Page 287 of Cross Checked
Bliss
Hospitals had a sound.
Not one sound. A hundred of them layered together until they became their own kind of weather. Wheels whispering over polished floors. Monitors chiming through half-open doors. Voices lowered by fear. Rubber soles moving fast, then faster. Distant intercom announcements that meant nothing to most people and everything to someone waiting for the wrong doctor to walk through the wrong door with the wrong look on their face.
I had never understood how cold waiting rooms were until I sat in one with Cade’s blood somewhere in the building and no part of my body capable of getting warm.
The ICU family room was small enough that everyone’s grief had to overlap. My dad sat beside me with one arm around my shoulders and one hand wrapped around mine so tightly it should’ve hurt, but pain belonged to some other version of me now. The one who had ribs and bruises and a body that still understood where it ended and the rest of the world began. This version of me had gone somewhere else. Somewhere thin and bright and terrible, where every breath felt like something I was borrowing from Cade.
Ryker stood near the door because sitting had become impossible for him sometime around the first hour. Knox kept stepping in and out with his phone pressed to his ear, switching between brother, detective, and the only person in the room still capable of understanding what the police were telling us. Lyon and Emmitt sat shoulder to shoulder against the far wall, silent in a way Bennett men almost never were, while Kellen stayedbent forward with both elbows on his knees and his hands clasped behind his neck like if he let go, something inside him might come apart.
Aura sat on one side of me. Charm sat on the other. They had not let go of me since we got to County. Sometimes their hands shifted. Sometimes Aura rubbed circles over my wrist. Sometimes Charm pressed a tissue into my palm even though I didn’t remember asking for one. But they stayed tucked against me like if they moved too far away, I might disappear into the thin, bright hospital air.
Briggs, Rider, Easton, Coach Little, and half the Fury were somewhere near the opposite wall and bleeding out into the hallway because the room was too small for a hockey team and this much fear. I knew they were there. I knew Briggs looked destroyed. I knew Easton hadn’t spoken in almost an hour. I knew Rider’s jaw was probably locked so tight his teeth hurt. But knowing did not mean I could hold any of them clearly in my head.
All I could hold was Cade.
Cade was in surgery.
That was the fact my brain kept circling because everything after it felt too big to understand. He had been stabbed twice. One wound had collapsed his lung, and the other had gone deep enough into his abdomen that Knox’s face had gone pale when he tried explaining what the doctors were saying. There was internal bleeding. Too much blood. Too little time. They had flown him here because an ambulance on regular roads had not been fast enough for whatever was happening inside Cade’s body.
Those were the facts Knox had given us in pieces, and every piece landed inside me like it belonged to someone else’s life. They were words I understood separately, but together they became a language my body refused to translate.
Collapsed lung.
Internal bleeding.
Critical.
Surgery.
Ventilator, maybe.
Trauma team.
I kept waiting for someone to admit they were wrong. That this was another Cade overreaction. That he would come through the doors irritated, pale, and dramatic about someone ruining his suit. That he would look at me with that exhausted, arrogant face and say, “Pip,” like my panic was personally inconveniencing him.
Because Cade Mercer was not supposed to be critical in anything other than critically wrecking every boundary I had put in place before him.
Cade Mercer was supposed to be arrogant and impossible and leaning against a counter somewhere with that stupid mouth of his, calling me Pip like I was both his favorite problem and his entire religion. He was supposed to be outside the arena with damp hair, tired eyes, and a smug grin because he had scored twice and kissed me through glass like a menace with zero respect for my nervous system. He was supposed to be making my brothers hate him for being too pretty and my dad hate him for being too easy to like.
He was not supposed to be open on an operating table while strangers tried to put his body back together and keep his heart beating.
I cried without making noise.
That was the part that felt strangest. Tears kept falling down my face, steady and warm and endless, but the rest of me had gone quiet. No sobbing. No screaming. No big dramatic collapse. Just tears. Just my chest splitting open in a way no one could see unless they looked too closely.
I would’ve thought this was a bad dream if the screaming in my own ribs wasn’t the only thing keeping me awake.
The door opened.
Ryan walked in covered in Cade’s blood.
For one second, the whole room stopped breathing.
He stood just inside the doorway like he hadn’t meant to come in. Like his body had carried him there because he knew where we were, but his brain had not caught up to the fact that walking into a room full of people who loved Cade while wearing that much of him would detonate all of us.
His white dress shirt was ruined. His sleeves were dark to the elbows. Blood had dried in uneven streaks across his forearms and beneath his fingernails. There was a smear of it near his jaw, like he had dragged his hand over his face and forgotten what was on it.
