.” He leans back, giving me space. “Can you squeeze my hands?”
He holds both of his out. I lift my arms with effort but they feel like they’ve got lead poured into the muscles. I wrap my fingers around his and squeeze. It’s not my full strength, but it’s symmetrical.
“Good. Wiggle your toes for me.”
I obey, feeling the fabric of the sheets drag over my ankles. My stomach twists again as the movement shifts the world a few millimeters.
“Name?” he asks.
I glare at him. “You know my fucking name.”
“Humor me.”
“Kasien.” My voice is hoarse.
“Surname?” He lifts his eyebrows.
“Don’t make me say it.” I would roll my eyes if I could.
“Do you know what happened?”
Images shudder through my head in pieces.
Headlights. Metal screaming. Cold. Water slamming into my lungs. Kiara’s hand slipping out of mine. The river swallowing the car.
She saved us. She shot the glass and saved us from the car. The pressure in my skull spikes.
“We went off the road,” I say slowly. Even talking feels like dragging barbed wire over my brain. “Hit the water.”
He nods once. “Good. Do you remember the impact?”
I dig for it and find nothing but a sharp white gap. I remember headlights and then black water. Not the exact moment of the hit.
“No.” That bothers me more than it should. I hate not knowing. Not having the footage in my head. “How long?”
“You were found unconscious at the scene,” he says evenly.
“Your men pulled you out, but you were disoriented, vomiting, in and out. That’s normal.
I had you scanned—no intracranial bleeding, no skull fracture.
Grade II concussion. You’ve been sleeping most of the last forty-eight hours.
I woke you every few hours at first to check your reflexes and orientation. You’re more coherent now.”
Forty-eight hours. Two days?
My heart rate spikes, the monitor’s beeping suddenly speeding up. One of the guys by the door shifts his weight, glancing over.
“No,” the doctor says sharply, palm pressing against my sternum to keep me from trying to sit up. “Do not move fast. Your brain needs time. You move too quickly, you’re going to vomit and pass out again, and I am not in the mood to intubate you on this mattress.”
“And Kiara,” I rasp.
My throat burns, the words scraping through it like glass.
“Kiara?”
He exhales through his nose. It’s the first sign of anything like discomfort.
“I’m handling your head injury first,” he says. “Then we’ll talk.”
Wrong answer.
I shove against the mattress, trying to push myself up on my elbows.
The room immediately punishes me—one violent spin, a flash of black at the edges of my vision, nausea slamming into me so hard I gag.
The doctor and the nearest man react at the same time, pinning my shoulders and forearm back to the bed.
“Lie down,” the doctor orders, not unkindly, but with the voice of someone who expects obedience.
My chest heaves and I swallow bile, eyes burning.
“If you stand up now, you’ll collapse and you might not wake up as cleanly next time,” Sebastian adds, softer, his face right above me.
“You have a moderate concussion. The hit was bad. Brain rattled, short loss of consciousness, memory gap, persistent symptoms. That’s what Grade II means. You do not push it,” he explains.
My eyes flick left, and that’s when I finally notice him.
Adrien.
Lying on the second bed by the far wall. IV in his arm, torso wrapped tight in compression bandages, oxygen tube under his nose. Skin pale, lips cracked, blood crusted in his hair. He’s breathing, shallow, uneven, but breathing.
A small piece of the weight on my chest eases.
The doctor follows my stare.
“He regained consciousness once,” he says quietly.
“Very briefly. He’s stable, but he lost a significant amount of blood from the side wound.
Hypothermia didn’t help. His temperature is still low, vitals slow but improving.
He’s sedated to keep his heart rate down.
He was fighting us.” He pauses. “Bullet passed clean through, no organ damage. But the blood loss and the cold pushed him close.”
I grind my teeth, forcing myself to stay still because he’s right, and I know it. The beeping from the monitor is still too fast. My head feels like it’s packed with wet cement and broken glass.
“Drink,” he says.
He slides an arm under my neck, lifting my head just enough to tip a glass of water to my lips. The movement makes my stomach roll again, but the first swallow is worth it—cold, clean, cutting through the sour taste in my mouth. I take a couple of careful sips before he pulls it back.
“Slow,” he warns. “If you vomit, your head will feel like it’s exploding.”
I sink back into the pillow, breath coming out in short, controlled exhales.
“Light and noise will make it worse for a while,” he continues.
“You’ll have headaches, dizziness, maybe trouble focusing, maybe some mood swings.
You’ll think straight one moment and feel foggy the next.
That’s normal for this kind of trauma.” His gaze sharpens.
“But if you get a sudden, severe worsening headache, repeated vomiting, confusion, weakness on one side—I get called immediately. No heroics.”
I stare at him, jaw set. “I don’t have time to rest.” My eyes burn with tears, and my vision blurs.
“You don’t have a brain to spare either,” he snaps back. Then, quieter, “You’re lucky you don’t have a bleed. You want to go from concussion to coma because you can’t stay horizontal for twelve hours?”
Silence stretches for a second. Only the soft beeping fills it.
“Where is Kiara,” I repeat, my voice lower this time.
One of the men by the window shifts, Dorian, exchanging a look with the guard at the door.
“She isn’t here,” he says finally. “By the time we found you two on the riverbank, she was gone. You and Adrien were unconscious and hypothermic. We had to choose what we could do in those minutes. That meant getting you two out before anyone else came back to finish you.”
The world narrows to a pinprick.
“I’m sorry,” Dorian adds.
For a moment I don’t feel my head. Or the IV. Or the weight on my chest. Just a cold, clean rage sliding into all the empty spaces. The monitor jumps, beeping wild and fast. The doctor reaches over and turns the volume down.
“Easy,” he says, watching me carefully. “Your brain is injured. You think in straight lines now, or you won’t think at all.”
I stare at the ceiling, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth, forcing the rhythm back into something that doesn’t sound like a dying animal.
Grade II concussion.
Two days lost.
Kiara gone.
The doctor’s voice cuts through, quieter.
“You’re going to stay in this bed for at least another forty-eight hours.
No bright light. No arguing. No plans. I’ll run neuro checks every few hours—orientation, pupils, coordination.
If you behave, you get pain medication that doesn’t make your brain fog worse.
If you don’t, I’ll sedate you, and you’ll lose more time. Understood?”
I close my eyes against the dizzy haziness and the slow spin of the room.
“Understood,” I bite out.
He pats my shoulder once, brisk, clinical, and stands.
“Good. Try to sleep. Let your brain settle. You can go do your thing when you can stand up without vomiting.”
He gets up and goes to the other side of the room to Adrien. I gesture to Dorian to come closer but he’s already whispering to me.
“We’re on it already,” he assures me while others relax by a fraction, their silhouettes blurring at the edges of my vision as I let my eyes close. The headache drills on, steady and vicious, but underneath it there’s a single, sharp point of focus.
She’s alive. I know she is.