Chapter 132: I’ve got you

The corridor smelled like antiseptic and cold metal, and underneath it, faintly, still his copper and adrenaline and the leather of the jacket she’d pressed her hands against on the runway.

Sienna could still feel the exact weight of him sagging into her arms if she let herself think about it, so she tried very hard not to.

She was pacing. She knew she was pacing six steps one way, turn, six steps back, but her legs seemed to belong to someone else entirely, moving on instructions her brain hadn’t consciously issued.

Somewhere behind a set of double doors at the end of the hall, machines were beeping in rhythms she understood better than she wanted to.

She knew what a flatline sounded like. She knew what a crashing heart rate sounded like, slowing down instead of speeding up.

Every time footsteps moved behind those doors, her whole body locked rigid, straining to hear which sound was coming next.

Please. Please, please, please.

She wasn’t even sure who she was begging. God, maybe. Fate, if Aria’s ridiculous, hopeful superstitions had ever meant anything at all.

Viktor himself, as if sheer force of wanting could reach through two sets of doors and remind his heart how to keep beating.

Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She pressed them flat against her stomach, then against her mouth, then let them drop uselessly back to her sides, because nothing helped, nothing made the trembling stop, nothing made the last image of him grey-lipped, blood soaking hot through her fingers, that small, broken attempt at a smile fade even slightly from behind her eyes.

Don’t cry. Please.

That was the last thing he’d said to her. Not I love you. Not stay with me. Just don’t cry. As if even bleeding out on a runway, his only real concern had been her.

She hated him a little for that. She hated herself more for how badly she wanted him to say it again.

Nurses moved past her in the corridor, quick and quiet, eyes down, giving her and the armed men flanking the hallway a wide, careful berth.

She heard the whispers anyway low, frightened murmurs trailing in her wake, did you see the blood, who is she, who did that to him, and none of it landed. None of it mattered. She barely registered the weight of the stares.

It wasn’t the first time Viktor had been shot since she’d known him she’d lost count of the number of times now, more than she cared to admit, including that reckless night at Lion’s party in Italy when he’d taken a graze to the side simply making sure she made it out unharmed.

Sienna had learned, in her own quiet way, to compartmentalize those moments, to treat them as simply another part of the world she’d married into.

This was different.

He hadn’t just been shot protecting her from a distance this time. He had turned his own body into the only thing standing between her and a bullet meant to end her life, and that single, deliberate choice unraveled something in her that no amount of medical knowledge could talk her back down from.

She knew, clinically, exactly how much blood a person could lose before their body simply gave up. She knew the color of skin that had lost too much of it.

And she had seen both, painted starkly across Viktor’s back in the dirt of that runway, more blood than she wanted to believe a person could survive losing.

She didn’t care about logic right now. She was terrified.

Marcus stood a short distance away, watching her pace the same six feet of hallway over and over, wringing her hands, jaw tight, tears slipping steadily down her face.

He didn’t know what to do with any of it, comfort wasn’t something Viktor had ever needed from him before, and touching Sienna, even in simple reassurance, wasn’t something he was foolish enough to attempt.

So instead he did the only useful thing he could think of. He made a call.

Aria was in a hospital bed, a few bruised ribs and a mild concussion from the crash keeping her tethered to observation, but the moment she heard Sienna needed her, she was already swinging her legs over the side of the bed, ignoring her parents’ immediate protests, ripping the monitor leads from her fingers before anyone could stop her.

"She needs me," Aria said flatly, already reaching for her shoes, brushing past every objection with the single-minded urgency of someone who had never once in her life let her best friend face something like this alone.

It took Marcus himself, arriving in person and escorting her through the tightly restricted wing where Viktor was being treated, a wing no one entered or left without explicit clearance, not today of all days.

Time did something strange after that. It didn’t pass so much as lurch, in broken, disjointed pieces. One second Sienna was staring at a scuff mark on the tile floor, memorizing every scratch in it as it mattered, and the next she was looking up to find the far doors swinging open, and Aria was there.

Aria, hair a mess, a thin hospital bracelet still clinging to her wrist, moving fast despite the careful way she was holding her own ribs, expression cracking the second their eyes met.

Sienna didn’t remember deciding to move. One moment there was distance between them, and the next there wasn’t, Aria’s arms wrapping tight around her, solid and real and warm in a way nothing else in this corridor had been.

"I’m here," Aria said into her hair, voice thick. "I’m here, girl. I’ve got you."

And that was when the sound finally came out of her the sob she’d been holding rigid in her chest since the runway, tearing loose all at once, her knees buckling slightly until Aria’s grip was the only thing keeping her upright, the two of them swaying together in the middle of a hallway that still smelled like blood and antiseptic and fear, while somewhere behind those doors, a man who had thrown himself in front of a bullet for her fought to keep his heart beating.

That was when the sound reached them before either of them fully understood what it meant.