Chapter 115 I Finally Found You

Chapter 115 I Finally Found You
Cassandra's POV

I gasped.

My eyes flew open.

A beeping sound pulled me upward through layers of darkness before I was ready. Then bright light, white-ceiling and the smell of antiseptic that my lungs recognized before my brain did.

I froze.

The ceiling was not stone. It was not candlelit or vaulted or anything it was supposed to be. It was a flat, white, fluorescent-lit hospital ceiling and there were tubes attached to my arm and a pulse monitor clipped to my finger and the beeping was coming from the machine beside me that was tracking my heartbeat in neat, unremarkable peaks.

I tried to move my hand.

Pain shot up my arm and I flinched. I lay there for a moment just breathing, thinking, waiting for the room to make sense.

I'm back.

The thought arrived without fanfare. It's not possible. I was supposed to be with Liam.

Liam.

His name arrived in my chest like a blow. The last thing– his hands on my face, his forehead against mine, his voice breaking as he said don't say goodbye, don't–

I pressed my hand over my mouth and it didn't help.

The crying started below my ribcage and came up in waves I couldn't stop and didn't particularly try to. The monitor beside me started beeping faster, the door burst open and two doctors and a nurse rushed in with the practiced urgency of people responding to an alarm they'd been half-expecting.

"Hey, hey– you're okay, you're safe–"

"Can you tell me your name–"

"Let's get her breathing, just breathe–"

I couldn't stop.

I cried for Liam. I cried for Cam and Mrs. Fernworth, Claudia, the pack and the war they had won without me there to see the end of it. I cried because they were real, they had been real, every single one of them and I cried because I was back in a world where none of them existed and I didn't know how to be Cassandra Sterling again after everything I had been.

I cried until there was nothing left. The monitor leveled out and the doctors exchanged the quiet, meaningful looks of people who had decided to let the storm pass.

The older doctor, grey-haired with wire-rimmed glasses, pulled a chair to my bedside and sat down.

"Well," he said. "I imagine there's a great deal of pent-up emotion after two weeks."

I looked at him. "What?"

He tilted his head slightly. "Two weeks. You've been unconscious for two weeks, Miss Sterling. You were brought in after an accident on your way home from college." He paused, watching my face. "Do you remember any of it?"

I stared at him.

Two weeks.

Two weeks.

I had spent more than a year with Liam, living through Tiara, Harlan, Cam, coronations, dungeons and dragon riding on a cold hill at midnight and here, in this world, only two weeks had passed.

"That's not possible," I said.

"I understand it must feel that way. Coming out of a coma can be disorienting. The brain does–"

"It wasn't a dream," I said, to myself more than to him.

He was still talking. Things about observation periods, recovery timelines and follow-up assessments but I wasn't fully hearing it anymore. I was lying in a hospital bed in the present, and somewhere across seven centuries Liam was standing on a battlefield in the dark with his arms empty.

It had all been real.

And it was over.

The door opened again and my mother hit me like a wave.

She was crying before she'd fully crossed the room, her hands on my face, my hair and my shoulders all at once, kissing my forehead and cheeks, saying my name over and over in a relieved, desperate tone.

My father was quieter. He stood back and let her go first and when she finally pulled away enough for him to reach me, he just took my hand in both of his and held it, his jaw working for a moment before he managed anything out loud.

"We're here," he said. "We've got you."

I held onto them both and let myself be glad for it.

They stayed for hours, filling the room with everything I'd missed. Updates about the house, about my college friends who had apparently organized a rotation of hospital visits, about the neighbor's dog who had finally stopped barking at dawn. Ordinary, inconsequential, completely wonderful things. My mother cried twice more and my father pretended not to notice either time.

By evening, the doctors had encouraged them to go home and rest, promising I was stable and monitored and would still be there in the morning. My mother left reluctantly. My father squeezed my hand one more time at the door.

And then I was alone.

The hospital had a different quality at night– quieter, the fluorescent buzz of the corridors softened, visitors gone and only the steady rhythm of the ward remaining. I had been lying still for two weeks and my body was restless with the knowledge of it.

I eased myself out of bed slowly, testing my weight, and made my way to the door.

The corridor was long and softly lit. I moved through it carefully, one hand on the wall, relearning the particular mechanics of being Cassandra Sterling in a body that had been asleep for a fortnight.

I found a bathroom halfway down the hall.

I went to the sink, turned on the tap and looked up at the mirror.

I stopped.

On the left side of my neck, at the exact place where Liam had marked me, was silver.

Glowing faintly in the fluorescent light, intricate and unmistakable, the mark of an Alpha that absolutely should not exist in this century, in this world, in any rational explanation I could construct.

I touched it with two fingers.

It was warm.

I was still standing there, staring, my brain cycling through explanations and discarding all of them, when a voice came from somewhere behind me.

"You know, most people don't stand in hospital bathrooms staring at their own reflection for that long. It starts to concern the nursing staff."

The voice was low and dry and familiar in a way that stopped my breath entirely.

I turned around slowly.

He was tall. Dark hair, longer than hospital protocol probably appreciated. And those eyes, those particular eyes, sharp and dark and carrying the specific quality of someone who had been looking for something for a very long time and had just found it.

He was wearing a doctor's coat, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and the ghost of a smirk at the corner of his mouth, watching me with an expression I knew as well as I knew my own name.

I couldn't speak.

He straightened. Crossed the small room in two steps. Leaned close, his face beside mine, and inhaled slowly and deliberately the way I had seen him do a hundred times before.

I staggered back against the sink. "What are you doing?"

But even as I said it, I already knew. I recognized that face the same way I recognized myself in any mirror.

Liam followed me to the present.

"Everything is not making sense," I muttered under my breath, closing my eyes.

"It makes perfect sense," he said, his voice warm and certain.

He leaned forward and pressed his forehead gently against mine. "I finally found you." A quiet laugh. "I go where you go.”

THE END.