Page 98 of Cruel Kiss

"It's not mine," Ronan rasps. "It's his."

That's the relief I needed, but I don't feel at ease yet. And I don't let go of the shirt. I can't. "But you—look at me—areyouhurt? Anywhere. Tell me."

"No." He shakes his head slowly. "Not a scratch. He—" His throat works. "He pushed me out of the way. He took both of them. For me. He?—"

And then this enormous man, this man who shot someone dead on my stairs and never so much as flinched, this man who made a grown criminal wet himself with a whisper, this man just comes apart in a hospital chair.

It's like I'm the one getting shot.

I get down on my knees in front of the chair. I don't care about the blood on the floor or the men watching. I get down so I can see his face, and so he has to see mine.

"Hey," I say. "Look at me. Navi's tough. He's an idiot, but he's tough. You told me that yourself. He's going to be okay."

"You didn't see it, Cali. You didn't see how much?—"

"I know. But he's in there right now, and there are doctors working on him. He's stubborn, right? He's not going to let a couple of bullets take him out. Not after everything. Okay? He's going to be okay. You'd never get rid of him that easily, right? Right?"

I don't actually know that. Nobody does, not even the doctors. But I say it like it's a fact, because right now he needs a pretty lie to hold onto more than he needs the truth.

I take his bloody hands in mine and press them between us.

"And you… You have to stay with me. Do you hear me? Whatever happens next, whatever Lev does, you stay. I can't lose you, too, Ronan. I can't."

Ronan's breath catches. His bloody hand comes up and covers one of my fists, the one knotted in his shirt, and he presses it there against his heart, which is pounding, which is alive, right there under my knuckles goingthud, thud, thud.

"You won't," he says. "You won't,kotyonok.I'm right here."

Behind him, through the double doors marked SURGICAL, two rooms down a corridor I can't see, Navi is fighting for his life on a table.

So we sit.

And we wait.

There's nothing else to do. That's the terrible reality of a hospital. You can have all the money in the world, all the power, and these places will still reduce you down to two people in ugly plastic chairs waiting for a stranger in scrubs to walk through a door and give you a thumbs up or down.

The men clear out, most of them, on Grigor's quiet orders. It isn't safe for them to cluster. Grigor stays, and two others by the entrance, watchful. The rest melt away into the evening.

I make Ronan wash his hands. I take him by the wrist and lead him to the family bathroom off the waiting room. I run the water warm and put the little pump of pink hospital soap into his palm myself. He stands there and lets me hold his hands under the tap and scrub the rust out of the creases, watching the water run pink and then clear.

There's nothing I can do about the shirt. Somebody eventually brings him a set of scrubs, gray-blue and too small in the shoulders. He changes in the bathroom and comes out looking like a stranger. I fold the ruined shirt up small. I don't know why I keep it, but I do, tucked into my bag the way he once kept a cheap, damp napkin from a bar.

Then we sit back down.

Somewhere in there, the sitting becomes leaning. My shoulder finds his arm and stays there. His hand finds mine on the armrest between us, and our fingers lace together, and we just hold on.

In public. Under the flat white fluorescent light, in a row of chairs bolted to the floor, with Grigor twenty feet away and a nurse walking past with a clipboard and a television bolted to the wall playing the local news on mute.

No rules are left between us. No lies. No receipts. Nonight stuff, in the dark, gone by morning.No separate rooms. No creaky floorboard to step over. No little contract I wrote to keep this from being real.

It's just his hand in mine, in the light, where anyone can see.

Around nine, my phone lights up in my bag.

I dig it out one-handed, keeping the other laced through his, to see that the screen saysDO NOT ANSWER.

Todd.

I barely glance at it before I reject the call.