Chapter 271: We will be okay.

Fabian

Alan left not long after, insisting on going home to grab a change of clothes for me, something clean, something that wasn’t stained through with her blood. I told him not to bother. I had no intention of leaving this hospital, let alone changing out of the one thing that still connected me to the moment I’d found her on that kitchen floor.

He didn’t argue. He simply squeezed my shoulder once before he left, and I was alone again with the silence and the weight of everything the doctor had just told me.

It felt like hours before the doctor returned, though it might only have been minutes stretched thin by dread.

He told me she was awake.

Two words, and my body was moving before my mind had even caught up, my legs carrying me down that hallway faster than I think I’d moved in years, my heart slamming against my ribs with something akin to relief, terror, guilt, all of it crashing into each other at once.

I stopped the second I reached her door.

She lay on her side facing the window, the hospital gown swallowing her small frame, an IV taped into the back of her hand, monitors beeping steadily beside the bed, tracking a heartbeat I’d been terrified only hours ago I would never hear again.

Her hair was messier than I’d ever seen it, dulled somehow, and her skin looked paler against the white of the pillow, but she was breathing. She was alive. And still, my feet wouldn’t carry me any further into that room.

Fear held me hostage right there in the doorway, uglier and more paralyzing than anything I’d felt facing down men with guns.

What if she blamed me again? What if she looked at me and saw only every way I’d failed her, the guard I hadn’t posted, the father I hadn’t caught in time, the child she’d never even known she was carrying, gone now because of a war that was never supposed to touch her?

I stood frozen, furious with myself, aching with a relief so large it nearly buckled my knees, unable to reconcile the two feelings warring inside me.

Then she turned.

Our eyes met, and something in her expression softened instantly, a smile spreading slow and soft across her face, and I nearly went down to my knees right there in the doorway.

“What are you standing there for?” she asked, her voice quiet, rough around the edges from whatever they’d had down her throat during surgery, and it broke something open in me even as it stitched something back together in the same breath.

The tears came like a tide, falling before I could stop them, my fist curling into the fabric of my pants as my jaw worked against the sob building in my throat.

I made myself walk toward her. She shifted slowly to lie flat, hissing softly at the movement, her eyes tracking me the entire way, but I couldn’t meet them.

Guilt wouldn’t let me. I lowered myself onto the edge of the bed beside her, keeping a careful distance, my eyes fixed on my own hands as I fought to hold myself together.

“Aren’t you going to look at me?” she asked again, quieter this time. “Do I look ugly now?”

My head snapped up so fast it startled even me. “Don’t you ever say that again.” My voice came out broken, warning and pleading all at once, and it made her smile, small and genuine despite everything.

“Why are you crying?” she asked.

The question undid whatever control I had left. The tears came faster, and some distant part of me marveled at the absurdity of it — a man like me, the enforcer, the one people talked about like I was carved from stone, unraveling completely over one woman in a hospital bed.

But even crying like this didn’t feel like enough. I would have cut my own heart out and handed it to her gift-wrapped if that was what it took to prove it.

I turned fully to face her, sniffing hard, wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand before letting my gaze travel over her, slow and careful, cataloguing every part of her like I needed to memorize that she was still here. “How are you feeling?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

She shook her head, and her own tears slid sideways across the bridge of her nose into the pillow. “No. I’m not, Fabian.” Her voice shook. “I thought I was going to die in there. I thought I was never going to see you or Lilia again. I was so scared..”

More tears fell, and everything in me wanted to fold in on itself, to hide the wreck I’d become somewhere she couldn’t see.

But I couldn’t do that to her, not now. I moved closer instead, taking her hand in mine and pressing my lips to her knuckles, one after another. “You are the strongest woman I have ever known, baby. And I love you so fucking much.” I kissed her wrist next, then the center of her palm, wanting to worship every inch of her, wanting her to feel exactly how much I meant it. “The one thing I couldn’t do, you did. And you did it so well, bravely too. You freed us both from him. You don’t know how grateful I am. How indebted I am to you.”

“The universe has taken a lot from us,” I continued, my voice cracking around the words, “but it couldn’t be cruel enough to take you from me too. I would have fought to bring you back. Tooth and nail. I will never let you die. Do you understand me?”

She nodded, crying harder now, her free hand rising to my face to brush the tears from my cheek. “We’re going to be okay now,” she murmured, a watery laugh escaping her.

I wanted so badly to believe that. We would have been, too, if Nicolai hadn’t already taken one more thing from her, our child, gone before she’d ever known to grieve it.

She didn’t know yet. I didn’t know what would happen to either of us once she did.

But I nodded anyway, mirroring her smile because it was the only thing I could give her in that moment. “Yes, we will, baby. Yes, we will.”