Chapter 97: ARE YOU TELLING ME...

Chapter 98

Ren

I couldn’t hear the doctor anymore. The blood was rushing in my ears.

I looked back down at Lumi. Her left eye was wide, bright, and swimming with raw, helpless panic.

The right side of her face stayed smooth and still, completely uncooperative. She tried to lift her right hand to grab my shirt, but nothing happened. Her fingers didn’t even twitch.

A tiny, choked whimpering sound escaped from the left side of her mouth, trapped under the clear plastic oxygen mask.

"Hey," I whispered, stepping closer until my chest was pressed right against the edge of the mattress.

I leaned down and gently slid my left hand into her left hand.

"Hey, look at me. Look at me, Lumi."

Her gaze snapped to mine. She squeezed my fingers. It wasn’t strong, but it was there.

"I’ve got you," I said, my voice thick and rough. "You’re safe. Nobody is ever going to touch you again."

Behind me, Neve burst into quiet, trembling sobs. "Oh God... Lumi..."

Lumi’s eyes flicked past my shoulder toward Neve. For a second, a flash of recognition crossed her face, followed immediately by a subtle tightening in her brow.

She remembered. She remembered everything that happened.

Julian gently put his hands on Neve’s shoulders, slowly backing her toward the heavy wooden door.

"Let’s give them a minute," I heard him whisper softly. "Come on, Neve."

The door clicked shut, leaving just me and Lumi.

I pulled the heavy chair right up to the edge of the bed and sat down, never letting go of her good hand.

I brought her cold fingers up to my mouth and pressed a long kiss against her knuckles.

"Callum is in handcuffs," I told her softly, keeping my tone steady so she could process every word.

"He’s sitting in a police cell right now. And Theo is safe. He’s with Darren at the house. He’s holding his green dinosaur, waiting for you."

A single tear spilled out of her left eye, tracking slowly down her pale cheek and disappearing into the elastic band of her mask. Her chest heaved once, a silent, ragged sob catching in her throat.

"I know," I murmured, using my thumb to gently wipe the tear away. "I know you want to talk. I know you want to tell me what happened. But you don’t have to right now. You just rest. I’m going to figure out who went into that house, Lumi. I promise you."

She closed her eyes, her breathing slowing down as exhaustion dragged her back toward sleep.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out with my free hand. It was a text from Darren.

Forensics are at Lumi’s mother house, I needed to be there.

Went outside and asked Neve to stay with Lumi while I go there.

....

The forensics team spent six hours inside the abandoned house.

I stood on the cracked porch and watched them carry evidence bags out to a white van, one after another, each one meaning nothing.

Darren stood beside me with his arms crossed, not saying a word, because there was nothing left to say.

"Talk to me," I said finally.

"Prints on the pill bottle don’t match him," Darren said.

"Prints on the door handle don’t match him. There’s a partial on the windowsill they’re still running, but the lead tech already told me not to get my hopes up. Whoever was in that house wore gloves for everything that mattered."

"He was careful."

"He was careful," Darren repeated.

I turned and looked back through the open front door, at the water-stained wallpaper, at the chair still overturned in the front room where they’d found her. I could still see her there if I let myself. I didn’t let myself.

"What about the passport records," I said. "The flight logs."

"He flew in under his own name three days before it happened and he’s booked to fly out under his own name tomorrow night," Darren said.

"There’s nothing illegal about a man visiting a country he has every legal right to visit. And unless that partial print comes back a match, we have no physical evidence tying him to this house at all."

"He is responsible," I said. "I know it. You know it."

"I know it too," Darren said. "But a pack tribunal doesn’t reach a UK national with a clean passport and a lawyer already filed with the city court. If we touch him without proof, Ren, it’s not just optics. It’s a diplomatic mess that drags every pack on this coast into it."

I put my hand flat against the doorframe and I didn’t move it for a long time.

Callum left the country the next evening with Theo on his arm and a custody order and there wasn’t a single thing I could do to stop either of them from getting on that plane.

I told myself it was temporary. I told myself Theo would understand, someday, why I let it happen.

