18. Surrender and Salvation
Chapter eighteen
Surrender and Salvation
The inside of the ambulance flashes red, emergency lights painting Silas’s face and making him look even paler.
Every pothole jolts us against the metal walls, the gurney groaning as the paramedics work over him, fast and focused.
His chest barely rises. The hands that traced my cheek just hours ago, treating me like I was fragile, are limp in mine now.
The monitors keep shouting numbers I can’t understand.
The only sign he’s still here is the fog on his oxygen mask, a faint proof he’s breathing.
There’s so much blood. It’s soaked through the bandages, smeared on my skin, and streaked across the floor in patterns I try not to see.
“Blood pressure dropping,” a paramedic barks, and I feel my own heart stutter in response. “Push another unit of fluid.”
“Is he—” My voice cracks, shatters like glass. “Please, is he going to—”
The paramedic doesn’t look up, just keeps pressing buttons, adjusting tubes. “We’re doing everything we can, ma’am. Try to stay calm.”
Calm? Fucking calm? There’s a knife-shaped hole in Silas’s chest because Garrow tried to kill me.
My guardian, my watcher, my—what? What is he to me now?
Partner sounds too formal, lover doesn’t feel right.
The person who stepped between me and death without a second thought doesn’t fit into any relationship label I know.
“Silas.” I lean closer, and my tears hit the thin sheet before I even realize I’m crying. “You don’t get to die for me. That wasn’t the deal. Do you hear me? That was not the fucking deal.”
His eyelids flutter but don’t open. The ambulance wails through intersections, each siren blast sending jolts of electricity down my spine. I grip his hand tighter, as if I can physically anchor him to this world through sheer force of will.
“ETA two minutes,” the driver calls back.
Two minutes. A hundred and twenty seconds. I count them in the gaps between my own heartbeats, in the rise and fall of his chest, in the steady beeping that means his heart is still going.
The ambulance jerks to a stop, and suddenly we’re in motion again, doors flying open, gurney wheels dropping, voices shouting medical jargon that might as well be ancient Sanskrit for all I understand.
I run alongside, still clutching his hand, until a nurse physically blocks my path at a set of double doors.
“You need to wait here,” she says, not unkindly. Her eyes drop to my hands, my clothes. “Let’s get you cleaned up while they take care of him.”
I look down, seeing myself as she must, a wild-eyed woman covered in someone else’s blood, knuckles split from punching a man unconscious. I probably look like I belong in a horror movie, not a hospital waiting room.
“No,” I say, the word tearing from my throat. “No, I need to be with him. He needs me there. He’s never had anyone, he’s always been alone—”
“The best way to help him now is to let the doctors work,” she insists, guiding me firmly toward a row of plastic chairs that look like they were designed specifically to prevent comfort. “Someone will update you as soon as there’s news.”
I collapse into the chair and my body finally gives out. Whatever kept me standing since Garrow’s attack is gone, leaving only a heavy, empty exhaustion. But I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I see it again: the knife, Silas falling, his blood warm on my hands.
I last ten minutes before I’m back on my feet, pacing the hallway. Seven steps one way, turn, seven steps back. The fluorescent lights make everything look off. Even the little landscape paintings on the wall, meant to be cheerful, look pale and sick under this light.
“This can’t be happening,” I mutter, not caring that I’m talking to myself.
“Not after everything. Not when we finally—” I can’t finish it, because I don’t know how.
When we finally what? Found each other? Figured out what we were to each other?
Kissed once in a hidden passage while everything around us fell apart?
Whatever this is between us, it’s still so new.
Still so fragile. Like it hasn’t had the chance to fully exist yet.
A door swings open, and Dr. Rao strides through, still in the clothes she wore at the estate, though she’s thrown a white coat over them. Her eyes find me immediately, as if she knew exactly where I’d be.
“Elara,” she says, and something in her voice makes my knees go weak.
“Is he—”
“He’s in surgery,” she interrupts, sparing me from finishing the terrible question. “The knife missed his heart by millimetres, but there’s significant damage to surrounding tissue and blood loss remains a concern.”
I grab her arm, fingers digging into the white coat. “Are you operating on him? Please tell me you’re doing it. I trust you. He trusts you.”
