Page 97 of Obsession
Saint bends until his forehead nearly touches mine. “I know. I know, baby. I know.”
“You’re not just useful. You hear me? You’re not. You’re mine, and I’m yours, and I’m going to learn how to say it right if you wake up and give me the chance.”
I want to tell him I hear him. I want to tell him he already did. But my body is done, and the dark closes before I can make the words leave my mouth.
Saint
Themorningaftertherescue is the longest morning of my life. I’ve spent plenty of nights awake. Surveillance. Retaliation. Runs that stretched too long and warehouse problems that needed my hands on them before they turned into bodies. Those nights had motion in them, and motion is something I understand. Engines, maps, weapons, men waiting for orders, blood drying under my nails while the next problem arranged itself in front of me.
This morning has nothing but the chair beside Oisín’s bed, the low lamp near the wall, and the slow rise and fall of his chest beneath the blanket Tally tucked around him like cloth can protect what the rest of us failed to.
I haven’t slept or moved except to shift my weight when my back locks up or lean forward when his breathing changes. Harlan told me to let him rest. Tally told me the same thing with a look that dared me to turn fear into orders. Moth came in sometime after four to tell me the corridor held, Canon’s men broke against the trap, and Bricks was handling cleanup at the barn with the kind of enthusiasm that makes the rest of the club nervous. I heard every word. None of it reached the part of me sitting in this room with Oisín’s blood still in the creases of my hands.
He’s quiet by nature, but this isn’t his quiet. Oisín’s silence usually has life in it, a small turn of his head when someone speaks, fingers moving absently over his ring, eyes tracking every detail in a room even when men think he isn’t paying attention.
This stillness belongs to injury and exhaustion. One side of his face is swollen, the bruise around his eye darkening by the hour. His lip is split. Bandages are wrapped around his forearm where Rook cut him. His ribs are bruised deep enough that every breath seems like something his body has to work for.
My own side throbs where Canon’s knife went in. It isn’t deep enough to matter, according to Harlan, which means it won’t kill me and therefore doesn’t deserve attention, though the bandage under my shirt is damp again. No one has said anything about it, though, because Oisín is in the bed, and every hierarchy in this house has rearranged itself around that fact.
Around dawn, Harlan comes back in. He’s scarred across both hands, and calm in the particular way of a man who has patched up armed idiots under worse circumstances and survived being threatened by men who thought fear made them more persuasive. He carries his bag to the bedside without greeting me, sets it on the floor, and washes his hands in the small bathroom before he touches Oisín.
“Don’t hover over my shoulder,” he muses.
“I’m sitting.”
“You’re sitting like you’re considering where to bury me.”
“Then don’t give me a reason.”
Harlan gives me a flat look over his glasses. “I’m not the one who put him in that bed.”
My hand tightens on the arm of the chair before I can stop it. The truth lands too close to the place where I’ve been bleeding all night, and Harlan must see enough on my face to decide not to press. He turns back to Oisín and changes the dressing on his arm first. The cuts are clean now, stitched where they needed stitching and covered where they didn’t.
Harlan’s fingers move carefully as he checks for heat around the wounds, and I make myself stay seated even when Oisín shifts under the contact with a faint sound caught in his throat.
I’m halfway out of the chair before Harlan lifts one hand. “He’s all right. That’s expected.”
“He made a sound.”
“He’s going to. He hurts.”
I sit back down because standing over the bed won’t help Oisín, and he’s had enough men making their fear his problem. Harlan checks his pupils next, then the bruising along his jaw and cheekbone. When he presses gently along Oisín’s ribs, Oisín flinches even unconscious, his breath catching around pain. My hand curls into a fist against my thigh. The doctor keeps working because stopping would make it worse.
“No hospital?” I ask.
“Nothing is broken badly enough for me to force that conversation right now,” Harlan says. “If he gets confused, vomits repeatedly, has trouble staying awake later, or his breathing worsens, I’m taking him in whether you like it or not.”
“You’ll come back in six hours.”
“And before that if Tally calls.” He packs his instruments with the patience of a man who has decided my panic is more irritating than dangerous. “Six hours, Saint. Wake him every few. Small sips of water when he’s alert. No crowding him, no yelling, no club bullshit in this room. He needs quiet more than he needs you proving how worried you are.”
“He’s not going to be alone.”
“I didn’t say alone. I said no crowding.” Harlan closes his bag and stands. “There’s a difference. Learn it.”
He looks at my side again before he leaves, but whatever he thinks better stay behind his teeth if he wants to walk out with them. The door shuts after him, and the room settles into the soft, awful quiet of waiting.
When Oisín wakes properly, it’s almost seven. His lashes flutter first, then his mouth tightens. Pain reaches him before the room does. I see it happen in the small changes, his brow drawing together, his fingers twitching against the blanket, his breath shortening when his body reports everything at once. I lean forward but don’t touch him yet, that restraint costing more than it should.
