Page 7 of Pucking Inevitable: Bonus Scene

“You need to stop performing reviews on the medical staff.”

“Someone has to.”

“Xaden.” Carnage moved around to stand in front of me, blocking my line of sight to the door. He was at his full height and he was looking at me with the expression he gets when he has decided something needs to be said plainly and he is going to say it plainly and he does not particularly care how it lands. “Pull your shit together.”

I looked at him.

“I am together,”

“You've been pacing this corridor for forty minutes. You've intimidated two nurses, you've blocked the door twice, and you just cornered the anesthesiologist. You are not together.” He held my gaze and didn't move. “And I get it. I understand exactly why and I'm not telling you the feeling is wrong. But she is in that room and she can feel the energy in this corridor and you know it. So pull it together. For her.”

The corridor was quiet for a moment.

“She can hear me out here?”

“Sound travels,” he said.

I thought about that. I thought about Toren lying in that room, listening to me pacing and snapping at people outside her door and what that would cost her in the middle of what she was already carrying.

I stopped pacing.

I walked to the row of chairs against the wall, plastic, uncomfortable, the particular brutal functionality of hospital furniture and I sat down. I put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, then I sat there and breathed. I didn’t move.

Cas sat down next to me.

He didn't say anything. He just sat there, close enough that I could feel the solid presence of him, and let the silence be whatever it needed to be. This is one of the things about Caspian Vought that I will never say to his face, he knows when to stop talking. He runs his mouth when the situation calls for it and he goes quiet when that's what's needed, and he reads the difference correctly almost every time.

“This is what she felt like,” I said, eventually. My voice came out muffled against my hands. “Every time I had her in my grasp and wanted to end her and there was nothing she could do.”

Cas was quiet for a moment.

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably.”

“I owe her a conversation about that.”

“You owe her several conversations about several things.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to have them?”

I lifted my head from my hands and looked at the door of her room. Behind it, somewhere, the anesthesiologist was finally doing his job, and Toren was getting something that would make the pain manageable, and in a few hours, in less time than the past forty minutes had felt, my kid was going to arrive.

“Maybe,” I said.

We sat in the corridor.

After a while, Carnage brought coffee from somewhere. He handed one to me without comment and one to Cas and kept one for himself and sat in the chair on my other side and the three of us sat in a row in the corridor, in a Colorado hospital, and didn't say much of anything. It was one of the few moments in the entire night that I was grateful for both of them without being able to say so.

Carnage isn’t a friend, he’s Toren’s… I don’t fucking know what the dickhead is but he’s here and him showing up means… something.

Fifty minutes after the anaesthesiologist went in, the midwife opened the door.

“Mr. Devlin? She's asking for you.”

I was on my feet before she finished the sentence.

Emmerson Kenna Nile Devlin arrived at two seventeen in the morning.