5. Sage
FIVE
SAGE
“Can you swallow for me?”
The nursing student has gentle hands, I’ll give her that.
She’s young—maybe a little older than me—with dark blonde hair she’s pulled into a braid. She’s tall and curvy, but strong. She lifted me up out of the wheelchair and into the shower seat without even groaning yesterday.
I like her. When she smiles, the little beauty spot on her right cheek sinks into a dimple. It’s cute.
She checks and double-checks my machines in a way that tells me she’s still new and determined to get everything right. Her name tag says ROSALINE, but she told me to call her Ro.
“Just a little one. I know it hurts.”
I try. It’s like swallowing a tennis ball wrapped in barbed wire. My face must show it because she winces in sympathy and makes a note on her clipboard.
“That’s actually better than yesterday,” she says. “Yesterday you couldn’t swallow at all.”
Great. Progress. Yesterday I was a zero and today I’m a one. At this rate I’ll be eating mush by Christmas.
“Your oxygen levels are good.” She removes the clip from my finger and hangs the blood pressure cuff back on its hook. “Swelling’s coming down. Voice is coming back. You’re doing really well, Sage.”
“Doesn’t feel like it,” I rasp.
“I know.” She makes a note on her clipboard, then glances up. “But I will say—I’ve never seen a patient with this many visitors. You’ve got a lot of people pulling for you.”
She’s not wrong. The last two days have been a revolving door.
Amy came twice—the first time she cried so hard a nurse had to bring her tissues and a cup of water, the second time she brought supermarket flowers and talked for an hour straight about a reality show while I drifted in and out.
Her voice was a warm, familiar hum that made the room feel less like a hospital and more like our apartment on a Sunday morning.
Jamie came. My boss at the diner told him I’d been in an accident and he showed up with a bouquet of sunflowers and a soft throw blanket because “hospital blankets are a crime against humanity.” He sat with me for twenty minutes, making small talk and trying not to directly address the dressing around my neck—which I was grateful for.
And of course, my guys have been here.
Knox has barely left. He sleeps in the chair, eats in the cafeteria, comes right back.
Micah comes in the evenings and sits beside me.
He doesn’t try to fill the silence, just holds my hand and lets me exist. Milo spent twenty minutes doing a one-man show of hospital observations until a nurse told him to keep his voice down.
He whispered the rest of it, which was somehow funnier.
Eli stays in his corner. He’s there when I wake up. There when I fall asleep. He doesn’t come closer. I don’t ask him to. Don’t even speak to him.
Two detectives came yesterday. They stood at the foot of the bed with their notebooks and their soft, careful voices, and not once did either of them say the word attack.
They said incident. They said what happened to you.
They said are you sure there isn’t anything you want to tell us, Sage, anything at all, in the voice you’d use on a horse that might bolt.
And lying there with the gauze wound around my throat, I already knew what was written on the chart with my name on it.
Knox had told me that morning, flat and low, the way he delivers things he thinks will hurt me: they’re calling it self-inflicted, Fury. We didn’t correct them.
Self-inflicted. A woman alone, a rope, a bad night.
Tidy. Believable. The kind of thing that earns a pamphlet in your discharge folder and a follow-up call from a crisis line and then, mercifully, nothing.
No case. No file that grows fat. No detective with a whiteboard asking the only two questions that actually matter.
Who. And why.
There was a moment—small, ugly, mine—where I hated that they’d decided it without me.
That I’d been in a coma while authorities drew incorrect conclusions about the worst night of my life, and nobody close to me thought to wait and ask me which version I wanted to wear.
Holden worked the scene. He looked at the lie that turns me into a woman who tried to die in the dark, and he let it stand, and I didn’t get a vote.
I should be furious.
But not at them.
The blood pressure cuff tightens around my arm like it’s double-checking I’m still here. Ro watches the monitor, nodding at the numbers, and scribbles on my chart.
I’ve followed the thread all the way to the end now, in the long beeping hours when there’s nothing to do but think, and it always goes the same way.
