Page 131 of Fate, Interrupted

Silas dissolves. The dark comes in from the edges the way the warmth went out—steadily, and then faster, and then all at once. The last thing I hear is his voice, calling me back.

Then nothing.

Chapter thirty-seven

Silas

The chair is rigid plastic, and the fluorescent lights are burning my eyes. Somewhere down the hall a cart rattles past at intervals, the thunk, thunk of janky wheels on the linoleum keeping my mind from wandering too far from this garish waiting area.

I’m aware of the blood on my sleeve.

It has dried in uneven patches, darker where the fabric absorbed it, stiff along the seam where my arm bends. Someone asks me if I am injured, and I tell them no without fully hearing the question. I’m keeping the bloody jacket in my peripheral awareness without looking at it directly.

Norah is in surgery.

The doctor says it carefully, with the precision of someone who has learned to give information without giving hope or taking it away. The injury is substantial. They have a team with her. They’re doing everything they can. Four hours, most likely.

I say thank you, and she leaves, and the doors close. I’ve been sitting here since then with my forearms on my thighs and my hands loosely clasped.

I can still feel the moment she shoved me. Not as a memory with a beginning and an end. More like fragments that keep arriving out of sequence. The force of her hands flat against my back. The sound that followed. And before all of that—the half-second where I was still reading the situation, and she’d already decided what she was going to do. I didn’t see her face. I felt what she did, instead.

I don’t follow it further than that. I can’t, and still stay in this chair, and staying in this chair is the only thing required of me right now.

The automatic doors at the far end of the waiting area open and close, admitting a brief wash of cooler air. Footsteps cross the tile, and I know who it is before he comes into view.

Of course it’s Logan. He would have felt the pack change the moment the wolf came fully forward in that parking lot—that’s how it works between us, how it has always worked, the frequency that runs between brothers who grew up in the same territory. He didn’t need a phone call.

Logan stops a few feet away.

For a moment neither of us speaks. He looks at me—the dried blood, the rigid posture, the stillness—and his expression tightens. There’s no panic. No shock. He already knows what he’s looking at, and he’s deciding what to do with it.

“The police gave Greer a heads-up. What happened?”

The question is placed between us with room for me to answer honestly.

I know the answer. Saying it out loud is different—it makes it a fact instead of a memory still replaying inside my chest.

“There was a man in the bar,” I say. “He started trouble with her. I handled it. Staff backed it. He left.”

Logan moves slightly. “And then.”

“He was waiting outside.”

The words drop, flat and final, stripped of anything that would make this into a story rather than a sequence of facts.

“He had a gun.”

Logan’s breath comes in slowly, controlled, but deeper than usual. “And Norah?”

“She’s in surgery,” I say.

He nods. Once. The nod he gives when he’s absorbing bad news and already moving toward the next decision.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

I watch him—the methodical processing, the steady look for the next step—and I think about all the times in my life where watching Logan figure out what to do next has been the most reliable thing in any room.

It’s still reliable.