Chapter 7

#Aveline

Beep.

That was the last word I heard before the dark closed over me.

Then, noise. Wheels rattled under my back. Lights slid across my eyelids, one after another. Someone shouted numbers I didn't understand.

"Pressure's still dropping! We're losing her!"

"Theatre two, now!"

A hand gripped mine until the doors swung between us, and Evelisse's voice cracked on the other side of the glass. "Please. Don't take her from me again."

Again.

Cold spread over my face. The lights went out.

When I surfaced, there was no tunnel, only a dull, heavy ache across my abdomen and a tube taped to the back of my hand. Pale morning light slanted through velvet curtains.

I was alive. I hadn't expected that.

"Don't try to move."

A man stood at the foot of the bed with his arms folded, dark-haired, in a suit that looked slept in. Steel-grey eyes. I knew his voice before I was allowed to see his face.

"Six hours in surgery," Darius said. "Your heart stopped twice."

By the window, another man lifted his head. A bandage across his forehead, one arm in a sling. His eyes were amber, the exact amber I had seen in my mirror every morning of my life.

My breath caught. He looked like me.

"You hit my car," Ronan said quietly. "I'm the reason you're here. I'm sorry."

"It was my fault. I lost control."

"The road was flooded and a truck had jackknifed. It wasn't anyone's fault." He looked away, jaw tight. "Doesn't stop me thinking about it."

The door opened before I could answer. A doctor came in with a tablet pressed to his chest, and the room changed. Darius straightened. Ronan stood.

"The rupture is repaired," the doctor said. "That's the good news."

"And the bad?" Darius asked.

The doctor hesitated, glancing at me. "Miss, you were already very ill when you arrived. The scans show advanced cancer, spread to several organs. Tonight's surgery saved your life. It cannot treat the disease."

Silence.

Six months, I thought. I had carried that number out of a mansion in the rain, and it had followed me into a hospital bed.

"How long?" My voice sounded steady, which surprised me.

"Miss, we..."

"I'd rather know."

"With conventional treatment, perhaps four months. Perhaps less."

Behind him, Evelisse made a small sound. It wasn't a sob. It was worse, like something tearing.

"No," Darius said.

He said it quietly, like a man who wasn't used to being refused. He took the tablet from the doctor's hand and scrolled through it once.

"There's something Lucan has been working on for three years," he said. "It's never been tried at this stage."

"Because it isn't finished," the doctor said carefully.

"Then it will be finished."

The door banged open so hard it hit the wall.

A man stumbled in, out of breath, tie loose, glasses crooked, dark hair standing up as if he'd driven here with his hands in it. He had a laptop under one arm and a rolled-up paper coffee cup in his fist.

"Please tell me I'm not too late.

He stopped dead.

He looked at me, and every joke went out of his face. For a moment he just stood there, a grown man in a wrinkled suit, staring at a stranger in a hospital bed.

"Oh," he said softly. "You has Mother's chin."

Evelisse laughed through her tears.

"That's Lucan," Ronan muttered. "Our youngest. Ignore most of what he says."

"Most of it is correct, which is the annoying part." Lucan came to the bed and crouched until his eyes were level with mine. Warm brown, tired, and kind. "Hi. I'm your other brother. I'm the one who's been very difficult to keep out of this room."

I almost smiled. I had forgotten how.

"I read your scans on the way here," he said, more quietly. "I won't lie to you. The treatment is rough, and I've never done it on someone this far along. But I haven't been able to stop thinking about it for three years, and now I think I know why." He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Give me a chance. Please."

I had been told to go home and spend my time with the people who mattered most. It turned out they had been waiting for me the whole time.

"Alright," I said.

His whole face opened. He stood, shoved the coffee at Ronan without looking, and began tapping at the laptop. "Right. I need a lab, forty-eight hours, and nobody to tell me no."

"Nobody will," Darius said.

They came to my bed one by one, as if they weren't sure I would let them.

Alistair, silver-haired, gripped the rail with both hands. "We are your family," he said hoarsely. "I am your father. This is Evelisse, your mother. You have met your brothers, all three of them, which is more than they deserve, given the state they arrived in."

Evelisse reached for my hand and stopped just short, asking permission.

I had overheard all of it. I knew what they would say. But I had spent eight years learning how it felt when no one reached for me, and I put my hand in hers before I could think.

She folded over my fingers, shaking.

"Where was I?" I asked. "Why didn't you find me?"

Alistair's face changed. It was tiny, the flicker of a man deciding what not to say.

"We'll tell you everything," he said. "When you're strong enough. I give you my word."

"That isn't an answer."

"No," Darius said from the foot of the bed. "It isn't. But you shouldn't hear it while you're still being stitched together."

Ronan looked at the floor. Lucan stopped typing.

They know something, I thought. All of them.

I let it go, for now. I was too tired, and my family was too close, and no one in that room was asking me to be smaller.

But I filed it away, the way I had once filed away a hundred small cruelties in a mansion. I had spent eight years learning to notice what people left unsaid.

Evelisse had said again.

Someone had taken me from them. And whoever it was had been very, very careful.