An attack becomes a case. A case asks who.
Who has no answer that doesn’t lead to why.
And why is a party, and a beach, and what happened on the sand, and a man who’s never coming home in a grave nobody’s looking for.
Pull the rope around my neck hard enough and it cinches around five others.
Holden made the only call there was to make. The same one I’d have made if I’d been awake to make it.
I still hate that I’m the kind of girl who can swallow around a raw, wrecked throat before the doctors said I was ready, but can’t seem to swallow so much as a single drop of bitterness when it comes to the men in my own life.
I’m furious that I don’t get to own this story, and I’m also grateful they rewrote it so I could keep breathing.
I try to remember who I was before the night with Brock, before the jetty, before all the ways my body has been rewritten and recontextualized, and I come up empty, every time.
Ro finishes her notes and tucks the clipboard against her hip.
“The doctors want you trying ice chips again in an hour,” she says. “Tiny ones. No heroics.”
I give her a look.
Her mouth twitches. “I mean it. Your throat is not impressed by your pain tolerance.”
“Rude,” I whisper.
She smiles, dimple appearing. “Do you want me to ask anyone to step out so you can rest?”
“No,” I say immediately. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever want to be alone again.
They made the guys leave for the psychologist. Walked Knox out into the hall like he was a hazard—which, fair.
Then it was just me and a kind-eyed woman with a lanyard, asking me gently whether I’d been having thoughts of hurting myself.
Whether I felt safe. Whether there was anything I wanted to say now that we were alone.
It took everything I had not to laugh in her kind, patient face.
I am safer than I’ve been in months. I am guarded and surrounded and loved by men who would burn this place to the studs if I asked them to.
The only person in this story who ever wanted me dead is still out there—and it isn’t me.
But I sat in that bed and let her look at me like I’m made of spun glass, like a sad fragile thing that needs watching, because the alternative is the truth, and the truth hurts all of us.
Worst trade I’ve ever made. I’d make it again every day of my life.
Rosaline is about to say something else when the door opens.
I know it’s Holden before I see him. I don’t know how—maybe the cadence of his footsteps, or the fact my body has learned to recognize him the way it’s learned to recognize the sound of rain or the smell of the ocean. Something cellular. Something I couldn’t unlearn if I tried.
He comes around the curtain and stops.
He looks terrible. His eyes are wrong—too bright and bloodshot, like he’s been running on adrenaline and caffeine since Saturday night. I’m told he’s been working extra hours behind the scenes to make sure the narrative holds. I haven’t been awake when he’s come to visit.
“Hey, wildcat.”
I break.
I’d steadfastly managed to maintain my composure behind a polite wall of “thank you” and “I’m fine” and “please” and “no, I don’t need anything.” But the moment I hear his voice, the structure liquefies and the pain I’ve been holding back floods in.
An ugly sob tears through my damaged throat and hurts so badly I almost choke on it, but I can’t stop.
I’m reaching for him before I know I’m doing it, hands out like a child, and he’s across the room in three strides.
He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls me into his chest and I just .
. . let go. All of it. The fear and the pain and the helplessness and the memory of the rope and the dark and the not-breathing, all of it pouring out of me in broken, shredded sounds that don’t even sound like crying. They sound like an animal in a trap.
“I’ve got you.” His arms are tight around me, one hand cradling the back of my head, his chin on top of my hair. “I’m here, wildcat. I’m here.”
I fist his shirt and hold on. He smells like coffee and leather and whatever detergent he uses and underneath all of it, like Holden, and it’s the safest smell in the world.
I press my face into his chest and cry until there’s nothing left, until I’m shaking and hiccupping and leaving a mess of tears and snot on his clean shirt.
He doesn’t let go. He holds me, solid and immovable, and lets me fall apart.
When the worst of it passes, I pull back enough to look at him. His shirt is ruined. His jaw is tight. And his eyes—those too-bright, too-sharp eyes—are suspiciously wet.
“Sorry,” I rasp. “Your shirt.”
