Page 4 of Deacon

Everything inside me dropped with it.

I had seen that line too many times to romanticize what it meant. I had watched families collapse beneath it and bodies turn cold while rooms full of skilled people fought to pull them back. Death inside a trauma bay carried no dignity. It came through shouting, violent movement, split-second decisions, and the sickening knowledge that sometimes every pair of hands in the room still wasn’t enough.

He could not die here.

The thought struck with such force it felt violent.

Not here. Not like this. He could not leave before I decided what I still hated him for or before he learned the truth. Jade deserved the chance to look him in the face and decide for herself whether she wanted anything from him at all.

The room surged around the flatline. Blue ordered compressions while someone pushed epinephrine. The shock lifted Jackson’s body from the table in a brutal snap that turned my stomach. Another followed, and time stretched into something that no longer felt real but offered no mercy either.

I didn’t realize I had stopped breathing until the monitor stuttered.

One blip appeared, followed by another. He wasn’t safe or stable, but he was there.

Air left my lungs in a rough pull. I kept working because relief was a luxury and we were nowhere near finished, yet something inside me had already begun trembling where nobody could see it.

The room pushed on.

We all did.

2

Lila

We finally had enough control to send him upstairs. My arms were heavy, my lower back ached, and my gloves felt fused to my skin. Someone was still talking. Someone always was. The edges of the sound had gone strange for me, dulled in places and painfully sharp in others. I heard the wheels turn beneath the bed, the wet pull of suction, and Blue breathing harder than usual beside me.

The body knows when it has come too close to losing something before the mind catches up.

They wheeled Jackson out, and the emptiness he left behind in the trauma bay felt wrong. I stood with my hands hanging at my sides for a beat too long, staring at the doors after they swung closed, then forced myself toward the sink. My gloves were soaked through, the room was still moving around me, and if I stopped moving with it, I was going to come apart in front of everyone.

I stripped the gloves off and turned on the water. It hit hot, sending pink ribbons swirling down the drain. My hands shook once, hard enough that I flattened them against the edge of the sink until they settled.

Through the glass, I saw Blue standing with a man in a blood-spattered cut. He hovered too close to the trauma bay doors, broad shoulders tight and his whole body strung with the kind of fear that made some men dangerous. Blue looked at him and went still for half a second. That was all I had time to notice before they wheeled Jackson toward surgery, and the room pulled me after him.

The hallway felt colder than the trauma bay. Maybe it always did, or maybe I only noticed because the sweat beneath my scrub top had cooled and every nerve in my body remained too close to the surface. Blue was still talking to the man when I caught up, her voice level while his came rough and frayed with genuine fear rather than anger.

“Go with him,” he said, quiet enough that I might have missed it from another few feet away. His jaw tightened before the next word left him. “Please.”

That plea struck something inside me, not because it was meant for me or because it made him seem softer, but because I understood what it cost certain men to say that word aloud, especially with other people watching.

Blue studied him for a long second, then nodded and turned toward surgery without another word.

Blue was already in the operating room when I slipped inside. The surgeon looked up, saw me, and groaned as though my presence was a personal insult. “And you,” he said, gesturing with one gloved hand. “What are you doing here?”

“I know him, and I need to know he’ll be okay.”

He muttered something about too many staff members knowing unsavory people before turning back to the table, leaving me to decide later whether I should be offended. Blue shifted enough to make room for me against the wall, and we stood scrubbed and silent while controlled chaos unfolded beneath the lights. We watched the same man with our breath held, each of us carrying a different reason.

Distance should have made it easier. It didn’t.

The operating room moved with a different pulse than trauma. The sharp rush had given way to measured violence, trained hands opening and repairing, clamping and forcing order back into a body that had taken too much damage. Overhead lights stripped the room bare. Stainless steel flashed while the monitors maintained their steady electronic conversation, and everything around me should have felt familiar.

Instead, it felt unreal.

Jackson lay beneath those lights with tubes running into him, blood still refusing to stop completely, and a chest that rose only because machines, medicine, and sheer stubbornness had conspired to keep him from slipping away.

After a while, Blue shifted close enough that her shoulder brushed mine. “Okay,” she murmured. “Tell me now.”