Chapter 36: A pulse between us

Chapter 36: A pulse between us
Silence hung heavily over the hospital room eerily. Steady beeping from the heart monitor jolted Sherry into the reality that Enzo remained tenuously connected to life by a faint thread of existence.
His hand lay limply inside hers, with fingers icy yet somehow still imbued with a faint vital spark.
Sleep had eluded her entirely that night.
Not entirely, actually.
Her cheek bore a faint imprint from a plastic armrest on some hospital chair, pretty recently, it seemed.
Her eyes looked raw, but her grip remained tight, somehow still.
Then...
A stir.
A whisper of breath.
And the slow, unsteady blink of lashes opened against the pale blue light.
Sherry bolted upright. "Enzo?"
His mouth parted. Dry, cracked.
His eyes moved sluggishly, groggily, but found her.
She leaned close, almost scared to breathe. "I'm here."
He tried to speak. It came out as a rasp.
She grabbed the water cup and gently tilted it to his lips. He drank, coughed, and then exhaled a long, trembling sigh.
Then, voice hoarse and broken, he said the only thing that mattered:
"Don't let them win."
Sherry's eyes welled.
He was awake.
He remembered.
He knew.
"I won't," she whispered. "I swear. But you have to fight with me."
His gaze was dull, unfocused.
The painkillers were doing their work, dulling his edges, numbing the sharpness she'd always feared and loved. But something in his eyes flickered-a ghost of the man who could crush kingdoms with his mouth and tear her in half with his hands.
Now? He looked fragile.
Almost... human.
It freaked her out worse than blood, and she felt utterly unnerved afterward somehow.
Sherry lay beside him on a hospital bed later that night, curled up delicately so as not to jostle his bandages.
She had permitted it with eyes growing soft when she grasped that rest would elude both unless bodily contact was established.
Enzo remained eerily silent suddenly. He still gripped her hand pretty tightly, though.
His thumb grazed her knuckles gently in sluggish looping motions as some recollection etched deeply back onto her skin.
She tilted her head sideways toward him with a gentle whisper escaping her lips in a soft, barely audible tone.
"I was afraid I would never get to tell you the truth."
His eyes shifted to hers.
"I would have taken your last breath and still never known the whole of what you are to me," she continued.
"You're not just a man I have loved. You are a man I have hated, wanted, and feared. You have broken me in ways no one else ever could, but still, you're the only one I want to be whole for."
A pause. His eyes shimmered but didn't close.
"Even when you were bleeding out in my arms, I didn't care if you never loved me back. I just needed you alive."
He said nothing.
But his grip on her fingers tightened just enough to tell her he heard what she said.
Sometime after midnight, his breathing evened. A kind of peace settled over him. Sherry shifted gently and was about to rise when his hand brushed over her hip.
She stilled.
"Don't go," he rasped.
Her breath caught.
"I'm not."
His hand moved lower. Slower.
Even through the pain, even in a hospital bed with machines wired into his veins, Enzo Blackwood's hunger returned like instinct.
Like obsession.
He tugged her closer, his touch fever-warm, fingers curling beneath the hem of her shirt. When his hand slipped under her waistband and brushed her bare skin, she gasped.
"You're injured," she whispered.
He gave a broken half-smile. "Still yours."
Her mouth found his.
They kissed like survivors-quiet, aching, trembling.
His body moved slower than usual, but the tension between them hadn't dimmed. His fingers, though weak, traced her curves like a blind man memorizing the shape of salvation.
She climbed gently over him, straddling his lap, careful of the bandage pressed across his ribs.
He groaned into her mouth.
"You're going to kill me," he rasped.
"Not if you let me love you."
She moved against him in slow, deep rolls of her hips, and he arched as much as his body allowed.
No power play.
No games.
Just a raw, aching connection.
And for once, when he came apart beneath her, he didn't hide his face or bite back a cry.
He just said her name softly, brokenly, like a prayer point.
The next morning, Ethan arrived with news.
He stepped in, eyes red-rimmed but alert. He waited until the nurse finished checking Enzo's vitals and left the room before speaking.
"We've received a delivery," he said, holding out a plain brown envelope.
Sherry took it. Inside was a small black USB.
Enzo shifted upright with a wince. "Plug it in."
Ethan connected it to the tablet.
A single file was loaded.
No title.
Just a timestamp: March 2002, New York City.
Sherry's brows furrowed.
The footage was grainy. Surveillance. A recording from inside a private room: oak table, dim light, high-quality whiskey on the table.
Four people.
A young Enzo's father.
Sherry's father.
A man she didn't recognize.
And Victoria Hayes.
Sherry's breath stopped.
She couldn't have been older than nineteen, seated beside her father, smiling tight and calculated.
The video is now playing audio.
"...we move forward with the asset exchange only if the merger agreement is signed. Otherwise, we fold the company and absorb the losses."
Sherry's father: "And what if your son finds out what we're doing with his name?"
Enzo's father: "He won't. He'll learn control, not truth."
Victoria: "And the girl?"
Sherry's father: "She's never to know. I will protect her. Even from him."
Enzo froze.
Sherry went cold.
Even from him.
The screen faded to black.
The silence afterward was suffocating.
"I don't understand," she whispered. "That's my father... My father. Did he know about all of this? What about your family? About... you?"
"He was part of the game all along," Enzo said, his voice low and dangerous. "And now I know why Victoria's been ten steps ahead."
Sherry's throat tightened. "I have been sleeping with the son of the man my father betrayed. And now the woman who was there from the beginning is trying to destroy us both."
Ethan nodded grimly. "The video's time stamp places it at the inception of the European holding company, the one you just inherited through your father's will."
Enzo blinked slowly. "The criminal shell. It's mine now."
Sherry looked at him. "So they think you'll use it."
"They think I am using it."
Sherry stared down at her hands.
Everything she believed about her father was unraveling.
She had inherited more than Margo Fashion House.
She had inherited his sins.
And now they were inside her bones.
Enzo's voice, low and shaken, cut through her spiral.
"You said last night... You weren't afraid anymore."
She nodded.
"I need you to hold onto that."
Sherry reached for him, hand to his chest.
"I'm still here. Still yours."
He gripped her hand.
But in his eyes?
Something colder than war stirred beneath the surface.
And it wasn't fear anymore.
It was a strategy.
Hours later, as Sherry stepped into the hallway to clear her thoughts, a nurse brushed past her. She wore the uniform. Held a clipboard. Looked like every other nurse in the ward.
But Sherry caught the glint of something in her hand as she passed.
A second USB.
Dropped into the trash bin.
Sherry retrieved it, heart pounding.
Back in the room, she plugged it in while Enzo slept.
Another video.
Grainier. Older.
But this time...
Just two men.
Her father.
And Enzo's father.
In the background?
A teenage Victoria.
"This girl," Enzo's father said, "is going to help us take down anyone who gets in our way. Including our children."
Sherry covered her mouth.
Because the girl looked into the camera directly and smiled.