His head fit against my chest. His bandaged face pressed into my shoulder. I wrapped my arm around him, holding him as gently as I could, and finally let myself breathe.
He was alive. Damaged, hurt, missing an eye because of me, but alive.
My hand moved to his hair, fingers threading through the dark strands. They were clean. Someone had washed the blood out while I'd been downstairs spiraling. Florica, probably. Or one of her daughters.
“I heard what you said," I whispered into his hair. "In Alaska, when you thought you were dying. I heard you and I wanted you to know…" My throat was suddenly too tight and I had to pause to swallow. “I love you too, Rafael.”
Outside, the rain fell. Inside, Rafael's breathing was warm against my chest, steady and real. I closed my eyes and let the exhaustion take me.
For the firsttime in two days, I slept.
The first thing Iregistered was pain.
It was duller than I expected, throbbing hot and steady behind a wall of gauze bandages. The left side of my face was covered with them.
I tried to open my eyes, but only one responded. That tracked. The other side of my face was covered in bandages, after all.
I was in some sort of a residential bedroom with a popcorn textured ceiling. The air smelled like antiseptic and wood smoke.
Am I still in Alaska?The last thing I remembered was shooting at Constantine's eagle and it diving for my face.
I tried to speak, but my throat was dry, so I wound up turning my head. Lorenzo sat in a worn armchair beside me, head back, mouth open, snoring gently. I lifted my hand, or tried to. The damn thing felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. Must've been whatever pain meds they had me on.
"Lorenzo?" His name came out as a hoarse whisper.
Lorenzo jerked awake suddenly. For a second his eyes were unfocused, wild, before they locked on my face. "Rafael! You're awake!"
He scrambled out of the chair and reached to take my hand.
"Where are we?" I asked. "How long was I out?" Neither was the real question I wanted to ask, but whether I still had a left eye could wait.
"Seattle. Diego's aunt Florica has a safe house here. Andrei's been treating you. It's been three days. I wasn't…" He paused and swallowed. "I wasn't sure you were going to make it."
"How bad is it?"
Lorenzo's jaw tightened. "You're alive. That's what matters."
"Lorenzo."
"You lost a lot of blood. Andrei had to give you transfusions. But you're stable now, and the infection risk is minimal if we keep the wound clean—"
"Stop." I squeezed his hand, or tried to. My grip was pathetically weak. "How bad is the eye?"
He squirmed and looked away.
"Tell me," I said. "Don't try to soften it."
Lorenzo exhaled slowly. "Augustus's talon caught you across the left side of your face. It tore through the eyelid and destroyed the eye itself. Andrei did what he could, but there was too much damage to the socket and the surrounding tissue. He had to remove what was left."
I stared at him and left the words hanging between us. Gone. My eye was completely gone.
I waited for the despair to hit, the rage or the grief or whatever I was supposed to experience when learning I'd lost a piece of myself. Instead, I just lay there, breathing through the dull throb in my skull, and thought about the snow.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Well," I said, "it could've been worse."
Lorenzo blinked. "What?"
"I'm alive. You're alive. The kids are safe, right?"
