The only one that mattered.
“Let’s talk over here.” She touched my arm and started leading me to a private room off the main waiting room.
I froze and shook my head. “No. I… I can’t.”
I knew what it meant when a doctor took you to a private room. Knew because that was where they’d taken me when my parents had been killed, when Bram had been fighting for his life.
“They’re alive,” she said gently, like she knew what I was thinking. “But there’s a lot to tell you. It’ll be better if we can talk in private.”
Bram took my hand. “It’s okay, Cass. I’ve got you.”
I followed Doctor Sterling into the private room. I could tell someone had tried to make it nice — plastic plants and comfortable chairs and serene watercolors on the wall — but I wasn’t fooled.
This was a place where people got bad news, maybe the worst news of their lives.
And now I was here, waiting to be told what had happened to the Hawks when they’d sacrificed themselves for me.
“Please,” Doctor Sterling said, “have a seat.”
I hesitated, afraid to make it real by sitting. Afraid to hear what she had to say next even though it felt like my whole life hinged on her words.
But then she sat and I found myself sitting too, like I was hypnotized, following an unseen script as if in a trance.
Bram and Maeve took the chairs on either side of me and Doctor Sterling leaned forward, like we were old friends about to exchange some gossip.
“Your friend Vigo got very lucky,” she said. “He’s pretty beat up, but he’s conscious and causing trouble.”
I choked on a sob mingled with laughter.
“He’s got some lacerations and quite a few stitches, some of which he wanted to ‘try doing’ himself, plus a couple of cracked ribs and some bruising, but the CT scan doesn’t show any internal bleeding. He also has some hearing loss in one ear. That may or may not be temporary.”
I exhaled slowly, trying to calm my racing heart, allowing myself a moment of relief.
Vigo was going to be okay.
“What about Jagger and Hawk?” I asked.
“Jagger has multiple shrapnel wounds — one of which is on his back and pretty deep — and a moderate burn on one arm. He also has a concussion, but he’s coherent, and his scan didn’t reveal any permanent damage.”
“Is he awake?”
“He’s in and out,” she said. “We have to be careful about pain management with a concussion, but Jagger’s case warrants it.He was in a great deal of pain from the deep laceration on his back, and burns are always very painful.”
I nodded, processing the information, imagining my men somewhere in the hospital.
Alive.
“And… Hawk?” I was almost afraid to say his name, afraid to hear what Doctor Sterling would say about him.
I knew how it worked, knew that the worst news was usually saved for last. That was how it had been with my parents and Bram: the doctor— accompanied by a social worker because of my age — had told me Bram was alive before delivering the news about my parents.
Doctor Sterling’s green eyes were filled with a sympathy I wanted to reject.
Accepting the sympathy I saw there meant accepting that something bad — something really bad — had happened to Hawk.
“Hawk has the same kinds of lacerations suffered by Vigo and Jagger. We see that a lot with this kind of trauma. Shrapnel travels at a high velocity with an explosion. Hawk also has a second-degree burn on his right side, but the most serious of his injures is a laceration to his liver.”
“His liver?” My head was swimming as I tried to piece together the injuries sustained by the Hawks, as I tried to connect them to the grenade that had been thrown at us at the paper mill.
