Page 173 of Dark Night of the Soul

I said nothing as I took the pills, then drank. The water was cold. Helped clear the fog.

“You’re a terrible patient,” he said, sitting in the chair by the bed. “Even the doctor agreed.”

“Who’d you get?” I asked.

“Otto,” he said. “Came in the middle of the night to stitch you back together.”

I leaned my head back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling. None of us expected a surgeon to be necessary. We’d seriously underestimated everything. We’d been arrogant. Assumed clean in, clean out. Nearly got us all killed.

“Where is she?”

“Sleeping on the sofa,” he said. “I had to make her. She didn’t want to leave.”

Of course she didn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had to physically remove her. The image pulled at my mouth. I kept it flat.

After a long pause, he said, “Your girl is something.”

My girl. Something about those words cut to the bone. Because they were true. And that terrified me more than the bullet had. My first instinct was to deny it, to say she wasn’t. But I knew she was.

I cut him a glance. He sat there, arms folded across chest, legs stretched out in front of him like we were having a friendly chat.

I said, “What about her?”

“She didn’t fall apart. Not once. You were bleeding out, she was shot, and she held pressure on your gut like her life depended on it. Didn’t faint at the sight of blood. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t hesitate.”

And still coherent enough to threaten me. Don’t you die on me, dammit. If you do, I’ll kill you.

“Most women would,” he said. “Fall apart, I mean.”

She wasn’t most women. She never had been. I knew that from the start.

“Ulrich didn’t know who to call,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The doctor, I mean. She grabbed Ulrich by the shirt—covered in your blood—and told him she’d rip us both apart with her bare hands if we didn’t get one. We believed her,” he said.

He sounded surprised by that.

I wasn’t.

She was a force. Had been since the day we met.

And I vaguely recalled her saying that shortly before passing out. Her voice razor sharp. She wasn’t hysterical. She was serious.

“Good thing you got one, then,” I said.

He smirked. “You know she’s one of us now.”

“No.” The refusal was quick, sharp.

“Yes, she is. Whether you like it or not,” Ludwig said. “Not because she’s with you. Because she proved it.”

The truth settled like lead in the pit of my gut. She’d made the choice I’d been avoiding making for her. All this time I thought I was stepping into her world.

Turns out I was bringing her into mine.

She wasn’t surviving it. She was standing in it. And there was no going back from that.