“Evie.”
I grab her wrist with my good hand. My grip is weak, but desperation does not need muscle. “He will never come back from this right if he thinks the only way to protect me is to become the monster everyone keeps naming. He’ll survive, maybe. But he won’t come back as Kauss. Not all the way.”
Mira’s face shifts.
She knows.
Of course she knows. She has watched enough wounded people choose the injury they understand over the healing that terrifies them.
“I heard him,” I whisper. “I heard enough. He wanted to say yes. He loves me. And now he’s walking back into war because he thinks that’s the only language the world respects. I can’t let the last thing between us be me telling him to leave and him thinking I only love the peaceful parts.”
Nara closes her eyes. “Damn it.”
“That sounds like medical approval.”
“It sounds like I am about to become criminally liable.”
“I won’t tell.”
“You are literally on monitors.”
“We’ll un-monitor me.”
“That is not a verb.”
“It is now.”
The next ten minutes are a miracle of medical fury. Nara does not check me out. Absolutely not, she informs me. She also does not physically stop me when I insist on sitting up, curse in three languages, and nearly throw up from pain. She disconnects only what can be disconnected without killing me, binds my ribs tighter, injects something cold and bright into my IV port thatmakes the room sharpen at the edges, and replaces the hospital gown with loose clothes Darlene apparently brought in a bag.
Of course Darlene brought clothes.
Darlene knew.
Darlene always knows.
When I swing my legs over the side of the bed, my vision goes black at the edges.
Nara catches me. “You faint, I drag you back into that bed and tell Kauss you called him emotionally constipated in your sleep.”
“I probably did.”
“You did.”
“Good.”
She helps me into a coat that smells faintly like bakery smoke and Darlene’s cigarettes. My right arm remains immobilized beneath it, shoulder burning with each breath. The plasma pistol is gone, naturally. Police probably have it. Or Darlene. Honestly, fifty-fifty.
Nara presses a compact emergency injector into my palm. “Pain and shock support. Only if you start dropping.”
“Dropping?”
“Turning gray, slurring, seeing dead relatives, making worse decisions than this one.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
The privacy curtain jerks open.
Darlene stands there with wet hair, a bruised shoulder, and murder in both eyes. “I do.”
