The hospital walls were too white.
Sterile. Quiet. Almost sacred in their stillness.
Elena sat on a hard plastic chair beside Damian’s hospital bed, her fingers tracing circles on the rim of a lukewarm coffee cup she hadn’t touched in hours. The faint beeping of the heart monitor was the only sound, a rhythmic reminder that he was still here, still fighting.
Damian slept, or at least drifted somewhere close. His face was pale, a bandage wrapped tight across his abdomen. Tubes snaked from his arms. Machines blinked quietly around him. His breath rose and fell — shallow, slow.
He was alive.
He was alive.
That truth had not yet settled inside her.
She looked at him, studying the slope of his brow, the faint stubble on his jaw, the scar on his left cheek from a fight months ago. He look
