Page 88 of My Craving

“I’m going with him.”

“I can’t let you back there. They need to evaluate him and find out where he’s bleeding.” I look past her at Nash. He’s already several yards away, surrounded by people in scrubs who are still working on him as they move, and he hasn’t opened his eyes. “I understand, but you can’t go any farther.”

The doors close behind the stretcher before I can argue with her again. For the first time since Nash hit the floor in that ballroom, there is nothing I can do for him. I can’t hold pressure against his side, keep him awake, or watch his chest to make sure he’s still breathing. I’m standing in the middle of a hospital with his blood dried across my hands while he’s unconscious somewhere on the other side of those doors.

The nurse has to ask me twice before I hear her. She takes me into a private waiting area and starts going through the information they need. I give her Nash’s full name, his date of birth and everything else I can answer, then sit only because she tells me someone will come back as soon as they know more.

The room goes quiet after the nurse leaves, and without anyone asking me questions or Nash in front of me to focus on, I finally notice the blood dried across my hands and beneath my fingernails. There’s more on the cuffs and front of my shirt, enough that I can still feel where the fabric has started to stiffen against my skin.

I go into the small bathroom and hold my hands beneath the water. Red runs into the white sink while I scrub my palms and work at the blood beneath my nails, but every time I close my eyes, I’m back on the ballroom floor with my hand pressed against Nash’s side. I could feel his blood coming through my fingers no matter how much pressure I used. By the time the water runs clear, my hands are clean, but the rest of me isn’t. I dry them and return to the waiting room, where several messages from Ronan are waiting.

Adrian is in police custody. Taylor found a second phone, restraints, and a syringe in the service area he used to enter the hotel. Alina disappeared during the blackout, but security footage caught her entering another service corridor, and Ronan is working with Taylor and hotel security to trace where she went after that.

Alina got away. After everything that happened tonight, she left Adrian behind and disappeared while Nash was bleeding on the ballroom floor. I send Ronan two words.

Find her.

Then I set the phone aside because until someone comes through those doors and tells me what’s happening with Nash, Alina can wait.

A nurse checks on me once, but Nash is still being evaluated and she has nothing else to tell me. After she leaves, I lose track of how long I sit there staring at the doors before Kieran walks into the waiting room with Declan and Xavier.

Kieran comes straight to me. “Anything?”

“They’re still evaluating him.”

He takes the chair across from me while Declan sits with Xavier beside him, keeping an arm around Xavier and pulling him close against his side. There’s still some of Nash’s blood smeared across Xavier’s shirt, and his eyes settle on the much larger amount covering mine before he looks away. For a while, none of us talk. Xavier stays pressed against Declan, his fingers twisting together in his lap until Declan catches one of his hands and threads their fingers together.

“I should’ve seen him behind me.”

Declan’s arm tightens around him. “There were hundreds of people in that room, A Ghrá. The lights had just gone out.”

“I still should’ve seen him.”

I understand where his head is going. If Nash hadn’t reached Adrian when he did, Xavier would have been the one with that knife in him. He doesn’t need me to tell him that, and he doesn’t need me telling him what Nash would or wouldn’t have done differently.

“Adrian did this,” I tell him. “Not you.”

Xavier looks at the blood on his shirt again, his jaw tightening before he leans farther into Declan. Declan presses his mouth against Xavier’s temple and keeps him there, one hand wrapped around him while the other stays firmly around his waist.

Kieran doesn’t try to fill the silence, and neither do I. There isn’t anything any of us can say that will change what happened in that ballroom or get Nash through those doors any faster.

When the door finally opens again, a doctor walks into the waiting room and asks for me. I’m out of the chair before he gets any farther.

“The knife entered below Nash’s left ribs and injured his spleen. That’s where most of the internal bleeding is coming from. He lost a significant amount of blood before he got here, and we’ve already started a transfusion.”

“He lost consciousness in the ambulance.”

“That was most likely from the blood loss and the drop in his blood pressure. His pressure has responded to the fluids and blood we’ve given him, but we need to get the bleeding stopped. He’s going into surgery now.”

I glance toward the doors behind him before looking back. “What else did the knife hit?”

“From what we can see on the imaging, there’s no injury to his heart or any major blood vessels. The spleen is our primary concern. We’ll try to repair it, but if the damage is too extensive, we may have to remove it.”

“How long?”

“A couple of hours if everything goes as expected.”

I want more than that. I want him to tell me exactly what they’re going to find when they open Nash up and guarantee that he’ll come back through those doors, but he can’t give me either of those things.