Chapter 269: Different versions of Me

Fabian

I stared at the phrase surgery in progress and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I had let this happen again. I had failed her. Yet again. I had put her into this mess, yet again. I was not there when she needed me, yet again.

The words on that door blurred and sharpened and blurred again, no matter how many times I blinked, no matter how hard I tried to force my eyes to focus on something else.

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I stared down at them like they belonged to someone else, at the dried blood still crusted along my knuckles, hers, not mine, and something in my chest caved in on itself all over again.

I don’t know how long I sat there, folded forward with my elbows on my knees, my head hanging low enough that I could feel my own pulse hammering behind my eyes.

Every version of tonight replayed itself in an endless, punishing loop, the second I’d walked through that door and found her on the floor beside Nicolai’s body, the sound that had torn out of me when I saw how much blood there was, how still she’d gone in my arms on the way to the car.

I kept seeing it. I kept seeing all of it, over and over, like my mind refused to let me look away from my own failure even for a moment.

She had begged me not to leave her. She’d said it that very night, tangled in my arms, tears on her face for entirely different reasons. And still I hadn’t been there. Still I’d let this happen.

I thought of every version of Fabian I could have been tonight, the one who insisted on a guard at the house, the one who checked the perimeter himself, the one who never should have let his father slip through his fingers in the first place and none of them existed.

Only this one did. The one sitting outside an operating room, useless, waiting to find out if the only thing that mattered to him in this world was going to survive the night.

The hallway was quiet except for the distant hum of machines and the occasional soft-soled footsteps of nurses passing by, none of them looking at me long enough to ask if I was alright.

I was grateful for that. I didn’t think I could have managed a single polite word to anyone right now, not with the way my throat kept closing around nothing, not with the way my own heartbeat felt like it was trying to climb out of my chest.

Alan found me like that, hunched over, hollowed out, staring at a door that refused to give me any answers.

He didn’t say anything at first. He simply lowered himself into the seat beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, and let the silence sit between us the way only someone who’d known me long enough could.

I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. I kept my eyes fixed on that door like it might open the second I let my guard down, like my staring alone could will her through this.

Minutes passed. Maybe longer. I lost all sense of time somewhere between the ambulance and this chair. Alan didn’t rush it, didn’t fill the silence with the kind of empty reassurances people always reached for in moments like this.

He just sat there with me, steady, solid, the one constant thing in a night that had ripped everything else out from under me.

Then, finally, quietly, he spoke.

“She fought, Fabian.” His voice was low and careful, like he was testing whether I could bear the sound of another person’s words yet. “You should have seen her. She didn’t just survive tonight. She made sure he never gets to touch her, or you, or Lila, ever again.” He paused, and beside me I felt him turn to look at me. “That’s not the kind of woman who goes down easy. Not after everything she’s already survived.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My jaw was clenched too tight around everything I was trying not to feel, and if I opened my mouth right now I wasn’t sure what would come out, a sob, a scream, or nothing at all.

So I just kept staring at that door, waiting, praying to whatever was still listening to a man like me, that it would open soon, and that when it did, she would still be on the other side of it.