Beautifully deceived

CHAPTERTHREE

CHAPTER THREE: Coma

The waiting room at Saint Mercy had a particular kind of silence to it not the absence of sound, but the presence of dread, thick enough that Elena could feel it pressing against her ribs every time she tried to breathe normally.

She didn't leave Leo's side for three days. Priya brought her clothes, a phone charger, a granola bar she didn't eat. Her professors, once informed, extended her deadlines without being asked twice small mercies that felt, in that fog, like they belonged to someone else's life. She sat in a plastic chair beside a hospital bed and watched the slow, mechanical rise and fall of her brother's chest, matched to a machine instead of his own lungs, and she thought about their mother.

Their mother had died when Leo was seven, and their father hadn't stuck around long past that. It had been Elena, seventeen and terrified and pretending otherwise, who'd learned to read insurance paperwork and cook dinner for two on a grocery budget meant for one and sit through parent-teacher conferences pretending to be twenty-five. She had built a life for both of them out of stubbornness and part-time jobs and the fierce, unshakable conviction that if she simply worked hard enough, nothing could break what she'd built.

Now her brother lay in a hospital bed with tubes in his arms, and nothing about how hard she worked was going to change what happened next.

"Induced coma," the doctor had explained, gently, the kind of gentle reserved for people who looked like they might shatter. "It gives the brain time to heal without the added strain of consciousness. It's not uncommon after trauma like this. We'll bring him out of it gradually, when the swelling responds."

When,Not if. Elena had clung to that word like a life raft.

She didn't sleep so much as lose consciousness in fifteen-minute increments, jolting awake every time a monitor beeped differently than it had a moment before. She didn't eat so much as forget to. She held her brother's hand and talked to him about nothing, about everything, about the stupid cartoon he'd been watching the night it happened, about how he still owed her twenty dollars from a bet neither of them remembered the terms of anymore because a nurse had told her hearing was often the last sense to go and the first to come back, and Elena would have talked to Leo for a hundred years straight if it meant he'd hear her.

On the third night, exhausted past the point of coherent thought, she finally opened her phone for the first time since the accident and found out exactly how her brother had ended up in that hospital bed.

A grainy video had surfaced online. Security footage from a gas station two blocks from the accident site, timestamped 11:52 p.m. five minutes after Leo's board hit the pavement. It showed a black SUV, tires screeching, running the red light at the intersection where the streetlight had been broken for months. The plates were blurred in the original upload, but it hadn't taken the internet more than six hours to sharpen the image, cross-reference it, and land on an answer.

The SUV belonged to Marcus Webb. Right wing, Goldcrest Hawks. He'd left Julian Ashford's after-party at 11:45 p.m., three drinks past legal, driving a car that had been gifted to him according to leaked texts that surfaced not long after by Ashford Global's youth sponsorship program, the one with Julian's own signature on the paperwork.

Elena stared at her phone screen in the blue dark of the hospital room, her brother's monitor beeping steady and slow beside her, and felt something in her chest go cold and very, very still.

She hadn't known his name that night at the party. She hadn't cared to learn it.

She knew it now.