Chapter two: I'll plan the funeral

Serena 

“Mrs. Warrick,” a doctor called, stepping into the room.

“Why am I alive?” I asked, staring emptily at the ceiling fan turning like a slow, indifferent clock.

“You were—” the doctor began, but I cut him off.

“You should have let me die!” I screamed, my voice tearing through the quiet. “Should have fuckin’ let me die. Why did you save me? I don’t want to live anymore. I’ve got nothing to live for!” I ripped at the IV in my arm, the plastic shrieking as it came free. Pain flared and I welcomed it, anything that made me feel anything but the hollow.

“Serena!” A voice rolled through me, dark and close enough to stir my bones. It made me still.

“Lucas,” I breathed, because the name was the only anchor left that meant anything.

He moved to the bedside as if he belonged there. Tears tracked down my face without permission; my cheeks were wet and hot and the room smelled of antiseptic and regret.

“You’ll live, Serena,” he said, quietly, like it was a fact. “I’ll make sure of it.”

I shook my head, the motion almost violent. The edges of the bed blurred. I could hear the machines—soft beeps filling the hollow. “I don’t want to live,” I said. “I—my son, Liam… he’s gone.” Saying it out loud punched a fresh hole through me. The words tasted like glass.

The doctor spoke then, but not in a voice that went straight to my heart. It was clipped, practical. “She’s lost a lot of blood,” he said. “We transfused earlier, but she’s still unstable. We need another match—fast.”

The words didn’t sink in because the only thing that mattered was the empty space where Liam should be. I pictured his small hand turning the toy car in sleep, his breath soft against my shoulder. The memory was a needle.

Lucas didn’t leave a beat. He stepped closer until his sleeve brushed my hand. Up close he smelled like rain and something warm—leather, smoke, something that made my belly pucker with a memory I couldn’t name. His jaw was tight. He looked like a man who had not slept in days.

“Can you—can you donate?” the doctor asked, turning to him.

Lucas’s voice was steady. “I have the same blood type. I can give.” There was no question in it, no second-guessing. He looked past the doctor at me—like I was both the wound and the thing worth fighting for.

A nurse frowned. “Sir, it’s risky—”

“Do it,” Lucas said. “Do whatever you have to. Take it.”

They moved fast after that, but not so fast that I didn’t notice the small things: his fingers brushing mine when they handed me a cup of water, the way he kept glancing at the monitors as if he could hold them steady with his look. They prepped him, wrapped his arm, found a vein that was willing, and the first warm thread of his blood slid into me like a promise.

It was intimate, ugly and miraculous all at once. I clung to his hand because my body wanted something to tether it to, and the world was too much like fog otherwise. His fingers tightened around mine and for a moment I was not entirely alone.

“You don’t have to do this,” I whispered, though the words felt useless.

Lucas leaned close, and his voice was rough. “I don’t have to do a lot of things. But I’m doing this.” He paused, as if measuring how much to hold back. “You’re not going to be alone.”

The transfusion warmed me. It was a small thing in a room full of devastation, but I felt it, like a tiny ember in a winter that had swallowed the sun. The monitors quieted just enough for me to breathe without thinking I might never breathe again.

They said we were lucky—Lucas’s type was rare in the city, but he matched. He had walked in like a ghost and given me part of himself. There was a crooked, impossible sound inside me that wanted to laugh at the absurdity: saved by the man who carried my husband’s name and had been painted as the villain of every Warrick dinner table. Life is stupid like that.

But luck is a fragile thing. The doctor’s eyes never stopped scanning the numbers. “She’ll need more,” he said. “If the bleeding doesn’t stop, there’s a chance—”

I didn’t let him finish because I knew what he would say. Endings came in measured tones and clipped medical phrases. They drew curtains where life used to be. I would not let them measure this one for me.

Lucas squeezed my hand. “We’ll get more,” he said. “We’ll find donors. I’ll call everyone.”

There was something desperate in the way he said it, not the clean, cold scheming people attributed to the Warrick name, but a raw, human plea. It sounded less like a plan and more like a prayer. He looked like a man who had already decided something irreversible.

“Why?” I asked, though the question was too small and too enormous at once. Why would he risk himself for me? For someone who had nothing left to offer? For a woman who was the product of other people’s mistakes?

His eyes were storm-gray, and he did not try to make it gentle. “Because I couldn’t stand you dying while he—” He swallowed. “While he sat somewhere else. Because someone needs to be here who isn’t him.”

The shame of that sentence burned. For a heartbeat, I thought of Ethan—his polite distances, his work calls, his laugh with Mia. I thought of the phrase he’d said once, sharp and clean: You need to remember your place. The memory tasted like bile now.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said, low.

Lucas’s jaw worked. “Maybe I don’t owe you anything. Maybe I owe my own conscience.” He looked back at me. “Or maybe—” He stopped himself, the rest of the sentence hanging like a shard. “Maybe I can’t watch you be discarded and stand still.”

The room had an edge now, sharp and bright. I wanted to tell him everything—how they’d called me orphan behind their hands, how Elena’s eyes always slid past me like I was dust, how Mia had learned to smile and slice at the same time. I wanted to tell him that Ethan’s absence had been a slow poison before it became a lethal one.

Instead I let the tears come and let his fingers hold mine. The transfusion warmed me, steadying the tremor in my limbs. For a few small minutes, pain was manageable. Hope felt ridiculous and obscene and necessary all at once.

But the bleeding didn’t stop easily. The doctor’s face drew thin, and the nurses moved with that quiet urgency that makes everything feel both immediate and small. They called the blood bank again, and they called people with my father’s number on file, and they called numbers that had no business being called. Every ring of a phone felt like a tiny drumbeat in a war.

Lucas never left. He sat in a chair pulled too close to my bed and colored the stale room with his presence. He told jokes that were flat and clumsy, things he’d never have said at a gala, and when I winced he brushed my hair back with a tenderness that made my chest crack.

At one point a nurse came in and shook her head before speaking. “We can’t find another unit immediately,” she said softly. “The bank’s being searched, but coordinates are slow. If she loses more—”

Her voice tapered and I understood without being told. The monitor’s steady beat accelerated.

Lucas’s hands were suddenly on me, palms steady at my elbows. “Take my blood,” he said, harder this time. “Drain everything out if you have to. Do whatever they need.”

His face was close now, and I could see the lines etched by too many fights, by too many sleepless nights. He looked less like the monster the world had painted and more like someone who’d been living with a blade for a long time and decided to put it down for once.

Something small and fierce flared in me then—an ugly urge to yank him away and tell him he didn’t have to be a martyr. But there was also gratitude and something that felt dangerously like relief. How could I refuse? How could I ask a man to risk himself for me when I had been given so little by everyone else?

“Do it,” I whispered, the command slipping from my lips like a surrender and a plea.

They started again—more prep, more needles, a soft rustle of paper and plastic, hands that moved in practiced movements to stave off something final. The world narrowed until there was only the pump’s soft thrum and Lucas’s breath against my skin and the feel of his fingers holding mine like an anchor.

The room tilted, colors blurring to watercolor streaks. The beeping grew thinner, as if someone were turning the volume down on life itself. I could feel the warmth in me.

“Don’t let him win,” Lucas said, his voice small and absolute. “Not this.”