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This wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was only supposed to save my life that one final time before the cops hauled Seth away, leaving us with the freedom to finally live our lives together in peace. It wasn’t meant to end like this. He wasn’t supposed to die. I had saved him. After he had saved my life three times, I had finally saved his, and he wasn’t supposed to fucking die.
I sharply inhaled through my nose, still halfway plugged from the bouts of tears I’d shed earlier, and then I covered my eyes with my hand and cried some more.
Harry laid his big, comforting palm against my leg. “I know, honey,” he said, his voice gravelly and holding his own deep sorrow.
“I-I can’t live without him.” There was no air to be found in this room, and I gulped on nothing, finding it hard to breathe. “I can’t—I can’t do this …”
He said nothing. He only nodded with tearful understanding and left that hand on my thigh.
My parents arrived a few minutes later,both of themrushing into the waiting room and bringing a new wave of tears to my eyes.
“Oh, Rain. Oh God, sweetheart.”
Mom rushed to me first while Dad shook Harry’s hand, then Patrick’s, all of them making quick introductions.
“Are you hurt?” Mom held my face in her hands, looking me over as I tried to shake my head.
“I’m fine,” I told her, but I wasn’t, was I?
Maybe I hadn’t been physically hurt—dear God, imagine what would’ve happened had Soldier not been there—but emotionally? Mentally? It was a wonder I could hold myself upright. Considering all I’d been through, after all those years … it was amiracleI could function at all.
“After everything that has happened, honey”—Mom’s eyes met mine, her irises blurred by her own tears—“nobody would blame you if you fell apart. You’reallowedtonot be okay.”
The strained splintering of her voice settled in my throat, forming a hard, sticky ball of emotion that threatened to choke me to death.
There was always someone who needed me to keep it together.
So, I cleared my throat, ignored the pain searing through my heart, and turned from her pain-stricken eyes. “I'll be fine,” I told her while knowing damn well that, as soon as I got in the shower, I'd allow myselfthe tenminutes to let my pieces fall and scatter before I needed to get up and put them back together again.
It was what I did.
It was what I'd always done.
Noah stirred against my shoulder, nuzzling against me the way he'd done as a baby, before lifting his head abruptly and surveying the room through eyes that were immediately wide and free of lingering sleep.
“Where's Soldier?”
This poor boy. The things he'd witnessed. The things he'd been exposed to when I tried so hard to protect him, to do the right thing. Now, I just felt like I had failed.
God, I had failed everyone I loved.
With a hard swallow against that sticky ball, now back with a vengeance, I said, “Baby, he's still in sur—”
Through the corner of my eye, I watched a man in scrubs enter the waiting area. Harry was the first to spring to his feet, and I followed, a sickening pang of panic striking my stomach with every shuddering beat of my heart.
Noah was at my side, my parents and Patrick standing close by, as I asked, “How is he?”
The doctor cast his gaze from one pair of eyes to another, addressing us all with a look of somber regret that obliterated my soul a little more with every passing second.
And withevery one, somehow knowing what he was about to say, I thought about those last moments I’d had with Soldier.
Those minutes that I knew would surely haunt my dreams and everything in between for years tocome—hell, maybe even forever.The secondsbefore the paramedics had come and brought him back and taken him away. The ones in which I'd held his hand, aware of the blood leaving his body and pooling around us both. Swallowing us into a black hole, where maybe we could both live together—one in which no harm could reach us, no pain or suffering. And I’d told him I loved him. I’d told him over andover and over againbecause if that was the last thing he ever got to hear, he deserved to know that. As hated as he might've been to some, he was, at the end of it all, loved.
He would always be loved.
My resolve to keep it together was already crumbling by the time the doctor brought his eyes back to mine. My knees locked, my hands holding tight to Harry and Noah.
“How is he?” I repeated, wishing this man would just get on with it and tell us what we already knew.
