Chapter 130: We Are The Crazy People

Maria’s jaw dropped. Nova caught her arm before a full-blown ass-kicking followed.

"Thank you. We’ll go through the proper channels," Nova managed, steering Maria away.

"She snorted at my holo-band, Nova. My encrypted, biometric—"

Nova held up a finger. Maria stopped. Her mouth closed but her eyes were filing a grievance. Nova watched the desk. The woman was checking the time. End of shift.

Maria followed her gaze. Then got it. "Oh, you’re devious."

"I want to see my mate and this receptionist can suck a dick," Nova replied.

Maria looked at Nova the way a coach looks at a rookie who just threw a perfect spiral. Pride. Wonder. A little bit of fear.

"I like this feisty Nova. Derek will too. Bring it to the bedroom."

Nova’s face flushed.

The woman disappeared through a door behind the desk.

"Go," Maria whispered, apparently the commanding officer of the mission now.

They bolted to the desk.

Maria leaned over the counter, eyes scanning the screen the way a raccoon opens a trashcan.

"Room two fourteen," Maria said, already straightening. "Horrible security. A crazy person could do that."

"We are the crazy people, Maria."

"Correct. And we did it beautifully."

"We did," Nova agreed, as they pushed through the double doors into a hospital they were breaking and entering for like they had been criminals together in a past life.

Maria was full-on holy-shit-we’re-actually-doing-this grinning.

It was hospital quiet. The kind that makes your shoes sound like they’re ratting you out and your breathing sound like a crime. Nova could feel every tile underfoot judging the fuck out of them for being there.

Room numbers passed in sequence. 210. 211. 212. 213.

Steps matched. Panic matched. Maria was gasping like she’d sprinted through a war zone and lost.

The door was closed. Maria reached for the handle and looked at Nova.

Nova’s throat locked. Every muscle in her body clenched at once, bracing for something she couldn’t name. She didn’t know what he looked like. Didn’t know if he was conscious. Didn’t know if he would want her there. She was overthinking this.

She took a breath and gave Maria a nod.

Maria turned the handle.

The door opened.

The room was small and white and lit by a single overhead panel that cast everything in clinical blue. A vitals array floated above the bed, translucent holo-panels cycling through heart rate, oxygen saturation, and neural activity in slow, rhythmic pulses that were too steady and too mechanical for a man whose heartbeat she had memorized with her cheek on his chest.

Derek was in the bed. Eyes closed. Breathing through an oxygen regulator fitted over his nose and mouth, the faint hiss of pressurized air the only sound besides the monitors.

His torso was wrapped in medgel compression wraps, the semi-translucent material pulsing faintly with each cycle as the regenerative compound worked beneath the surface, the burns hidden underneath.

He was completely still. The kind of still that is the opposite of everything Derek Thunderfang is. The man who tossed her in the air. The man who narrated his own heroics. The man who kissed her mid-sentence.

That man was lying in a hospital bed and his eyes were closed and they had been closed when she arrived and they weren’t opening.

The sound that came out of Nova was not voluntary. It started in her chest and climbed through her throat and exited her mouth as something that was too quiet to be a scream and too broken to be a word and it contained everything she had been holding since his eyes rolled back in the courtyard.

She crossed the room. Her hand found his bandaged one on the bed, gently wrapping around his fingers.

"He was awake," she sobbed, tears already falling. "In the courtyard. I made eye contact with him."

"I know, Nova. I saw him get up trying to get to you," Maria agreed.

"How did this happen?"

The monitors answered with another beep. Regular. Rhythmic. Indifferent.

She looked at his face. The face that had grinned at her from below when he tossed her in the air. The face that had been inches from hers in a bathtub when he told her she was beautiful. The face that had gone wolf-gold and terrified when she walked through his brother’s Alpha commands with a bloody nose.

She had only known him for a week and she was already so fond of him.

Her shoulders shook once. "He came into that fire to find me. Didn’t he?"

Maria didn’t answer right away. "Yes. And he’d do it again in a heartbeat."

His fingers didn’t move. His eyes didn’t open. The man who always had a line for everything, who had never once failed to deliver a response, who had narrated his own heroics mid-sprint and talked shit during sword fights and announced his feelings at volumes that made furniture vibrate, was lying in a hospital bed saying nothing and the nothing was the loudest thing Nova had ever heard.

"It’s all my fault, Maria."

Nova pressed her forehead against his hand and cried. Properly. Every tear she had swallowed and redirected and filed for later landed on his knuckles in a rush that had been waiting for the right surface to fall on and his hand was the right surface because his hand was always the right surface.

Maria’s arms came around her from behind. The hug was tight and silent and carried the weight of a woman who understood that some moments didn’t need words and the absence of them was its own kind of comfort.

Time did what time does when someone is breaking. It disappeared. Nova cried until her ribs ached. Until the tears stopped being about guilt and became about exhaustion and then became about nothing at all, which was somehow worse.

When she finally lifted her head, her eyes were swollen and her throat was raw and the light in the room had shifted.

"Nova." Maria’s voice was soft. Careful. The voice she used when the motormouth was off and the friend was on. "How did you end up in that room?"

Nova wiped her face with the back of her hand. Looked at Derek’s closed eyes. Looked at Maria.

"It’s a bit of a story and it sounds insane," she hiccuped.

"On brand for you." Maria gave her hand a squeeze. "Let’s hear it."