Near Death

Serena's Pov

Beeping.

That was the first thing.

Not pain, not light, not the slow crawl back into consciousness that they show in films where everything is soft and gauzy and someone is holding your hand. Just beeping. Steady and indifferent, like the world had kept running while I was somewhere else and this was it pulling me back.

Pain shot through my neck when I tried getting up.

It didn't ease. My left side, my shoulder, the base of my skull where it met the pillow all suffered from the pain, it was like my body had been waiting for the moment I was conscious enough to receive it.

My throat felt itchy and my lips dry.

I tried to blink to get my eyes cleared and check my environment. The ceiling was white. A monitor to my left with numbers I couldn't focus on yet. A drip taped into the back of my hand.

Somewhere nearby, the sound of soft soles on linoleum.

"Oh —" A figure appeared at the edge of my vision, leaning in close. Young. Tired eyes, warm ones. A nurse. She reached for something near the monitor. "Hey. Hey, you're okay. You're okay, you're awake — can you hear me?"

I blinked at her.

"Can you tell me your name?"

"Serena," I said. My voice came out like something scraped from the bottom of a drawer. Dry and cracked and barely mine.

She exhaled and touched my wrist lightly.

"Serena. Good. That's good." She glanced over her shoulder and then back at me and her face did the thing that faces do when they are relieved but still careful about it. "You're lucky to be alive."

I held her gaze.

“I know”, I thought.

I said nothing.

They ran checks and took readings. A doctor came and asked me to track a light with my eyes and squeeze his fingers and tell him what month it was. I did all of it quietly and correctly and he made notes on a clipboard and told me that I had sustained a significant concussion, two bruised ribs, and soft tissue trauma along my left side consistent with impact, which could have been considerably worse.

I nodded at the right intervals.

The whole time, underneath all of it, my mind was completely clear.

Everything that happened before my stay started crawling back to my memories.

Rose at my door. The smile. The hug that made my skin crawl, and the call she had made from the car park.

I knew this would happen but I took the chance to risk it all and have everything run smoothly.

I had been careful. I had told Lawrence, and got covered what I could.

And still.

I was here. In a hospital bed with cracked ribs and a drip in my hand and a nurse telling me I was lucky.

Something had gone wrong somewhere in the plan. Or not wrong exactly — not completely. I was alive. But I was here, which meant the car, the hired woman, something in it had shifted, and I hadn't been fully outside the blast radius the way I should have been.

I would need to understand what had happened.

But not yet. Not here. Not with eyes on me.

I closed mine instead, and I breathed slowly, and I stayed very still, and I waited.

At mid-day, Damien came to the hospital. His voice echoed through the room before I saw him.

He looked terrible. That was the first thing I noticed and I hated that I noticed it.

He crossed the room in four steps and sat in the chair beside the bed and his hands went to mine both of them, wrapping around my fingers with a grip that was slightly too tight, a fraction past gentle.

"Serena." His voice came out rough. Like it had taken the journey with him and arrived tired.

I looked at him.

His eyes were red. He was looking at me the way I had always wanted him to look at me and the cruelty of that arriving now, in this room, when I already knew everything sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.

"You scared me." He exhaled it more than said it. A long, shaky breath that he'd clearly been holding since he got the notification, or the call, or whatever it was that had broken through whatever he was doing, whoever he was with, and dragged him here. "God, Serena. You scared me."

I looked at his face.

He meant it. I could see that he meant it.

That was the thing about Damien that had always undone me. He was never entirely pretending. He did love me, in the fractured, insufficient, ultimately selfish way that certain people love. The way that feels like everything until you understand it was never going to be enough. Until you see the text from Rose on the lit-up phone and understand that love, real or not, had never been the point.

"I'm okay," I said.

He shook his head. Squeezed my hand, and pressed his mouth briefly to my knuckles, and I let myself feel it, because feeling it didn't change anything anymore. It was just grief wearing the face of something that used to be hope.

"You don't have to talk," he said. "Just — I'm here. Okay? I'm here."

I nodded.

The doctor returned twenty minutes later, clipboard in hand, Damien still in the chair beside me.

"Mrs Whitmore, I want to ask you a few questions about the incident if you're feeling up to it." He clicked his pen. "Do you have any memory of what happened? Before the accident — anything from that evening?"

The room went quiet.

Damien looked at me. The nurse near the door looked at me. The doctor waited with his pen hovering.

I let the silence stretch exactly one beat longer than was natural.

Then I furrowed my brow. A small thing. Barely a movement. Just enough to look like a woman reaching for something that wasn't quite there.

"No," I said.

My voice came out soft. Confused. Apologetic almost, like I genuinely wished I could give them more.

"I don't remember anything."

The doctor nodded. Made a note. Said something about trauma responses and memory gaps and how it was common and we would revisit it when I had rested more. Damien's hand on mine loosened slightly... not relief, exactly, but something adjacent to it. A particular quality of tension leaving a body that had been braced for something.

Rose would hear this. By tonight she would have the word from somewhere in the chain that Serena was alive, yes, unfortunate, but that Serena remembered nothing. That Serena was no threat… and that's exactly how I want it to be.

They let Damien step out for coffee at half past five. The nurse dimmed the light and said she would check back in thirty minutes and then it was just me and the beeping and the blue curtain and the city doing whatever cities do at that hour beyond a window I couldn't quite see.

I waited, and then reached over to the nightstand where they had placed my things . My phone, still intact, screen cracked at the corner and I unlocked it.

It took me a moment to find the file. My fingers weren't entirely steady, less from fear than from the drip and the bruised ribs and the fact that my body had been through something even if my mind had come through clean.

I found it. I pressed play and turned the volume low and held it close.

Rose's voice, thin through the small speaker. Calm. Almost bored.

“It's me. I need something done.”

There was a pause.

“Serena Whitmore.”

Another pause, shorter this time.

“Permanently.”

I let it play to the end. Then I locked the phone and set it face-down on the blanket and lay back against the pillow and looked at the ceiling.

My ribs ached. My head ached. The drip was cold in my vein and the room smelled like antiseptic and recycled air and something floral from a get-well arrangement someone had left at the nurses' station down the hall.

My thoughts were filled with everything that had happened.

Rose had tried to kill me.

She had tried to kill me.

And now she thought I was harmless. Concussed and memory-wiped and alone in a hospital bed, no danger to anyone, the same naive woman she had always counted on me being.

I almost smiled.

“Now I don't have to hold back anymore.”

Not a single thing.