Chapter 272: What did I loose?

She grinned at me through the tears, still clearly in pain, and God, how I loved this woman.

“Now please come lie beside me,” she said. “My hands ache, and I want to feel your body.”

I glanced down at my shoes, then at the dried blood still crusted across my shirt, and hesitated.

She noticed immediately. “Why didn’t you change?”

I pressed my lips together. “I couldn’t leave you, little fairy. Bloody shirt or not, I wasn’t going to leave until I knew you were okay.”

She rolled her eyes at that, and the sight of it filled me with more joy than I could reasonably explain. She was back. She was here, and she was rolling her eyes at me like nothing had happened at all. I grinned. “Let me go change first—”

I was already halfway to standing when her hand caught my wrist, still flat on her back but gripping me with surprising strength. “Where are you going?”

I blinked, glancing between my shirt and her face.

“I don’t care about the blood on your shirt, Fabian. Get over here.”

“Damn.” I smirked despite myself. “Didn’t you just come back from the dead? And now you want to fuck me? Should I be scared?”

She swatted at my hand, hissing at the movement, and I laughed, moving in closer to rub gently along her arm.

“Stop making me laugh,” she warned, though the smile on her face said otherwise.

I adjusted myself carefully onto the bed beside her, mindful of every wire and every wound. “Is this even allowed?” I whispered against her hair.

“Since when did you care about rules?” she drawled, drawing circles on my chest.

I lifted my head, grinning down at her. “What the hell happened to you in the afterlife?”

She laughed again, then hissed through the pain of it. “You idiot.”

And there in that hospital room, tangled in wires and grief and everything neither of us had said yet, we laughed together.

Indigo

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him. Nicolai, gun stretched toward me, pulling the trigger again and again in whatever version of the memory my mind decided to torture me with that time.

Other times, it was the knife, plunging into me over and over, dragging me straight back to one of the most terrifying moments of my life.

I had genuinely believed I was going to die in that kitchen. I hadn’t made peace with it, it was either him or me, and some stubborn part of me refused to believe the universe could be cruel enough to let me die alongside a man like that, but somewhere underneath the fighting, I truly hadn’t thought I would make it out.

I supposed that while Fabian kept thanking me for killing his father, I’d been quietly thanking him, over and over in my own head, for saving my life yet again.

Still, something felt wrong. I couldn’t place it exactly, but the feeling clung to me the way smoke clings to a room long after the fire’s been put out.

Fabian, for his part, was still entirely himself around me, possessive, loving, funny, flirty, sweet in all the ways I’d come to depend on. That hadn’t shifted an inch.

Alan, on the other hand, had. He and Fabian kept trading these strange, loaded looks whenever they thought I wasn’t paying attention, and since when had the two of them grown this close? I’d only been gone twenty-four hours.

But even accounting for that, something about their closeness felt new, like they were carrying something between them that neither wanted to set down in front of me.

Alan himself had barely said two full sentences to me since I woke up, hovering instead like the bodyguard he’d always been, clearly relieved I was alive, but off, somehow, in a way I couldn’t name.

When I asked Fabian about it, he simply said Alan was still in shock.

I knew that wasn’t the whole truth.

I had an overwhelming urge to call my daughter, to hear her voice, but I didn’t want her worrying about me being in a hospital bed, didn’t want that fear anywhere near her. So I held onto the ache of missing her instead.

The doctor came to examine me again not long after, and that was when I finally understood that something really was wrong.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, flipping through whatever chart he was holding. “Any other pain besides the wound site?”

“A little around the wound,” I admitted, “but my stomach hurts. Really bad, actually.”

He nodded, unbothered, jotting something down. “That’s normal, considering what you lost.”

I felt Fabian stiffen beside me before the words had even fully landed. My bed was elevated, upright enough that I could see both of them clearly, and Fabian’s hand was still resting over mine, warm a second ago and suddenly rigid.

What I lost.

The phrase echoed through me strangely, catching on something unnamed. I turned to look at Fabian, searching his face for anything that might explain it, but his features had gone tight, unreadable, saying absolutely nothing.

He and the doctor exchanged a glance over my head, and the doctor’s brow pulled into a frown.

“What do you mean, what I lost, doctor?” I asked slowly, glancing between the two of them. “Did you remove one of my organs or something?”

The doctor blinked, clearly caught off guard. “Uh—” He trailed off, eyes flicking nervously between me and Fabian behind me, whatever expression Fabian was wearing, it left the doctor looking skeptical, confused, like he’d just stepped into the middle of something he wasn’t supposed to see.

I didn’t look at Fabian either. A sharp, sudden anger was rising in me instead, along with the awful feeling of being left out of something concerning my own body.

“Thank you, doctor. I’ll come see you after I’m done here,” Fabian cut in smoothly.

I wanted to argue, wanted to demand the doctor finish his sentence right there, but something told me that whatever this was, it would be better coming from Fabian than from a stranger holding a clipboard.

The doctor looked visibly relieved at the out, nodding quickly before all but fleeing the room.

The second the door clicked shut behind him, I snatched my hand out from under Fabian’s and refused to look at him. He pulled a chair up beside the bed anyway, settling into it, and I could feel the weight of his eyes on the side of my face even though I kept mine fixed stubbornly on the window. He was hiding something from me. And he wasn’t telling me.

“What is it, baby?” he asked gently, and the gentleness of it only made the anger in me spike hotter.

I turned on him with a glare sharp enough to cut. “What is it?” I spat. “Don’t treat me like a fool, Fabian. I told you something was off with Alan, and you made me think I was imagining it. Then what the hell was that with the doctor? What did I lose? Why won’t you tell me?”