2. Knox
TWO
KNOX
Thirty-two hours. That’s how long Fury’s been in a coma.
Medically induced. To help her heal.
They put her in a room on the fourth floor around two in the morning on the first day, and the machines took over from there. Pulse-ox clip. IV line. The tube down her throat that’s keeping her airway open while the swelling recedes.
I’ve been watching the green line on the monitor. Up. Down. Up. Down.
She’s fighting to stay.
The chair next to the bed is a molded plastic monstrosity hospitals buy in bulk.
At six-foot-seven and two hundred and fifty pounds of scar tissue and muscle, I’m not exactly built for it.
But I’ve been in it the best part of two days, waiting for Fury to wake.
My back is fucked and my right leg fell asleep hours ago.
I haven’t moved because every time I think about it, her hand twitches in mine, and I’m not willing to risk that she’ll wake up to an empty chair.
The doctors say they’ll wake her tomorrow.
Maybe.
I’ve held dying men’s hands before. When you sit watching over the dying, you learn what their fingers do at the end. They go slack. The tension drains out of the joints and the hand sits in yours like they’re already gone, even if the chest is still moving.
Fury’s hand isn’t doing that.
Her fingers have been curved around mine for hours. Loose grip, but constant. Every time the green line dips, her grip tightens. Every time the machine clicks through whatever cycle it runs, her thumb shifts a fraction against the back of my hand.
She’s holding on.
Micah comes back from the cafeteria and sets a paper cup of coffee on the rolling tray beside the bed.
Black and steaming. He doesn’t ask if I want it. We both know it’s a need at this point.
“How is she?” he asks, like the answer might have changed in the twenty minutes he was gone.
His face is pale, his blue-gray eyes circled by dark rings. He’s gentle, and loving, and the kind of person everyone gets along with.
Well, everyone except the sex offenders he murders.
“No change,” I mutter into the coffee.
“Eli?”
“Also same.”
Micah glances at the orange chair in the corner where Eli collapsed.
Before this, the last time I saw him, I’d broken into his house and punched him in the gut, telling him he didn’t get to take a verbal knife to Fury and call it protection—that he either loved her with his whole damn heart or he disappeared for good.
I’d meant every word. Stood over him while he wheezed and warned him it didn’t get to happen twice.
Then he’d vanished, the way I’d practically dared him to. None of us heard a thing for four days. And the next time I laid eyes on my oldest friend, he was on his knees in the mulch with her blood on his hands, breathing for her, screaming for help.
So. He’d made his choice.
Just not the one I’d braced for.
Micah crosses to him and sets a coffee on the nearest surface.
Eli stays slumped over. His blond hair is rumpled, and the button-up shirt and jeans he’s wearing are still covered with Fury’s blood, now dry and crusted across his chest. He’s finally sleeping, though God knows how in that chair with all the fucking noise around us.
“Milo?” I ask as Micah makes his way back to me.
“Vending machine. I think he might be trying to eat his feelings.”
I nod.
Micah sits on the other side of the bed and picks up Fury’s other hand.
“Holden called,” he says quietly. “He’s on his way.”
I grunt.
He wasn’t there when it happened, when some fucker looped a rope around our woman’s neck and hitched her up. But the scanner picked up the call for the apartment.
Female victim, strangulation.
He’d answered, driving through the streets while the woman he loves bled into the mulch and fought for her breath behind her building.
He’s been to the hospital and gone multiple times, doing what he can to keep this whole situation locked down. Trying to protect us and Fury when everything is so fucking out of control.
The green line goes up. Down. Up again.
How the fuck did we get here? One job. A rapist we planned to hang from a jetty. That was the whole of it, until a woman we didn’t plan for stole my knife and became the center of all five of us. The sun we all fucking revolve around.
Now she’s hooked up to machines that breathe for her because somebody knows what she did under that jetty—and wants her to die the way we kill.
Her thumb shifts against the back of my hand.
I count her breaths.
Holden arrives a little after noon.
The door opens without a knock and he enters. Still in his work clothes, badge clipped, jacket on. He looks like shit—sunken eyes, two-day stubble. I’ll bet he hasn’t slept, hasn’t eaten, and is holding himself together with pure stubbornness.
Somehow, most of the nurses have crushes on him.
“Wildcat,” Holden whispers, stopping at the foot of Fury’s bed without sparing a glance at any of us.