“I’m assisting,” she says, gently extracting herself from my grip. “The lead surgeon is a trauma specialist, the best in the county. But yes, I’ll be there for every moment.”
“He protected me,” I say, the words catching in my throat. “That knife was meant for me.”
Dr. Rao’s professional mask softens slightly. “He protected you,” she agrees, not a question but an acknowledgement. “Now we’ll protect him.”
She glances at her watch. “I need to get back. The surgery will take hours. You should try to rest.”
Rest. That’s impossible. Instead, I start pacing again, counting time by the squeak of my shoes on the linoleum, the nurses changing shifts, and the slow brightening of light through far-off windows as dawn comes.
Three hours. Four. Five. I lose count. People come and go, nurses offering coffee, social workers checking if I need anything, police officers hovering at the periphery, waiting to take statements.
I answer their questions in monosyllables, my focus never leaving the double doors where they took him.
The lights flicker now and then, and I flinch each time. Whenever those doors open, my heart jumps, hoping for news, hoping it’s Dr. Rao, hoping for anything that will end this. But it’s never for me. It’s never about Silas.
“Please,” I whisper to no one, to everyone, to whatever force might be listening. “Please let him live. I just found him. I can’t lose him now.”
The lights buzz overhead, never letting up.
I catch my reflection in the polished floor: hair wild, clothes stained, dark circles under my eyes.
I barely recognize myself. But I’m not the same person who arrived at that house weeks ago.
The Elara who first walked through those doors could never have imagined this—standing in a hospital hallway, covered in the blood of a man who lives inside her walls, praying to gods she’s never believed in.
“Ms. Hale?” A different nurse approaches, holding a clipboard. “There are forms that need filling out. Insurance information, medical history…” He hesitates. “Do you have any of that for Mr. Merrick?”
The question stops me completely. Of course I don’t have any of that. Silas has spent decades outside the system — no insurance, no medical records, probably no valid ID. How do you even begin to explain that the man bleeding out on an operating table has spent most of his life being a ghost?
“I…” I start, but the words stick in my throat like shards of glass.
The nurse must see the panic in my eyes. “Later is fine,” he says gently. “Right now, just focus on being here for him.”
That, at least, I can do. So I resume my vigil, pacing the sterile corridor while fluorescent lights cast harsh shadows across my exhausted face, waiting for the man who stepped between me and death to find his way back to me.
Hours blur together in the hospital’s waiting room, where time seems to operate by different rules, stretching and contracting without warning.
The plastic chair has found every wrong angle in my body, digging into my spine, numbing my legs.
I can’t sit still for long. Every ten minutes I’m up again, wearing a path between the coffee machine and the nurses’ station, asking the same question, getting the same answer: “He’s still in surgery.
We’ll let you know.” My knuckles throb where the skin split against Garrow’s jaw — this dull, constant ache that keeps reminding me what I did, what I was capable of.
I keep staring at my hands. There’s still dried blood under my cuticles even after I scrubbed them raw in the bathroom sink.
Some of it is Silas’s. Some of it is mine.
Mingled together on my skin like they belong there.
Around hour three, a nurse pushes a sandwich toward me.
I take it because it feels rude not to, but I can’t eat.
The thought of it makes my stomach turn.
I end up just tearing the bread apart, smaller and smaller pieces, until there’s a little pile of crumbs on the table in front of me that feels embarrassingly accurate to how I’m doing right now.
The automatic doors slide open with a whoosh, and I look up to see two men and a woman in county police uniforms. Behind them, Jonah hovers like a nervous shepherd, his uniform rumpled from what must have been a sleepless night.
The woman, tall, with prematurely grey hair cropped close to her scalp, approaches me directly.
“Ms. Hale? I’m Detective Warners, County Major Crimes. We need to take your statement about what happened at your property this morning.”
I nod, gesturing vaguely at the empty chairs around me. What does it matter now? Let them ask their questions. Nothing seems important except the double doors hiding Silas from me.
“Can you walk us through the events leading up to Mr. Garrow’s assault on you?” she asks, notepad ready, pen poised.
I start with the basics: Garrow’s arrival, the explosion, the hostage situation with Marta. My voice sounds flat to my own ears, just listing facts without feeling, like I’m describing something that happened to someone else.