“Fuck the shirt.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw. His gaze drops to the bandage on my throat and his whole face hardens. “I’m getting you out of here.”
“The doctor hasn’t—”
“I don’t care what the doctor says. You’re not staying in this place another night.
” He looks over his shoulder at Rosaline, who’s been standing quietly by the monitors, clipboard against her chest, very carefully pretending she isn’t witnessing the complete emotional disintegration of a grown woman.
Rosaline straightens. “Dr. Chowdhury wants at least another forty-eight hours of observation. The tracheal swelling is improving, but there’s a risk of secondary edema—her airway could re-occlude without warning.
She needs monitoring, regular vitals, and someone qualified to intervene if her breathing deteriorates.
” Holden glares, but she holds her ground. “She can’t leave.”
“She’s leaving.”
Most people wilt under Holden’s attention, but she lifts her chin and glares back. “I understand you want her home. But if something goes wrong without proper equipment and trained—”
The door opens again.
This time the room doesn’t just shift. It reorganizes. The way a room does when someone walks in who is utterly out of place.
Odin.
He’s in a charcoal suit, his hair swept back. His pale gray eyes move over the room, coming to land on me.
“Miss Adams.” He nods at me. “You look considerably better than the last time I was briefed.”
“It’s been a rough couple of days,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like much, but Odin hears me just fine.
He glances at Holden. “I thought we were leaving?”
“We are,” Holden says. “As I was explaining to Rosaline—”
“Dr. Chowdhury wants—”
“I’m aware.” Odin holds up his hand, silencing my nurse.
He reaches into his jacket and produces a thin sheaf of paperwork, which he hands to Rosaline.
“Miss Adams is being transferred to a private facility effective today. Around-the-clock care—a full medical team and psychiatric staff equipped for a patient in her circumstances.” He doesn’t look away from the nurse.
“Every box her chart generates will be checked. Every need, medical and otherwise, met to the letter of the law.”
Rosaline’s gaze drops to the pages.
“Dr. Maddox is overseeing her care,” he continues.
“His credentials are on the second page, with the facility’s accreditation and the signed acceptance of transfer.
The airway risk Dr. Chowdhury flagged is accounted for—ENT on staff, full resuscitation capability on-site, and a private medical transport already standing by, in case her condition changes en route. ”
Rosaline scans the first page and flips to the second. I watch her register the credentials, the signatures, the sheer weight of preparation that went into this document. She looks up at Odin and their eyes lock.
It’s barely a second. A half-second, maybe. But I see it—the way her eyes widen fractionally, the way her lips part and then press together. Like she’s only just realized that Odin is, objectively, the most dangerous man in the room.
She blinks, glancing away. A flush creeps up from her collar.
“This is . . . very thorough,” she says, and her voice is perfectly professional but half an octave higher than it was thirty seconds ago.
“I’ll need to confirm with Dr. Chowdhury, but if Dr. Maddox is on board, I don’t see a medical objection.
” She clutches the printout against her chest. “I’ll go process the paperwork and arrange the transfer. ”
She leaves, not quite running, but definitely not lingering.
Odin watches her go.
“Thank you,” I rasp.
He turns to me. “Don’t thank me, thank your men. They’ve been quite insistent.” He looks at Holden. “We need to talk. Privately. Now.”
He turns and walks out without waiting for confirmation that Holden will follow.
Guess it’s good to be king.
Holden looks at me. Cups my face. Presses his forehead against mine.
“I’ll be right back, wildcat. I promise. Nothing you need to worry about.”
He kisses my forehead and heads out, the door clicking shut behind him.
I’m alone in the hospital room with the beeping and the wilting flowers and the antiseptic smell that I’m starting to think has permanently bonded with my skin.
And Eli.
He’s still in his little shame corner, watching me with the same haunted, hollowed-out look that hasn’t changed since I first woke up.
Our eyes lock, and I read the sorrow there, the need, the want for absolution.
I reach over and snap the curtain shut.