Page 145 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“Don't,” she cuts me off. “Don't defend him, Tor. You almost died. You were sitting in a burning building ready to give up, and when you got here, when you needed him, where the fuck was he? Torturing someone. Because that's what matters to him. Violence. Revenge. Not you.”

“That's not fair⁠—”

“Isn't it?” Harper challenges. “He saved you. Great. He did the bare minimum of being a decent human being. But the second you were safe? The second you were in that ambulance? He disappeared. And now he's choosing to carve someone up instead of being here.”

Tears burn behind my eyes because part of me knows she's right. Everything she says is true but I keep trying to defend him and that needs to stop.

“He was here earlier,” I say weakly. “You said⁠—”

“For an hour,” Harper interrupts. “While you were unconscious. When you couldn't see him or talk to him or ask him why he keeps doing this to you. And then Cas showed up and they left together. They left you here alone.”

“I'm not alone,” I point out. “You're here.”

“Because I actually give a shit about you,” Harper snaps. “Not because I'm obsessed with my revenge fantasy.”

Before I can respond, the door opens and a nurse enters.

“You're awake and alert,” she says with a warm smile. “That's excellent progress. How are you feeling?”

“Like I got hit by a truck,” I admit.

“That's to be expected,” she says, checking the monitors. “You had significant smoke inhalation. Your oxygen levels were critically low when you arrived. You've been drifting in and out of consciousness for the past six hours, but your vitals are stabilizing now,” she says as she adjusts my IV.

“The baby?” I ask.

“Heartbeat is strong and steady,” she confirms. “We'll continue monitoring, but right now everything looks good. You're very lucky.”

Lucky.

I almost laugh.

Nothing about this is lucky.

“We'd like to keep you for observation for at least twenty-four hours,” the nurse continues. “Make sure there are no complications from the smoke inhalation. And we'll do an ultrasound in the morning to check on the baby more thoroughly.”

“Okay,” I agree.

She finishes checking my vitals and leaves.

Harper and I sit in uncomfortable silence.

Not the comfortable kind. The kind with too much in it.

Harper is sitting in the chair beside my bed and I am staring at the ceiling and we have been doing a lot of talking in the past hour and there is something we haven't talked about and I can feel it the way you feel weather coming, not yet arrived but present, pressure building.

I'm the one who says it.

“You've never told me about your father.”

Harper goes very still. Just for a second. Then she reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear with the particular deliberateness of someone deciding something.

“No,” she agrees. “I haven't.”

I don't push. I've learned with Harper that pushing is exactly the wrong instinct. She is not a woman who responds to pressure, she responds to space. So I look back at the ceiling and I wait.

She speaks after about thirty seconds.

“My father wasn't cartel,” she says. “Not Cosa Nostra. Nothing that organized. More the kind of man who knew people. The kind other men called when things needed to disappear.” A pause. “Favors and debts and the particular currency of people who operate in the space between legal and not.”