What Grows Dies Here

Done terrible things.

But that right there almost fucking broke me.

Almost.

No fucking way I was going to break.

Wren still needed me. She was lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors with a gunshot wound in her stomach.

They’d tried to tell me bullshit about visiting hours. Protocols.

They didn’t try that for long.

“Hi, darlin’,” I murmured as I sat down in the chair beside her bed. Her eyes were closed, hair pulled back from her face, her cheekbones gaunt, lips almost blue.

I grabbed her hand. It was so small. So fucking cold. I warmed it in my own, bringing it up to my lips.

“You can sleep for as long as you want,” I whispered, keeping my eyes on her closed ones. “It’s gonna be hard when you wake up. But I’m here. I’ll be here. To remind you that you’re strong enough to get through this. To survive this.”

The only reply was the steady beeping of her monitors. My hand stayed in hers.

WREN

Karson was by my bedside when I woke. His hand was in mine. Heavy, dry, secure. It made me want to peel my skin off.

If I had the strength, I would’ve yanked my arm away. But I didn’t have the strength.

I knew before the doctor told me.

Whatever drugs they’d given me had me feeling numb, like my limbs were made of cotton wool instead of flesh. There was no pain.

But there was emptiness. There was an expression on the nurse’s faces. There was a sorrow hanging over the room that was coming from me. From inside of me. I was coating everything, everyone with my rancid emptiness.

Karson was there when the doctor told me. His hand was tight in mine. I saw that instead of felt it. His knuckles were white. His expression was foreign. Hopelessness tinged with fury, with sheer fucking devastation. He knew before the doctor told me too. I wondered for how long. Who’d told him.

The thought of him standing there in the hospital, on his own, being told that. It hurt me, in a place deep down where I could still feel.

They told me I could see her.

Hold her.

They had kept her for me. Kept her where, I wondered. Not in those tiny, clear cribs you saw in the movies. Not in the room full of babies, wriggling, screaming, blinking and getting used to the world they were thrust into.

Of course, they would not keep her there.

Then where, I wondered. Somewhere cold, quiet, where she would be alone. Not that it mattered now, I guessed. She couldn’t feel the cold, couldn’t hear anything. She wasn’t really here anymore.

I said no. The doctor tried to gently urge me to change my mind. For closure. Healing.

I stared at him. I fucking hated him. For his white coat, his weak jawline, the expensive haircut, the no doubt Ivy League education and impossibly rich parents—I knew how to spot the trust fund kids just like I could spot a fake Chanel. He was trying for empathy, maybe. Or maybe he was just regurgitating whatever some therapist had told him.

He couldn’t possibly know what I was feeling. What I needed. He had a dick and a superior air to him that told me he had no idea what real pain was. He was detached from it all. He came in and did the cutting, talked to the patients when it couldn’t be avoided, and pawned most of the work off onto the nurses.

“Healing?” I repeated. My voice was scratchy. Dry. As if I’d been screaming. Had I been screaming? Maybe. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember anything that had happened since I woke up. Except that my baby was dead.

That was the one thing I remembered. The one thing I would never forget.

“You think that you know anything about what I need in order to be healed because you know how to sew up flesh after you’ve torn everything out of it?” My voice much higher now.