Page 5 of What We Burn

Micah glances at the orange chair in the corner where Eli collapsed. Before this, the last time I saw him, I’d broken into his house and punched him in the gut, telling him he didn’t get to take a verbal knife to Fury and call it protection—that he either loved her with his whole damn heart or he disappeared for good. I’d meant every word. Stood over him while he wheezed and warned him it didn’t get to happen twice.

Then he’d vanished, the way I’d practically dared him to. None of us heard a thing for four days. And the next time I laid eyes on my oldest friend, he was on his knees in the mulch with her blood on his hands, breathing for her, screaming for help.

So. He’d made his choice.

Just not the one I’d braced for.

Micah crosses to him and sets a coffee on the nearest surface. Eli stays slumped over. His blond hair is rumpled, and the button-up shirt and jeans he’s wearing are still covered with Fury’s blood, now dry and crusted across his chest. He’s finally sleeping, though God knows how in that chair with all the fucking noise around us.

“Milo?” I ask as Micah makes his way back to me.

“Vending machine. I think he might be trying to eat his feelings.”

I nod.

Micah sits on the other side of the bed and picks up Fury’s other hand.

“Holden called,” he says quietly. “He’s on his way.”

I grunt.

He wasn’t there when it happened, when some fucker looped a rope around our woman’s neck and hitched her up. But the scanner picked up the call for the apartment.

Female victim, strangulation.

He’d answered, driving through the streets while the woman he loves bled into the mulch and fought for her breath behind her building.

He’s been to the hospital and gone multiple times, doing what he can to keep this whole situation locked down. Trying to protect us and Fury when everything is so fucking out of control.

The green line goes up. Down. Up again.

How the fuck did we get here? One job. A rapist we planned to hang from a jetty. That was the whole of it, until a woman we didn’t plan for stole my knife and became the center of all five of us. The sun we all fucking revolve around.

Now she’s hooked up to machines that breathe for her because somebody knows what she did under that jetty—and wants her to die the way we kill.

Her thumb shifts against the back of my hand.

I count her breaths.

Holden arrives a little after noon.

The door opens without a knock and he enters. Still in his work clothes, badge clipped, jacket on. He looks like shit—sunken eyes, two-day stubble. I’ll bet he hasn’t slept, hasn’t eaten, and is holding himself together with pure stubbornness.

Somehow, most of the nurses have crushes on him.

“Wildcat,” Holden whispers, stopping at the foot of Fury’s bed without sparing a glance at any of us.

He only has eyes for her.

I watch him take her in. The tube down her throat. The bandage around her neck under the tube. The IV in the back of her hand. The broken fingernails where she clawed at the rope. The color of her face, which is somewhere between paper and ash. The way her hair is fanned out on the pillow because Milo couldn’t help himself and combed it for her.

Holden’s hands flex once at his sides.

“Update?” He finally moves his eyes to us. “What’s the status?”

Micah sighs. “Scans show tracheal damage, no fracture—the cartilage held.” His thumb is moving against the back of Fury’s hand while he talks. “She’s stable. Critical, but stable. The swelling’s the variable. If it goes down in the next forty-eight hours, they pull the tube and she breathes on her own. If it doesn’t, they start talking tracheostomy.”

Holden listens without moving.