ONE EIGHTY TWO
As we reached the door to the room, I hesitated, feeling the heavy weight of all the emotions we’d barely kept at bay earlier. But Isabella didn’t pause. She stepped forward and pushed the door open, and we both slipped inside.
Immediately, two sets of eyes lifted toward us at the same time: Gael, sitting hunched and stiff at the edge of the bed, his hands dangling between his knees, and Dominic, who was pacing back and forth like a caged animal, his brow furrowed deep with worry.
The air in the room was heavy with sweat, antiseptic, and a low-grade desperation that prickled at the back of my neck. Tina lay in the center of it all, a fragile, shivering shape beneath the worn blanket. God, she looked even worse than before which was only a few minutes since I’d left her to go get Isabella.
Without a word, Isabella crossed the room to the closet tucked in the far corner, her steps brisk, her body language all business. The closet creaked loudly as she yanked it open. Of course. Isabella had gotten a shirt from my closet for Tina yesterdya as she had left my clothes here, untouched, as if part of her had been waiting for me to come back.
I shoved the thought aside as Isabella began rifling through the cramped space, pulling hangers aside with quick, impatient flicks of her wrist. She muttered to herself under her breath — too thin, too rough, not warm enough — her fingers finally pausing on a soft, oversized sweatshirt. It was old, but it was thick and plush, the kind you could bury yourself in. She tugged it free and paired it with a pair of soft, cotton leggings that looked just roomy enough not to press against Tina’s bandages.
"This will do," Isabella murmured aloud, almost to herself.
She turned, clothes bundled in her arms, and her gaze landed, just briefly, on Gael.
He was already looking at her. There was sadness in his eyes — an empty, painful sort of sadness that seemed to age him far beyond his thirty-something years. For a heartbeat, they just looked at each other across the battered room, the silence stretching tight. So much unspoken in that look — regret, exhaustion, a quiet apology that neither of them knew how to voice.
Isabella blinked and looked away first. She cleared her throat lightly and lifted the clothes a little higher in her arms, breaking the moment.
"This’ll do," she said again, a little louder. Then she added, her voice just a touch firmer, "I’m going to need the room, please."
For a second, the men just stood there blinking at her, not moving — Gael on the edge of the bed, Dominic near the doorway, both looking at her like she’d spoken in a foreign language.
I almost laughed despite myself. It was so stupidly human, so ridiculous, everything we’d been through, a simple "please leave" managed to completely throw them off.
Isabella arched a brow, a little impatient now. "I need to change her. Clothes? Dressing? Girl stuff?" she prompted, waving the bundle of fabric lightly as if that would help them connect the dots.
Dominic grunted first, catching on, and immediately began backing toward the door. Gael, slower on the uptake, pushed himself stiffly to his feet with a wince, moving with the clumsy stiffness of someone who hadn’t eaten, slept, or been treated like a human being in almost twenty-four hours.
His knees cracked audibly as he straightened, and he gave a grimace of discomfort.
"Right, right, sorry," Gael mumbled, shuffling after Dominic with a dazed look on his face.
Dominic reached the hallway first, but just as he crossed the threshold, he paused — his hand still on the frame, his body halfway out of the room.
Gael walked past him into the hallway.
And Dominic, he glanced back over his shoulder at me, his expression unreadable for a beat. I caught the way his jaw shifted slightly, like he was chewing on something he didn’t want to say. Then he exhaled roughly through his nose and jerked his chin in a subtle motion.
"I need a word," he said, voice low but firm. His eyes cut briefly to Isabella, then back to me, a silent now hidden in the glance.
My heart gave a strange little lurch, not fear exactly, but something heavy and expectant, like a stone dropped into deep water.
I nodded, feeling the weight of the moment settling on my shoulders.
Isabella didn’t say anything. She just gave me a small, understanding nod and turned back toward the bed, her entire focus narrowing back to Tina as she laid the clothes carefully at the foot of the mattress, her hands gentle, almost reverent.
I hesitated only a second longer before following Dominic into the hallway, the door swinging closed behind me with a soft, reluctant click.
The noise of the house seemed to grow louder in the sudden privacy — the distant groan of old wood, the faint hum of the generator outside, the creaking of the floorboards as Gael moved down the hall ahead of us like a tired ghost.
Dominic didn’t say anything at first. He just stood there, facing slightly away from me, his broad shoulders rising and falling in slow, deliberate breaths that somehow made the silence louder, heavier, pressing into every inch of space between us. The dim light from the hallway cast long shadows across his frame, making him look almost statuesque — a man carved out of stone, trying desperately to hold something crumbling inside. I stayed silent, my arms crossing over my chest, not in defiance this time but almost as if I needed the barrier, something to clutch onto while I waited for whatever words were clawing up his throat. I watched him shift his weight from one foot to another, his boots scuffing against the old wooden floorboards, the slight creak echoing off the walls. It was in the way his fingers flexed at his sides, the way his shoulders tensed and untensed like he was fighting with himself. And then finally, with a breath through his nose, he turned his head enough that I could see the hard cut of his jaw, the flicker of green in his narrowed eyes, darting to mine like a man stepping onto thin ice.
I didn’t blink. I held his gaze, stubborn, silent, willing him to just say it, to trust me enough not to dance around whatever brutal thing he was about to drop between us. He licked his lips once, a quick, nervous motion so uncharacteristic for him that it almost knocked the breath out of me. Dominic was not a nervous man. He was calculated, he was steady even when the world burned around him. But right now, facing me, he looked like he didn’t know how to begin.
"The hospital," he said finally, voice rough and low, like it hurt him to push it out. "It’s not far. It’s in Fairgrove."
Fairgrove.
The name alone sent a rush of cold through my veins. My spine stiffened instantly, a deep, instinctive dread blooming in my gut like poison. Fairgrove wasn’t just a casual mention. Fairgrove meant going past the semi-safe outskirts of the abandoned estate, inching closer toward the city proper where the net of law enforcement, cameras, and watchers tightened like a noose. It meant risking everything. Walking into a hornet’s nest with Tina’s fragile life hanging in the balance.
"You’re out of your mind," I said, stepping closer before I even realized it, my voice low but sharp, slicing through the thick air between us. "Fairgrove? That’s suicide, Dominic. You don’t just waltz into the city when half of it is still smoking from what happened last night. There are cops, patrols—"
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t argue either. He just watched me, his expression closed off, guarded, like he’d already fought this battle in his own head a dozen times before coming to tell me.
"I know," he said quietly. Then, after a pause so heavy it practically dragged the air out of the room, he added:
"And you’re not coming."
For a moment, I literally couldn’t move. I just stood there, blinking at him like he’d spoken a language I didn’t understand. It didn’t compute. It didn’t make sense. This was Tina. This was our fight because her fight was ours now. He wasn’t going to go without me, he couldn’t.
"What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded, my voice rising, hoarse and ragged. "Of course I’m coming. You need someone to help. I know the streets better than you, I know—"
"You’re staying," Dominic cut in, his voice low and firm in a way that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. It wasn’t a shout. It wasn’t anger. It was something worse — a quiet, aching resolve.
"You’re staying here," he said again, softer now, like he hated the words even as he forced them out. His jaw was tight, a nerve ticking just beneath the skin like it was taking all he had not to reach for me. "You’re staying with Adam. With Isabella. You’re keeping them safe. Gael will be coming with me.”
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