But the truth was simpler than any of it. I had to choose. And I chose Lumi.

....

The first two weeks she didn’t open her eyes at all again.

The doctors called it a partial emergence. They said the swelling in her brain had gone down enough that she was breathing on her own, that her vitals had stabilized, that this was progress.

I sat by her bed and watched her chest rise and fall and I didn’t feel a single thing that resembled hope.

By the end of the first month, her eyes were open sometimes. They didn’t track anything.

They didn’t find me. They just stared past my shoulder at the ceiling, glassy and unfocused, and then they’d close again like even that had cost her more than she had.

I moved her to a new apartment at six weeks, against three separate doctors’ recommendations, because I couldn’t stand watching her exist inside that sterile room one more day.

I brought in a private nurse who came twice a week to check on her, and I did the rest myself.

I learned how to lift her without hurting her. I learned the right angle to hold the spoon so the broth didn’t spill down her chin, and when it did anyway, I learned to wipe it away without letting her feel my hand shake.

I learned how to change the sheets under her without moving her more than necessary, how to bathe her with a cloth and a basin so she never had to be jostled into a tub.

How to dress her in soft clothes with wide necks and no buttons because her arms wouldn’t cooperate and I refused to fight her body for her.

Some nights I sat on the floor beside the bed with my back against the frame, just so I could feel the small shift of her weight if she moved.

Neve came every single day.

She didn’t ask permission and I didn’t offer it, and somewhere in the second week we stopped needing to talk about why she was there.

She sat with Lumi in the afternoons so I could sleep for an hour. She learned the same routines I had... how to brush the tangles out of Lumi’s hair without pulling, how to read to her from whatever book was closest even though there was no proof Lumi could hear a word of it again.

Julian never left either. He’d show up most evenings, drop a bag of groceries on the counter, and sit with Neve on the porch while I took my hour with Lumi’s hand in mine, saying nothing, just breathing next to her.

"You should sleep more," Neve told me one night, standing in the doorway of the bedroom with a mug of tea she’d made and I hadn’t asked for.

"I sleep enough."

"You sleep like a man keeping watch," she said. "Not like a man resting."

I didn’t argue with her because she wasn’t wrong.

.....

It was the second month, a Tuesday, gray light coming thin through the curtains, when Lumi’s hand moved on top of the blanket for the first time after months, on its own.

I was in the chair beside her, half-asleep, and the small motion of her fingers curling against the fabric snapped me fully awake before I even understood why.

I sat forward. Her eyes were open. Really open, for the first time...not glassy, not staring past me. Looking at me.

"Lumi," I breathed, my whole chest folding around her name. "Hey. Hey, I’m here."

Her mouth moved. Nothing came out but air.

"Don’t push," I said, even as my pulse slammed against my throat. "Take your time. I’m right here."

She tried again. Her jaw worked, her lips shaped around something, and what came out was a broken, airless sound that didn’t resemble a word at all.

"It’s okay," I said. "It’s okay, slow down."

She shook her head, just barely, a small frustrated motion, and tried a third time.

"...ad." I froze.

"Say that again," I whispered. "Say it again, baby, I’m listening."

Her chest rose with the effort of it. Her fingers dug weakly into the blanket like she was trying to physically drag the word out of her own throat.

"Da....d." It landed in the quiet room like something breaking.

I leaned in close, my hand closing gently around hers, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.

"Dad? Lumi...what happened to your dad?"

She didn’t say it again. She didn’t repeat the word like I expected her to. Instead her whole body went rigid under the blanket, her breath catching, her eyes locking onto mine with a kind of terror I hadn’t seen in her since the day she woke at that hospital.

Her free hand came up, trembling, and pressed flat against her own chest.

"Lumi," I said, slower now, something cold crawling up the back of my neck. "Are you telling me... " She held my gaze and didn’t look away.

God please, let me be wrong. Please let my thoughts be wrong.

"Wait," I said, and I heard my own voice crack down the middle. "Are you saying... your dad. Your dad was the one who did this to you."