Page 140 of The Final Cut

The word is quiet. I stop.

He stops with me. His face is pale, his side probably hurting, his eyes steady in a way that makes me want to break things. “I kept it because Cal asked me to. Because Marisol asked him to. Because Isabel would have used the knowing to pull you straight to her, and then she would’ve killed you.”

My throat tightens. “That sounds like everyone deciding what I can survive.”

“It was.”

“I’m tired of this, Deacon.”

“We will talk,” he says. “I will take whatever you give me for it—but later. See Cal first.”

See Cal. The words pull me back to the only reason I walked out of Nash’s bed and into this nightmare.

I go to the ICU door. This time, no woman stands beside his bed. Only Cal, and Shiloh in a chair.

Cal is pale. Still. Breathing because the machine insists on it. His hand lies open on the blanket where my mother’s had covered it minutes ago. I slip inside, cross the room, and take that hand in both of mine.

It is warm, which nearly brings me to my knees. Deacon stays at the door as I bend over Cal and press my forehead to his knuckles.

“You absolute asshole,” I whisper. “You have so much explaining to do.”

The monitor keeps beeping, steady and indifferent.

I close my eyes. Behind my lids, my mother says my name like a prayer she was never allowed to finish.

I hold Cal’s hand harder.

“You promised,” I whisper. “So live.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

SHILOH

Cal is mine tonight.

His room—that is what a watch means. Not the hallway, though I know every person who passes it. Not the elevator, though Nash has a man posted there with a jacket too expensive for hospital work and eyes mean enough to make visitors reconsider wrong turns. Not the nurses’ station, though I have charmed two nurses, irritated the shit out of one, and learned which orderly smokes on the roof when he’s supposed to be restocking linens.

Cal.

His room. His monitors. His breath dragging through a machine with a sound I am starting to hate.

I sit in the chair by the window with one ankle crossed over the other and a paper cup of terrible coffee cooling in my hand, listening to the ventilator and trying not to think about Reva’s face when Nash told her Cal had worsened. The complication is sitting in the room with us like a fifth person, quiet and unwelcome. Blood pressure drop. Labs moving the wrong direction. Doctors watching for slow bleeding or infection or whatever name they need to give the fact that a good man took a bullet meant for a girl who had already lost too much.

Cal looks smaller like this, which as a man, I resent.

Men like Cal Boudreaux should be allowed to age stubbornly, to complain about weather and coffee and Reva’s taste in men. They should not be reduced to pale skin, IV lines, and a machine breathing for them while everyone who loves them bargains with a God none of us trust.

The door eases open.

I do not reach for my gun because Deacon has a way of entering a room that makes the air recognize him first.

“Let her see him,” he says.

I turn.

Reva stands beside him in a dark hoodie with her braid half coming apart and her face completely wrong. No color. No fight sitting close to the surface. Her eyes look too wide, too fixed, like she has seen something she cannot fit behind them and has decided to keep standing until her body figures out what to do with the damage.

My chest tightens.