**Chapter 50**
**Cossette's POV**
The doctor stood beside my bed with the particular expression of a man who had seen every variety of patient manipulation and was not entirely convinced by this one.
"Miss Jonas," he said, "you're fine. I told your friend - you only needed one night for observation. I don't understand why you're requesting two. Medically speaking, you don't need it."
I arranged my face into something that communicated exhaustion and fragility and a general sense of a woman not quite ready to face the world.
"I just feel so tired, doctor," I said. "And my head - it still hurts quite a lot."
Did my head hurt?
When I had woken up - yes. Genuinely, properly, the kind of pain that arrives before consciousness and stays to introduce itself. But now?
Not particularly.
Why was I doing this.
I knew exactly why I was doing this.
Alaric was in this hospital. He had been in surgery . He was stable and recovering and somewhere in this building right now and I was going to be the first person to see him - before Nathalie, before his parents, before anyone - and two days in this hospital gave me considerably better odds of achieving that than going home tonight.
Two days minimum.
It was the least I could do. He had thrown himself over me. He had taken a chandelier to his back so I wouldn't have to. The absolute minimum I owed him was proximity and the first visit and -
"Your dinner will arrive shortly," the doctor said, apparently having decided to accept my performance at face value or having decided it wasn't worth the argument. "Eat and rest, Miss Jonas. Your body has been through a shock regardless of the injury level."
He left.
I smiled at the ceiling.
---
The dinner arrived.
I looked at it.
Hospital food. Some category of thing that had once been ingredients and had since made several questionable decisions on the way to becoming what was currently on this tray.
I ate approximately half of it out of necessity and then pushed the tray aside and lay there for twenty minutes staring at the ceiling and thinking about Alaric.
Then I got up and went into the corridor.
---
The hospital at this hour was a different place than it was during the day - quieter, slower, the particular quality of a building that never fully sleeps but has reached the part of the night where it stops pretending to be fully awake. The overhead lights were dimmer. The footsteps were fewer. The sense of urgency had settled into something more sustained and low.
I walked slowly, hospital pajamas and bare feet, hands in my pockets, trying to look like someone taking an innocent late-night walk and not like someone with a very specific destination.
A nurse at the station at the end of the corridor looked up as I passed.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," I said back.
"Need anything?"
I stopped.
I looked at her.
She was young - maybe my age, maybe slightly younger - and she had a book open on the desk in front of her, face-down to hold her page, the cover visible. A romance novel. The kind with an extremely dramatic cover and a title in large gold letters.
Something occurred to me.
I had learned this from Betha - or rather, I had learned it from years of watching Betha deploy a particular skill set involving emotional storytelling and a well-chosen audience. Find the right person. Tell them the right version of the truth. Let them do the rest.
"No," I started to say.
Then I stopped.
Then I said: "Actually - my boyfriend is in this hospital his name is Alaric veynor. He got hurt this night protecting me and I haven't been able to see him and they won't let me in until tomorrow and I just -" I stopped. Let my voice do something that didn't require much acting at all. "I just need to see him. Just for a few minutes. Just to know he's really okay."
The nurse put her book down.
Not gently.
She put it down with the decisive energy of a woman who had just heard something that required action.
"How did he get hurt protecting you?" she asked.
"A chandelier fell," I said. "At a gala. He threw himself over me."
She stared at me.
"He threw himself -"
"Over me. Yes."
She stood up. "How could they separate two lovers after that," she said, with a conviction that suggested this was not a question. "Come with me. Right now."
I blinked.
Twice.
Then I followed her, because this was working and I was not going to examine it too carefully.
---
She stopped outside the surgical recovery wing and held up one finger.
"Right now it's late - there should be no one. Let me check first."
She slipped inside.
Came back thirty seconds later.
"Empty. Go in - third door on the right."
I nodded. "Third door on the right."
"Third," she confirmed.
I went in.
---
The corridor inside was dim and quiet. I counted doors on the right.
First.
Second.
I stopped at the second door. Pushed it open slowly and stepped inside.
There was a man in the bed.
I could only see his back - turned away from the door, dark hair, the general outline of a person roughly the right size. I moved closer, my heart doing something complicated in my chest, and crouched beside the bed and took the edge of his blanket in my hands.
"I'm so sorry, Alaric," I whispered.
The man turned over.
He was approximately sixty-five years old and looked extremely confused.
I stood up so fast I nearly knocked the IV stand over.
"You're not -" I started.
"Alaric?" he said, pleasantly. "No, I'm definitely not Alaric, young lady."
"This isn't the third door."
He shook his head, still smiling, apparently finding this entirely reasonable as a late-night hospital occurrence.
"I'm so sorry," I said. "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm -"
"It's quite alright -"
I was already backing out of the room.
I stood in the corridor for a moment with my hand over my face.
*Cossette.*
*You are a grown woman with a university degree.*
*Count the doors.*
I counted the doors.
One.
Two.
Three.
Third door on the right.
I pushed it open slowly.
---
He was there.
Even like this - hospital bed, bandages visible at his back where the gown didn't fully cover, the particular stillness of someone in medicated sleep - he was so devastatingly, unreasonably handsome that I stood in the doorway for a full three seconds just recalibrating.
The bandages on his back made something tighten painfully in my chest.
*Cossette. Shut up about the handsome. Look at what he went through.*
I shut up about the handsome.
I moved to the chair beside his bed and sat down, and reached out and took his hand - carefully, the way you hold something you're afraid of disturbing - and looked at his face.
Peaceful. Quiet. The smirk entirely absent for once, which made him look younger and somehow more real than he did when he was performing his usual version of himself at everyone.
"Alaric," I said softly. "Thank you. For what you did." My throat tightened. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry it was you - I'm sorry it had to be -"
I looked down at the blanket.
I wasn't expecting an answer.
So when it came it went through me like electricity.
"You're welcome, foxy."
Low. Rough at the edges. Costing something to produce. But there.
I looked up.
He was moving - slowly, carefully, with the deliberate controlled movement of someone working around significant pain, pushing himself upright against the pillow. Every degree of movement made something in my chest contract because I could see what it cost him and he did it anyway.
"Alaric, don't - you shouldn't -"
"Stop," he said quietly.
I stopped.
He was upright now. Looking at me - directly, steadily, with those storm-blue eyes that had never once in my experience looked at anything the way they looked at me.
I opened my mouth to say something.
His hand came up.
And he held my face.
Both hands, careful and certain, his thumbs at my cheekbones, tilting my face up toward his - and then he kissed me.
Not the elevator. Not rushed, not stolen, not interrupted.
Deep and slow and deliberate, the kind of kiss that knows exactly what it is and has decided to stop pretending otherwise. His hands stayed at my face the whole time, holding me like something he had been afraid of losing and was no longer willing to treat carelessly.
I didn't pull away.
I didn't think about Frost.
I didn't think about Ray.
I didn't think about revenge or plans or anything that existed outside this dim hospital room with its fluorescent quiet and the bandages on his back and his hands on my face.
I just -
stayed.
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