Everything Carries Me to You (Axton and Leander Book 3) (4 page)

Distantly, he heard Dana's sucked in breath, and smelled his fear.

Yet Dana pulled the trigger again.

Impossible as the capacity to feel more pain had seemed just a second ago--Axton felt worse. Part of him was aware--he should press down on his wounds--but something was wrong and his limbs didn't...couldn't...he had
paws
--

"Goddamnit," Dana said, chest heaving. He sounded like he was going to be sick. "
Goddamnit
, Axton, will you just--"

Dana pulled the trigger for a third time. He was a good shot.

Axton's body stilled.

For three days, Leander lay in his hospital bed and refused to speak. He was perfectly conscious and fully capable of coherent speech. If pressed he would nod yes or no, but only for very select and mundane questions. Mostly he stared hard at the window across from his bed until his battered body rebelled and slept.

There was a bright yellow band around his wrist. In bold black letters it read: FALL RISK.

The nurses watched him closely, warily. Someone had muttered about ordering a psych eval, but it was a big hospital and no one had come over to administer it yet.

Sarah stayed by his bedside and seemed grateful for the silence. Outside of the ICU, there were plenty of outlets for her to plug in her phone, her tablet, her everything. She kept busy.

On the sunset of the third day, Leander turned to her and said: "Go home."

Startled out of silence, Sarah just looked up.

"Get some sleep," Leander elaborated. "Go home, Sarah."

Sarah paused, her stylus still frozen in the air, and looked at him carefully for almost a full minute.

"No," she said finally.

Leander sighed, closed his eyes, and pretended to sleep.

Eventually, Sarah curled up on the cot in the corner.

On the fourth day, Leander said good morning to his nurses and answered their questions about pain levels. They adjusted his medications. For the doctors and nurses, he was suddenly a cheerful and model patient. For Sarah, there was another half day of silence.

"Don't you have to go home to feed your cats?" Leander asked eventually, gazing at the window--and maybe even out of it, now, and actually seeing the trees on the other side.

"Diana's watching them," Sarah said.

"Showers?" Leander asked.

"There's showers here," Sarah said. "And you know I have an emergency capsule wardrobe in my car. It's French themed."

"Food?" Leander tried.

"There's a cafeteria," she said.

"But you hate eating out," Leander said.

"I know," Sarah said. "I do. Yeah."

"How are you even allowed in here all night?"

Now it was Sarah's turn to be quiet.

"Last time I left for the night, you had some sort of breakdown," she said. "I think they want help watching you."

"I did
not
have a breakdown," Leander said.

"You had to be tackled and sedated and you did further damage to your legs," Sarah said evenly. "You dragged yourself to the door on broken bones and tried to fight the nurses that stopped you."

Silence again, and Leander refused to look at her.

"Fine," Sarah said, flipping open her laptop. "I'll just be here, handling your insurance claims and sourcing costume parts for this season's Shakespearian horror remake. Don't mind me."

"I don't want your pity," Leander said clearly.

"Okay, cool," Sarah said. "Because I'm actually pretty angry at you right now."

"That makes two of us," Leander said, before closing his eyes and refusing to say more.

On the fifth morning, Leander stared hard at his breakfast tray. There was a carton of milk next to a plate of plastic looking eggs and some strips of thin bacon. There was an apple that had seen better days.

"I need you," he said suddenly.

"I tried, I told them you're allergic to dairy and they shouldn't give you milk," Sarah said, plucking the carton from his tray and starting to pry it open.

"This is dangerous," Leander said.

"No, the expiration date's okay," Sarah said. "And I'm not allergic, remember." She stuck a straw into the newly opened carton.

"Not what I meant."

"I know," Sarah said, with her lips around the milk straw, "but I'm ignoring you now. See?"

"I'm serious," he said.

"Me too," Sarah said. "I have to read my skincare addiction forums now." She sipped her milk and scrolled down on her tablet.

Leander waited.

