045— HE RAN.

                  ~SLOANE~

I lay in the dark after the bonfire and stared at the ceiling and thought about the way he'd looked at me from across the fire.

No emotion.

Not the almost-smile. Not the silver threading into his eyes when something was happening underneath the control. Just even and nothing, the way he looked at rooms before he decided whether they were threats or not.

He had called everything nothing.

Standing in my doorway with that even voice. 

‘None of anything happened, I apologize for the inconveniences’, and walked out and I had stood there wanting him to stop, wanting to say his name, wanting to take back the word I'd used because the look on his face when I said it had done something to my chest that I was still feeling three hours later.

‘Molest.’

I closed my eyes.

I hadn't meant it the way it landed. 

I'd been scared and furious and the word had come out before I could pick a better one and I had watched it hit him and watched him go somewhere behind his eyes that I couldn't follow and then watched him walk away.

‘None of anything happened.’

I pressed my face into the pillow.

His voice when he'd said it had been perfectly level. That was the thing. Not cold, not the armor he wore for the world. Something flatter than that. Something that sounded like a door being closed very quietly by someone who had decided to stop knocking.

I couldn't sleep.

I tried for two hours and got approximately nowhere and eventually lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and thought about ‘black’ said across a fire. About his nod.

I fell asleep sometime around 3am.

                      …

The dream was the living room again.

The carpet. The dark spreading out from my father like it had somewhere to be. My mother at the stairs. Elijah in the hall.

All that blood, so much blood, and me on my knees in the middle of it with my hands pressing against wounds that had already finished bleeding and my voice saying ‘wake up’ on a loop that everyone could hear.

I woke up gasping and sat straight up.

The room was wrong — not my room, not the mansion, the mountain building, the retreat, the unfamiliar window, and I pressed both hands to my face and breathed and waited for my heart to slow.

It didn't slow.

Something was wrong with my chest.

Not the dream. Something physical. A tightening that started low and spread upward and then the cough came and I coughed once, twice, harder.

It wasn't stopping, my body was convulsing with it, both hands over my mouth, and I couldn't get ahead of it, couldn't find the gap between spasms to pull in a proper breath…

I looked at my hands.

Dark blood. More than last time. So much more. Clots of it on my palm and dripping between my fingers and still coming, each cough bringing more, and I was on my feet somehow trying to get to the door and my legs weren't cooperating, the room tilting, the floor closer than it should be.

I tried to call out.

Nothing came.

Just the cough. Just the blood. Just the floor coming up to meet me as I grabbed the wall and missed and went down on my knees.

The blood was dripping onto the wood and I pressed my lips together and tried again—

Nothing.

I looked at the door.

Five feet away. Maybe six. And I had nothing left, my arms were shaking just holding me up from the floor and there was so much blood, there was so much—

‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘This is actually it.’

The thought arrived without drama. Without the panic I would have expected. Just… clarity. I was on the floor of a mountain building with blood coming from my mouth and I hadn't gotten to Crew and I never told Anya the truth and I never—

K-Kai.

I closed my eyes.

Laughter in the corridor.

Elena's high voice. Saying something to Niko about breakfast, about… I couldn't hear it properly, the ringing in my ears was too loud, but it was her voice and it was right outside the door and I pushed every remaining thing I had toward it.

‘Please. Please come in. Please just—’

The door opened.

"Niko has been telling me about this place he found—" Elena's voice, laughing, and then the sound of her phone hitting the floor and then nothing and then…

"NIKO." Elena's voice broke completely. "NIKO CALL SOMEONE RIGHT NOW CALL—"

I tried to smile at her.

Coughed instead.

The last thing I saw was her face. White, absolutely white, hands on my shoulders, her mouth moving in words, the ringing was swallowing, and then Niko in the doorway going completely still and Elena screaming at him to move and him running.

Then darkness.

                  …

Light.

Something was in my wrist — I looked at it. A drip. Hospital white walls and the smell of antiseptic and a hand holding mine so tightly I felt the bones shift.

Elena.

She was in the chair beside my bed with her head down and her shoulders going and the hand around mine shaking badly.

"Hey," I said. My voice came out wrecked.

Her head came up.

Her face was the worst thing I'd seen since I found my family. Red-rimmed, swollen, tear-tracked from what looked like hours of crying, and the expression on it when she saw my eyes open—

"You're awake." She said it like a question. Like she'd stopped believing it was possible. 

"You're actually—" Her face crumpled completely. "I thought you had left me. I thought you were—" She was squeezing my hand so hard. "Don't you ever. Don't you ever do that again. Are you okay? Does it hurt? Should I call the—"

"Hey." I squeezed back. "Hey. I'm here."

"You were unconscious for—"

"I'm here Elena."

She sobbed. Once, hard, like something she'd been holding for days finally releasing.

I held her hand and looked at the ceiling and thought about the floor of my room and the blood and how cold everything had gone at the end. I pressed my lips together and breathed through it.

"How long," I said.

"A whole day." She wiped her face with her free hand. "They said the mark — they said whatever it's been doing — it accelerated and your—" She stopped and pulled in a breath. 

"You were so pale, Sloane. When I found you on the floor you were so pale and there was so much—"

"I'm here," I said again. Because it was the only thing that helped. "I'm not going anywhere."

She nodded. Still shaking.

I looked at the doorway.

And then he was there.

Kai. 

In the corridor. Panting like he'd run — actually panting, his chest moving, which I had never once seen on him in all the weeks I'd known him. He was still in last night's clothes. His hair was wrong. His eyes found me across the room before he'd fully stopped moving and something happened in his face that I couldn't name because I had never seen it there before.

He ran.

Not walked. Not the unhurried stride that never varied regardless of the situation.

He ran across the room and his arms were around me before I could say his name and he held me so tight I felt it in my spine and his hands were shaking. Both of them pressed against my back, visibly shaking, and his face was against my hair and he was saying something I couldn't hear properly over the sound of his heart hammering against my cheek.

"I thought—" His voice came out wrong. Not even. Not controlled. Fractured at every edge. "I thought—"

He stopped.

Tried again.

"I thought you had—" He pulled back slightly and looked at my face and his hands came up and framed it and they were still shaking and his eyes were red — actually red, and he looked at me like he was checking I was real. "Just — just like that," he said. "I thought you'd just—"

I couldn't speak.

I had never seen him like this. Not on the staircase. Not in the painting room. Not in any of the moments I had catalogued and stored and tried not to examine. 

This was something else entirely. 

A tear ran down his face.

I stared at it.

Then another.

He didn't wipe them. He just held my face in his shaking hands and looked at me and let them come and I was so stunned by the reality of it that I couldn't move.

He pulled me back in.

His arms around me. His whole body shaking slightly. His breathing ragged in a way that told me he'd been holding something together all the way here and had stopped holding it the moment he saw me.

I put my hands on his back and patted him slowly.

Kai Volkov, I thought. Crying?

I looked up and the room was empty. Elena had gone at some point, quietly.

He was still in my arms.

His breathing was slowing. Coming back. The shaking in his hands settling by degrees.

Then he pulled back.

His hands stayed on my shoulders. His face close. His eyes red and his hair wrong and his jaw doing the thing — but different. Everything was different.

He looked at me for a long moment.

His thumb moved across my cheekbone slowly.

"Will you be my mate?" he asked.

His voice was barely sound.

"Sloane Thorne." His eyes held mine. "Will you be my mate?"

The hospital room was completely silent.