Page 3

They backed.

Coach Patterson appeared from my left. He’s a reasonable guy and I have a functional respect for him and I didn’t have time for him right now.

“Devlin, what do you need⁠—”

“Clear the corridor,” I said, still moving. “That's what I need.”

“I can call⁠—”

“Cas did it. Move, Patterson.”

He moved.

We got Toren through the corridor and out to the car. I had her in the back seat before she could argue about the pace, which she was building toward, I could see it in her face, that particular gathering of energy that means she is about to tell me to slow down, that she's capable of handling this herself.

She is capable of handling anything herself. That has never once been the question.

“You're going to break my hand,” she said, as Cas pulled out of the parking lot.

I looked down. I had taken her hand the moment I got in the car, my knuckles were white and I hadn’t noticed.

“I'm not breaking your hand,” I said.

“You're going to break my hand.”

“No the fuck—” I looked at her. At the slight strain around her eyes, that had nothing to do with what I was doing with her hand and everything to do with a contraction she was breathing through quietly, without making a sound, with the composure of someone who was not going to give the situation the satisfaction of reacting to it. “Tell me what you need, Tink.”

“For you to stop looking at me like I'm about to die.”

“I'm not⁠—”

“Xaden.” She turned her head and looked at me directly, fully, the look that has always gone straight through whatever I am performing down to the thing underneath it. “I'm okay. Breathe.”

I breathed.

It didn't help.

“Two minutes,” Cas said from the front. He ran a red light. I said nothing.

The hospital was the worst experience of my life and I have had some genuinely catastrophic experiences.

I want to be precise about that.

I am not exaggerating for effect. I have stood in rooms while people died and felt nothing but the cold precision of what needed to happen next. I have held instruments of deliberate harm over people who deserved what was coming and I have done so with a steady hand, a clear head and zero hesitation. I have made decisions that ended things. I have lived with those decisions and not one of them has ever made me feel the way I felt in that hospital.

Because in all of those rooms I had control.

I had a thread. Something I was holding. Even in the worst of it, even in the warehouse, even in the years before, there was always a calculation running, always a move available, always something that the particular architecture of my mind could grip onto and work with.

There was nothing to grip here.

The baby was coming, Toren was in pain, and the only thing I was capable of contributing to either of those facts was standing in a corridor in hockey gear, radiating the specific energy of a man who wanted to dismantle the building and was only barely managing not to.

They had us through triage and into a room in under ten minutes, which would have been adequate under any other circumstances but which felt, to me, standing in the corridor watching a nurse take Toren's details at a pace I found unacceptable, like an eternity.

“Can we move faster,” I snapped.

The nurse looked up at me. She was somewhere in her forties, she had the expression of a woman who had seen everything this job could produce and had decided to be unmoved by most of it, and she looked at me with a particular patience that I found more aggravating than impatience would have been.