Breakfast got cold—well, colder. The last dregs of milk were noisily extinguished. And Leander waited.

Then, crisply, Sarah switched off her screen and turned to him.

"Now that I've given you the silent treatment for, oh, twenty minutes," she said, "you can imagine what the past few days have been like for everyone else."

"Sarah," Leander said. "Sarah, he's gone." He sounded immediately lost and devastated, when he had sounded calm--bored, even--before.

"I know," Sarah said, looking away. "That's why I'm here."

"Bad things are happening," Leander said.

"Yeah, you're telling me," Sarah said. "New York has been giving me the third degree."

"I told Christina to wait," Leander said, "before coming back here."

"Before your little incident, yeah."

"She needs to stay away from me," Leander said. "Permanently. Or for a good long while, anyway."

"Good luck," Sarah scoffed. "Mama Bear's fury at not being here the past few days is infinite."

"It's for her own good," Leander said.

"I'm not sure," Sarah murmured, "that you're in a place to decide what's good or not for you right now, let alone for anyone else."

"Look me in the fucking eyes and tell me you don't believe something underhanded and secret and terrible is happening right now," Leander said. "Look me in the face and tell me that Christina's house fire was an innocent electrical failure. Stare into my eyes and tell me her girls are completely safe. Go ahead. Tell me I'm crazy."

Sarah clasped her hands together and bowed her head, almost as if she was kneeling at a church pew.

"She'll never agree to stay away," Sarah said, and that was all.

"I'll make her stay away," Leander said.

"Yeah, that's not troublesomely ominous or anything," Sarah said.

"Call her, Sarah," Leander said.

"I refuse," Sarah said. "Calm down and eat your breakfast."

"I am calm," Leander said, picking up a piece of bacon. "Call her, Sarah."

There was a care basket in Leander's lap. It was kind of unfair and he suspected Christina had put it there on purpose. He had to look over it to address her. It was big.

She was so very beautiful, in a way Leander would never even think to act on, because they'd been close since they were children. Motherhood had gifted her with an exaggeration of curves that still cinched in ridiculously at the waist, and she'd kept her thighs that could kill a man. Her hair tumbled down in gentle rolling waves, and her mouth was soft and plush--

Currently, that mouth was flattened out into a displeased line.

"No," she said.

"Please," Leander said.

"No," Christina said. "We just started spending nights in the new house. The girls have been through enough upheaval already--the house fire and now their uncle in the hospital." She crossed her arms over her chest with some difficulty. "No."

"Come on, you don't even have stuff to move," Leander pointed out. "It's all burned."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"Not really," Leander said, doing his limited best to put the care basket on the floor gently. "But you can't be in that house. You can't be in that neighborhood."

"I'm not leaving the neighborhood," Christina said point blank. "I live there,
we
grew up there, and I want the girls to grow up where they ca--"

"You want the girls to
grow up
," Leander repeated, throwing it back at her. "You want survival to be an option? Get out of there."

"That's not--no," Christina said, exasperated. "I know how you feel about what happened, but no. I'm not going to be bullied. I'm not leaving you like this, Lee."

"I'm asking you to," Leander said, breathing in sharply. "Christina. Please."

"No!" she burst out. "Why? No! Why do you think doing this-whatever this is-alone is better?"

"All right," Leander said, resigned. "I tried. I really did. Sorry."

"You're like a brother to me. I'm not going to--"

"I haven't actually leased the new house to you yet," Leander said suddenly, in a new tone of voice.

"And?" Christina asked.

"It's not even on the market yet, technically," Leander said.

"And?" Christina asked again, more deliberately, narrowing her eyes.

"You can't live there," Leander said.

"You're kicking us out?" Christina said evenly.

"Yes," Leander said.

There was silence.

"I see," Christina said. And icily: "Fine."

"Okay, good," Leander said.

"But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop visiting you," Christina said. "As incredibly inconvenient as suddenly having to find a new place in the neighborhood is--"

"Neighborhood's full up," Leander said.

