I lean closer.
"...stubborn," he breathes. Barely sound. Just shape.
A laugh cracks out of me that sounds nothing like a laugh. "Yes. The most stubborn person you've ever met. And you're going to be so annoyed about it for so long. Years, Axel.Years.So you need to stay."
His eyes close.
"No—" I grab his hand, squeeze hard. "No, no, no, open your eyes. Open your eyes right now.Axel."
He doesn't open them.
His chest is still moving. Shallow. Steady. Still moving.
But his eyes are closed and his hand is heavy in mine and I am screaming his name and I don't know when I started screaming it, just that I can't stop, and Viktor has both hands pressed to Axel's side and is talking fast and low into the radio, and somewhere beyond the burning vehicles the gunfire has gone fully silent, and none of it matters.
None of it exists.
There is only his face. The slow, terrible rise and fall of his chest. The blood on my hands, arms, and soaking through the knees of my trousers, drying cold on my cheeks where I've been pressing my hands to my face.
Please,I think, at nothing, at everything, at whoever might be listening in whatever darkness exists beyond the smoke and the dying flames.Please. Please. Please.
I count his breaths.
I count every single one.
31
AXEL
The first thing I'm aware of is the smell.
Clean. Antiseptic. The particular sterile nothing of a medical room that I've woken up in enough times to recognize before I open my eyes.
The second thing is the pain.
It lives in my left side, deep and hot and specific, the kind that tells you exactly where you got hit and exactly how badly before you've done a single thing to aggravate it. I breathe through it slowly, taking inventory. Hands. Feet. The ceiling comes into focus above me, white and flat and unfamiliar.
I turn my head.
Aurora is asleep in the chair beside the bed, folded into it sideways with her knees pulled to her chest, one hand tucked under her cheek. She's still in the clothes from last night — the cream sweater, dark trousers — and there are rust-colored stains on her knees that take me a moment to identify.
My blood.
She fell asleep in a chair covered in my blood rather than leave the room.
Something moves through my chest that has nothing to do with the wound.
I watch her breathe. The small rise and fall of her. The way her lashes rest against her cheek, the furrow between her brows that's there even in sleep, like some part of her is still braced for something. She looks exhausted in the specific way of someone who fought very hard to stay awake and lost the battle only recently.
I reach out.
My arm is heavier than it should be, the IV line tugging at the back of my hand, but I get there — fingertips touching her knee, light as I can make it.
Her eyes open immediately.
She looks at my hand on her knee. Then at my face.
"Hi," she says. Her voice is wrecked, scraped raw.