He only has eyes for her.
I watch him take her in. The tube down her throat.
The bandage around her neck under the tube.
The IV in the back of her hand. The broken fingernails where she clawed at the rope.
The color of her face, which is somewhere between paper and ash.
The way her hair is fanned out on the pillow because Milo couldn’t help himself and combed it for her.
Holden’s hands flex once at his sides.
“Update?” He finally moves his eyes to us. “What’s the status?”
Micah sighs. “Scans show tracheal damage, no fracture—the cartilage held.” His thumb is moving against the back of Fury’s hand while he talks.
“She’s stable. Critical, but stable. The swelling’s the variable.
If it goes down in the next forty-eight hours, they pull the tube and she breathes on her own.
If it doesn’t, they start talking tracheostomy. ”
Holden listens without moving.
“What about on your end?” I ask. “Status?”
Holden sighs. “The working theory is self-inflicted.”
The room shifts. Micah’s head comes up. Eli, awake now, makes a choking sound.
“Self-inflicted,” Micah repeats, flat.
“It’s the easiest explanation,” Holden says, hands on his hips, eyes straight ahead, unseeing.
Micah is staring at him. “And you sold them that?”
“I didn’t have to sell hard. The scene does most of it.
” Holden’s eyes don’t move from the wall.
“I worked it with the responding officers—stayed on because the watch commander asked me to. Steered nothing that wasn’t already there.
No forced entry, no second set of prints, no sign of a struggle that couldn’t be her own panic.
Crimes is treating it as an attempt, and I’m not stupid enough to correct them.
” He shifts his weight—small, but it’s the first thing his body’s done since he walked in.
“This way means no homicide file. No detectives crawling her life. No spotlight.”
“But . . . ” Micah starts. “It’s not true.”
“I know that. You know that,” Holden says. “We all fucking do. But it’s the best we’ve got.”
“An attempt,” Eli says slowly. “So they’ll want—”
“A psychiatric hold. Seventy-two hours, minimum, once she’s medically clear.
” Holden turns to look at Eli. “And that’s the part we use.
Odin has a private facility. He already said we can get the hold transferred there.
She’ll be protected, off the grid, and whoever did this won’t be able to reach her.
” He pauses. “Buys us time to find them. Keeps our girl safe.”
Nobody speaks.
Holden is still looking at the wall.
“It’ll hold,” he says quietly.
Micah’s voice is very quiet. “Holden.”
“Don’t. Okay? It’s the only way.” His voice cracks on the final words.
I watch the green line.
The silence stretches.
Holden looks like a broken man. He’s building a lie to his own department about what was done to Fury. Both to keep us safe and so we can be the ones to deliver justice.
He’s using everything he has—his rank, his reputation, his colleagues’ trust in him, our trust in him—to write a story over the top of what actually happened to her. And it’s a really shitty, uncomfortable version of events. But he’s right. It’ll hold.
I stand up.
My right leg buckles when I put weight on it. The pins and needles hit so hard I have to brace on the bed rail for a second before the circulation comes back. I let go of Fury’s hand carefully, setting it back on the blanket. Her fingers stay curled where mine were.
“I need a walk,” I mutter, shaking out the numbness.
“Take your time,” Micah says. “We’ve got her.”
I don’t acknowledge Eli on my way past. I’m still pissed at him.
The corridor smells like disinfectant. I make it as far as the elevator before I have to put a hand against the wall.
I don’t cry. I haven’t cried since I was twelve. The thing happening behind my ribs isn’t crying. It’s something with weight to it. A heaviness my body wants to put down.
I take the stairs.
Milo is on the third-floor landing.
He’s sitting on the top step of the next flight down.
Back against the cinder-block wall. Knees up.
He’s not on his phone. He’s not doing anything with his hands.
He’s looking at the concrete between his boots.
For a man whose baseline is constant noise and inappropriate innuendo, the silence coming off him hurts both my ears and my soul.
He looks up when the door bangs shut behind me.
“Knoxie.”
The only person I let call me that is Fury. If he’d called me that on any other day, I’d clap my hand against the back of his head. But right now, I don’t have it in me. He looks as rough as the rest of us, his dark curls flopping all over the place, his usually tan face pale and flushed.
I sit down on the step beside him. The concrete cold through my jeans.