Chapter 248: Reid
Night shift softens the whole floor—lights down to a warm hush, wheels whispering at the nurses’ station, the lemon-clean sting of sanitizer hanging under the plastic warmth of machines. Madeline sleeps the sleep you earn after a day that strips you bare: mouth parted, one copper curl stuck damp to her cheek, the monitor at her shoulder sketching out a steady green tide. Twenty-four hours since those eyes opened and said my name. Twenty-four hours since the room went bright with applause and relief—residents blinking at her sats, a nurse actually clapping when she answered questions in that sleep-rough voice that was still her. Name, date, where she was, who we were. Where it hurt. (“Everywhere,” she said, a tiny laugh that broke in the middle, “but I’m here.”)
We called her parents; they ran. She saw them and dissolved—arms up like a child and then the kind of sobs that pull from the bone. Kisses to her hair, her temple, her hands. More crying when we told her the rest.
And then she filled in what we didn’t have: how he pulled her from the street and jammed her into the alley; the way he steered her with a forearm and a promise of pain; how he got her down the dock, onto the Vigil; the snap at her wrist, the dull, white-hot break; the wheelhouse and his hand on the back of her skull. We already knew she’d hidden in the starboard locker—Grayling saw her—but we didn’t know the torn skin was a bracket edge catching like a hook and ripping when he yanked. She listened to the timeline of her coma like it was a weather report and the first thing out of her mouth was 1224B—pregnant humpback—grid coverage—“Did we ruin the study?” That was when I excused myself. Kissed her hair, told her I needed air, stepped into the hallway and put my boot into a steel door until my calf twitched and some poor tech jumped out of his skin. Hearing it from her—and how—lit something in me I don’t admire. It took both hands and a wall of cold to keep me from walking to wherever the fuck they're keeping Nick and finishing what Jake started. Break every bone he used. Cut the rest into pieces for the gulls.
Now her parents are out to dinner, finally, because she’s sleeping and the numbers have behaved for hours. The blinds cast pale bars across her blanket. Jake and I take up our usual posts like sentries that forgot how to leave. He sits opposite, elbows on knees, hands hanging loose and then tightening, loosening again, like he’s testing rope.
“I keep thinking about the nights,” he says quietly, eyes pinned to her face. “How many nightmares she’s going to have now.”
My fingers won’t stop trembling; I lace them together to make them. “Too many.”
He swallows, jaw ticking, and finds my eyes. “And I can’t get past that he kissed her on top of everything else,” he says, and the word is a grain of poison on his tongue. “Twice. Once while he was breaking her wrist. Once while he was shattering her jaw. As if hurting her wasn't enough, he had to assault her too, try to claim her.”
The bedrail groans under my fist before I realize I’ve closed it. There were always two loops in my head for her: the first time on the pier—small, bundled, cheeks wind-bright, a blue tuque tugged down to her lashes—and later, that motel bed where we turned the world into a square of linen and breath and she laughed, flushed and alive and ours. Now there’s a third burned in whether Iinvite it or not: the fading map of fingers at her throat; the brace swallowing her wrist; the shadow-yellow bruise along her jaw where the doctor pointed and said “fracture line,” and I had to stare at the floor to keep from tearing the wall out.
Jake’s mouth thins. “I always see her at that light, that first night, in my head,” he says, a rough scrape—and he shakes his head once, like he’s trying to throw something off. “But this image of her won’t leave.”
“It shouldn’t,” I say, keeping my voice low so I don’t wake her with the edge. “Let it stay. Let it keep us mean.”
His eyes lift to mine. Dark. “Mean and organized.”
I nod.
Jake rubs a hand over his mouth, looks back at her. “I keep hearing it,” he says, and I don’t need to ask what—kiss—and I feel it again, the quick flash up my spine like steel dragged across a battery.
“He put his mouth on our girl,” I say, even, because if I spit it, I’ll go hunting. “So from now on, the only mouths on her are the ones she asks for.”
He nods once like he’s sealing a pact, then glances at the door, at the hall, back to her. “Nightlights,” he adds, as if a small thing could be a blade. “No dark corners. Not for a while.”
“Nightlights,” I agree. I stand and smooth the wrinkle near her shoulder, careful of the IV. Free the stuck curl from her cheek with the back of a finger and tuck it behind her ear. Above the brace, her pulse taps—small, stubborn, infuriatingly brave. Mine falls in with it like it can do anything useful.
“I had to walk out earlier,” I admit, eyes on her mouth, parted just enough to see the slow pull of breath. “Hearing her say how he did it turned me into a thing I don’t like.”
“I know,” Jake says. “I was trying to figure out how to get past six security doors with a smile and a coffee.”
We almost laugh. We don’t.
Outside, a cart squeaks and someone coughs a laugh they clamp down fast. In here, it’s just her. The bruise at her jaw is already more yellow than purple. The finger marks at her throat are ghosts. Her lips are pink. She smells faintly of vanilla and hospital and her.
I sit again and let the anger cool into something harder than heat—edges, plans, patience with teeth. I bend close enough that my breath stirs that small curl back onto her cheek.
“Sleep, trouble,” I murmur, not touching the word love because it’s everywhere anyway. “We’ve got the door. We’ve got the night. And no one gets close again.”