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Internal bleeding.
Surgery.
Each face was more grim than the last as I paced the hallway until Mattie asked for me, and my heart broke all over again.
Alice had agreed to help me out of scandal, to save my skin for no reason beyond a bone-deep sense of justice, and my secrets hurled her to the cusp of death. In a matter of weeks, we’d made an enemy that nearly robbed me of my dog, and now three of my most beloved human beings on the planet were in these sterile papered walls. Two tiptoeing on the territory of the Grim Reaper.
I couldn’t go in there and patch either of them back together. There wasn’t anything all our fucking money could buy that could make this right. Nothing in my power tofix this.
When Ollie and I rounded the corner into the waiting room, her siblings all looked up at once. Jameson and Paxton both rose to their feet expectantly.
Even as they closed the distance to stand to either side of me, I knew I didn’t deserve their solidarity.
My fault.
This was all my fucking fault.
I had a feeling that the ever-silent Jameson would put me out of my misery if this went belly up. Or at least he would if I told him the truth.
A flicker of surprise turned into a flame of outrage in my chest when I spotted Reggie off in the corner of the room. His balding head rested in his hands, elbows braced on his knees. I didn’t have time to respond before Ollie was nudging me in the ribs.
It was the surgeon in black scrubs that came into the room and snapped me from worst-case scenarios and the anger of his pathetic, artificial presence.
“Mr. Hart?” When I nodded, she pulled her mask below her chin, a tentative smile on her face lending me an ounce of comfort. “Your wife is out of surgery, and it went as well as it could have. We stopped the bleeding and have no indication of any permanent damage. She’s in for a long recovery, but I do expect her to make a full one.”
A collective whoosh of breath left the room. Someone burst into sobs. Ollie palmed his jaw, eyes shooting skyward as his tears overflowed. Paxton slapped a hand between my shoulder blades as Jameson collapsed to kneel with his head in his hands, rocking on his heels. My uncle found his feet, his eyes locked on me and…bloodshot.
Tears seared my eyes as I watched the doctor’s sympathetic expression. “She’s awake in her room and asking for you.”
My pulse slammed so hard against my ears that I couldn’t make sense of the words hurled at me fromtwelvedifferent angles. I couldn’t find words as Reggie nodded solemnly, setting a hand on my shoulder as he walked past us and down the hallway.
I just numbly followed the doctor back to a room in a wing I had yet to wander. When I rounded the corner and stepped over the threshold, groggy gray-blue eyes found mine, a weak smile lining her lips as I cracked like an egg.
Collapsing to my knees by her bedside, I shakily grasped her hand in mine and brought it to my lips as relief washed through me. Alice thumbed away the tears on my cheek as she gave a little murmur.
“I don’t think beasts are supposed to cry,” she rasped before coughing a little laugh out.
“My Belle,” I breathed, unable to meet her eyes, even as I felt them boring into the top of my head. Shame was a hideously consuming companion. She slipped her fingers from mine, and I let her. I’d deserve it if she left—deserve it if she fled to the far corners of the world and changed her name so not even Max could find her.
But the woman knew me well. Saw everything as I diverted my gaze, wiping my hand across my mouth, because she brought her fingers to my chin and tugged me back to her. “Grey.” When my eyes stayed closed, she said, “Look at me.” I did. How was she so beautiful, even with her skin wan and a cannula in her nose? Even nearly broken, Alice was the most radiant creature I’d ever beheld. The woman who saw everything smiled softly and shook her head. “I’mnot running.”
Alice
Eight months later…
“Are you ready?”
“I think so.”
“Are yousure?” Greyson pressed, with a devilish glint in his eyes that made my smirk deepen.
“Pretty certain.”
“Cause it’s not too late to change your mind,” he insisted.
“I think that ship has sailed, Mr. Hart.”
His low rumble of a laugh made me smile. “I dunno. Frankly, that crowd isterrifying. They all look so expectant.”