Chapter 17 — The Vulnerability
1420 Words
The car stopped hard.
Doors flew open. Cold air rushed in and then Varek's arms were under me and moving without my feet touching the ground. The lights above were too bright. Ceiling lights. Moving past fast. A corridor.
Couldn't track where we were going. The gray was still there at the edges, pushing in, and every breath made a sound I didn't like.
Bright room. Cold metal under my back.
The trauma room. The one that smelled like bleach and something sharp.
Varek put me down on the table and the overhead lights came on and I had to close my eyes against them.
Voices. Two men rushing in from a side door.
"Step back sir we need to"
The voice stopped.
Not because it finished. Because something happened to it. A sliding sound. A crash of metal things hitting the floor.
I opened my eyes.
Varek had the doctor by the front of his shirt. Thrown him into the supply cart. Things were all over the floor. Shiny things. Medical things. Rolling away under the cabinets.
The room had gone completely still.
Varek was standing over the table. His coat was dark with my blood. His chest going up and down hard and fast. His eyes were... I didn't have a word for what his eyes were. I had never seen them look like that. Not in the basement. Not in the casino. Not in any of the terrible things we'd walked through together.
His gun was out.
Pointing at the doctor on the floor.
"Out," Varek said.
The doctor looked at the gun. Looked at me on the table. I looked back at the gun.
Both of them left. Fast. The door swung behind them.
We were alone.
I tried to breathe and the wet catching sound came back and my back came up off the table a little with the effort of it. My right side felt like something was sitting on it. Heavy and getting heavier.
Varek dropped the gun.
It hit the tile and I heard it but he didn't look at it. Leaned over me and his hands found the front of my jacket and my dress and pulled both apart down the middle. The cold air of the room hit my skin.
He looked at the wound.
Didn't look away fast. Just looked at it and then looked at my face and something in his expression did something I had never seen it do before. Like a wall that had been standing a long time finally finding the crack it couldn't hold.
He turned to the cart.
Hands moved fast. Found a sealed package and tore it open. Some kind of thick pad with a valve on it. Peeled the backing off.
"This is going to hurt," he said.
Not a warning really. More like he needed to say it. More like he needed me to know he knew.
He pressed it over the wound.
The sound I made wasn't something I chose to make. My whole body went tight and my heels hit the table and my fingers found his forearms and I dug in hard. My nails broke his skin. I felt that happen and couldn't stop it and he didn't pull away. Held the pad in place and let me dig in and didn't make a sound about it.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked at him.
"Your lung has gone down," he said. His voice was steady. He was making it steady. I could hear the effort of it underneath. "I have to let the air out of your chest. It's going to hurt more than this did."
"Okay," I said. The word came out in two pieces.
He picked up a needle from the tray.
I looked at the ceiling instead of the needle.
Big. Saw it inside vision before looking away. Much bigger than the ones at the clinic in Sector Four where I'd gotten stitches twice as a kid.
He found the spot between my ribs.
He pressed the needle in.
Everything went white.
Don't know what sound I made. Something bad. My spine arched so hard my hips came up off the table. My fingers found his arms again and I held on like holding on would help anything and maybe it did because the needle stayed steady.
Then a hiss.
Loud and sudden like a tire going flat very fast.
And then.
The weight lifted.
Just like that. The thing sitting on my chest picked itself up and left. My right lung opened and I pulled in a breath... a real one, full and deep... and the sound of it was the best thing I had ever heard in my life. Fell back against the table and breathed and breathed and the gray at the edges of everything started to pull back.
I cried.
Didn't mean to. It just happened. Tears coming out the sides of my eyes and running back into my hair. Not from the pain. From the breath. From the simple enormous fact of being able to breathe again.
Varek worked. He taped things down. Hands fast and sure and covered in my blood and he didn't stop until it was done.
Then the room went quiet.
Just the lights humming. Both of us were breathing. He is rough and uneven. Mine is slow and careful and so grateful.
He didn't step back.
Put his hands on the edge of the table and dropped his head between his shoulders and just stood there. His whole body went heavy like something had been holding him up and stopped.
His hands were shaking.
Not a little. A lot. Both of them on the edge of the metal table shaking in a way that had nothing to do with being cold.
Raised my right hand.
My arm felt like it was full of sand. Heavy and slow. Got it up anyway.
My fingers found his jaw.
Rough under my hand. Dried blood on his cheek. Dust still in the lines around his eyes.
Varek went completely still.
He looked down at me.
The thing on his face that I had never seen before was still there. Wide open. Like every door he kept shut had come open at the same time and he didn't have the energy left to close them.
He leaned into my hand.
Just slightly. Just a small press of his jaw against my palm. Like he couldn't help it. Like his body made the decision without asking him.
His mouth opened.
He was going to say something.
The phone on the floor buzzed.
Loud in the quiet room.
He looked at it.
The thing on his face closed over. Slowly. Like a curtain coming down. The doors shut one at a time until he was the same man again. Controlled. Still. Unreadable.
He straightened up.
My hand fell back to the table.
Picked up the phone without looking at the screen and held it to his ear.
"You missed," he said.
His voice was completely flat. Like nothing had happened. Like he hadn't just been standing there shaking with his head down.
A pause.
Then Syris's voice through the speaker. Quiet and dry like always.
"I wasn't aiming for you, Varek." A small rattling sound. A laugh maybe. "I want my queen back." Another pause. Slower. Heavier. "How does it feel... knowing everyone who gets close to you ends up in pieces?"
Varek said nothing.
The lights hummed.
Watching his back from the table. The stillness of it. The way his hand holding the phone had gone white at the knuckles.
"She signed a contract," Varek said finally.
"Contracts end," Syris said. "Everything ends. Even you."
The line went dead.
Varek stood with the phone at his side.
Then he turned back to me.
The curtain was still down. The doors still shut. But underneath all of it... in the small things, the shaking hands pressed flat against his legs, the way he looked at the table instead of my face for just a second before he looked up...
I could still see it.
He set the phone on the cart.
He looked at me properly.
"Sleep," he said. Quiet. "I'll be here."
And the thing was... I believed him.
Not because I had to. Not because there was nowhere else to go. But because a man who shook like that when he thought he was losing you didn't say words he didn't mean.
I closed my eyes.
- Writer
