I answered with my heart in my throat. “Yeah?”
Decoy’s tense voice filtered down the line. “Surgeon just saw Mateo. They took him straight down.”
20
EMBRY
The rest of the journey passed in a blur. Logically, nothing had changed. Mateo was having the same surgery I’d already made peace with—it’d be fuckingoverbefore I got there. But that he’d gone under without me there cut deeper than any scalpel ever could, and Cam and Folk’s words of wisdom became nothing but noise.
We pulled up outside a nondescript hospital.
I was out of the car before it stopped, dashing inside, following the directions Decoy had left me to the surgery department upstairs.
A staircase. A corridor.
A nurse who spoke to me as I kept moving through a department that smelt horribly fucking familiar. Past a brother I knew by scent almost as well as I knew Cam.
Fresh-cut wood and lilac flowers.
Decoy.
I was so grateful he’d been here when I wasn’t. But the primal need to reach Mateo overrode my fucking manners and I kept moving, I kept running, until I found my husband.
He was halfway out of bed, hair sticking up in every direction, eyes heavy with the bewildered daze unique to waking up to a reality, abodythat, for better or worse, would never be the same as the one you remembered.
I reached him before he got a foot to the floor. I eased him back onto the bed and my hands found his face, my gaze locked to his, searching his amber eyes for every fucking thing I loved about him—which waseveryfucking thing, including the dazed scowl he levelled me with. “Let me up.”
“No. Lie down.” I spoke with conviction, Decoy’s most recent texts cemented in my brain. “You need to chill until you’re not dizzy anymore.”
“I’m not fucking dizzy.”
Lies. I saw it in how he swayed on the bed, rooting a fist to the mattress to rescue his equilibrium. In the pallor of his olive skin and the slow breath he released as his latest escape attempt caught up with him.
His fingers trembled as he gripped my wrists. “You didn’t have to come.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“That your bedside manner, chaparrito?”
“Depends if you’re in dickhead mode.”
Mateo opened his mouth, but whatever road man sass he’d been about to dole out was derailed by the nausea Decoy had warned me about. The post-op puking I’d always been too near death to worry about.
“Liedown,” I repeated. “Did you drink anything yet?”
Mateo swung his gaze to the ubiquitous NHS water jug. “I don’t know.”
Looking at him, I could believe it. I filled the cup and pressed it into his hand, reading the room for what would happen if I tried to feed it to him. “If you drink and take a piss, they might let you go home.”
“They’re not letting me go home.”
His words were muffled by the fist he’d pushed against his lips to keep the water down.
I waited for him to elaborate.
He didn’t, but I was saved from interrogating him by a doctor poking her head around the curtain.
She took her place at the foot of the bed, and I was versed enough in medical speak to be reassured by what she said... until she got to the part about his blood pressure tanking from the anaesthetic, which was fucking news to me.