Page 21 of What We Become

He tugs at the too-tight scrubs. “Clothes would be nice.” He pulls out his phone and shoots off a text. “Micah and I are about to grab something to eat. You want anything?”

I look at Sage in the bed. She’s so damn small. It’s the thing I keep coming back to. Sage has never looked small to me—not on the beach, not in the hospital after the hanging, not when she stood in a motel room covered in Dale Stine’s blood and dared me to be angry about it. She fills rooms. She fills my house. She fills a space in my chest that I didn’t know was hollow until she walked into it.

But right now, under the white sheet, with the oxygen mask and the IV line and the bandaged wrists, she so vulnerable. Breakable.

He almost broke her for good.

“Holden?”

I lift my head to Knox, and it takes me a moment to remember the question. Food. Do I want any?

“I’m good,” I say, my eyes straying back to her. “I’m fine right here.”

Knox studies me for a long moment. Whatever he’s looking for, he must find enough of it, because he nods once and moves toward the door.

Micah appears in the frame before Knox clears it. Damp curls, borrowed scrubs, skin scoured pink. He’s scrubbed himself raw trying to get the night off his body. I recognize the impulse. I’ve done it after scenes that followed me home.

“You should eat,” he says gently.

“I’m good.”

“Holden—”

“Bring me back a coffee if they have one that isn’t terrible.” I give him the closest thing to a smile I can manufacture. “Black. Bring one even if it is terrible, I’ll drink it anyway and complain. It’ll give me something to do.”

He huffs out a laugh. It dies halfway, but it was there, and I count that as a win. He looks at Sage, then at me, and something passes behind his eyes that I don’t have the bandwidth to translate.

“Thirty minutes,” he says.

Then it’s just us. Her and me and the machines and the fog-and-clear rhythm I’ve built my evening around. I squeeze her hand, lean forward, and press my mouth to her knuckles above the tape line. Then I stay there.

I can’t stop shaking.

It starts in my hands. A fine tremor, barely visible, the kind I could mask with a fist or a pocket. But it spreads up my forearms, into my shoulders, through my chest. The muscle in my jaw is jumping, teeth grinding against each other with enough force to crack enamel.

I press her hand to my forehead. Close my eyes.

You almost died in a wall, wildcat.

She almost died. Again.

It keeps replaying in my mind. The wall. The foam. Her face, gray and still. Her mouth, sticky with pink insulation. The seconds—the infinite-fucking-seconds—where she wasn’t breathing and nobody could make her breathe and I sat there with blood on my hands from the bricks and a gun in my holster that couldn’t do shit to save the woman I love.

I’m good at things. I’m good at tactics and logistics and reading rooms and making hard calls and staying calm when everyone else falls apart. I have been shot at. I have sat across from men who killed their families and kept my voice level. I have orchestrated the deaths of predators and eaten pancakes afterward and slept like a baby the next night.

And I couldn’t stop a man with a trowel and a bag of mortar from sealing my girl inside a wall.

Couldn’t figure out that the guy who claimed to be her best friend—who said he’d hide a body for her to my face—was just getting close to her in order to brick her into a fucking wall.

What if Knox wasn’t watching the tracker?

What if the tracker stopped working?

What if we didn’t find her in time?

What if . . .

What if!