"Somewhere within the school district, whatever," Christina said, massaging her temples. They both knew that anything else in the area at the same price point wouldn't be nearly as nice as what Leander had been leasing. Maybe a single bedroom apartment in a run-down complex--shitty lighting, cracks in the parking lot asphalt, dingy windows with cheap ironwork over the glass. "I see what you're trying to do, but still, no."

"You should vacate the premises as soon as possible," Leander said.

Christina let out a disbelieving little laugh.

"Seriously?" she said. "You're going to lever economic pressure to make your point?"

"I will leverage
anything
I can," Leander said, "To get you to listen to me."

"You've just had a huge shock," Christina said. "You're not thinking right, you need to--"

"
You're
the one who isn't thinking right," Leander snapped. "You want the girls to have a mother? Get away."

"I'm not leaving you!" Christina cried out.

"Why, because you've been left?" Leander asked. "What, twice now?"

The air was thick and hot in the room.

Christina exhaled noisily.

"You're going there?" she asked evenly.

"You think your girls need an uncle? What they really need is a mother. If something happens to you, it's not like they have anyone else. It's not like their deadbeat dad is going to--"

"Stop it!" Christina said. "Stop it,
stop
it. Don't--"

"Maybe he'll manage to stay out of jail for a little longer this time," Leander said, "and him and his coked out girlfriend can--"

"No," Christina said. "No, no--"

"He probably won't hit them at first," Leander went on. "After all, it took him a while before he went after
you
, right? So probably the girls have a few years of general neglect to get through in a roach infested drug den and then--"

"Leander,
stop
!" she cried out, hands over her ears and eyes screwed shut like that would help. "Why are you being so nasty about this?"

"It's not like you've given the girls good fall back options," Leander said. "It's touching, babe, it really is, that you're so ready to put yourself in danger to keep hanging around me. Or it would be--but we both know that you're terribly willing to stand by your man regardless of what he's done, don't we?"

"So fucking uncalled for," she said, voice low.

"It's bad mothering," Leander said promptly.

"Fuck you," Christina said. "I don't care what the hell you think you're accomplishing, but you need to shut up and stop."

"Still willing to put your children in danger when all signs point to it being a bad situation," Leander mock sighed, like it was a damn shame. "I would have thought you'd learned by now."

"Nothing
ever
happened to my girls!" she shouted. "I never let it get to that point!"

Leander shrugged.

"All right," Christina seethed. "You know what? Fine. Fuck you and fuck your fancy houses that you're willing to throw in my face. We don't need you."

"It's about time you stopped taking advantage," Leander said.

"You lowballing son of a bitch," Christina said. "Really?"

"I mean, do you have any idea how much money I've lost on that house?" Leander scoffed. "Please."

"
Well
," Christina said, standing up. "I guess we're done here."

"Great," Leander said.

Christina stalked away like an angry cat, all tense shoulders and furiously precise steps.

Leander clenched his jaw, biting back the vulnerability fighting to plaster itself across his face, because Christina had whirled around at the doorway.

"I still see what you're doing," she warned him. "I'm angry. You're getting what you want. But I
know
you."

"You're delusional," Leander said, sounding bored. "Get out."

"I can't believe you chose this moment to not trust me."

"
Out
," Leander said. "Done."

"Let me know if you ever stop being such a fucking cunt," she said, and sailed out the door.

Leander lay back in his hospital bed, more exhausted than he could ever remember being. He closed his eyes and did not sleep. His pulse was racing even if it didn't show on his face, and he felt ten years older, maybe twenty. At least the sun was setting, and the room was slowly sinking into darkness, and soon the day would be over.

There was a timid knock at his door.

Leander said nothing, just opened his eyes. Sarah wiggled one of her heels past the door and peeked in. She looked ashamed already.

"Hi," she said in a tiny voice. "Um."

"Is she gone?" Leander asked.

"Oh. Yeah," Sarah said, slipping the rest of the way into the room and closing the door behind her softly. She did not come closer. "Yes."