49
Patch notes
Player One
Ashercamearoundthecorner from the attorney’s office after signing off on the probate plan for Marianne’s estate and Paul was in the hallway, wearing the face of a man who had done something he couldn’t take back and was waiting to find out what it would cost him.Maybe he broke the coffee maker again?
“Where is Levi?” Asher asked.
“Fifth floor.”
The two words emptied Asher’s chest and filled it with something worse than the ache. The ache was absent — Levi not being in the room, the flat water, the thin air. This was the opposite. Levi was in the building. Levi was in the room with the beds and the ventilators he read about in dozens of panicked texts from Paul after he woke up. Ventilators were a trigger for Levi. He didn’t need to see people in that state…what the fuck was Paul thinking?
I could kill him too…
He didn’t finish the thought. His legs were already moving. Past Paul, who pressed against the wall to let him pass the way Paul always pressed against walls when someone with the last name Kane needed him to move.
He took the stairs, his bad leg protesting on every step, the wound not healed enough for stairs taken two at a time but his legs didn’t care about the wound right now. Levi was involved, and where Levi was involved, nothing else mattered.
Third floor. Fourth floor. Fifth.
The hallway to the c-suite. The keypad. The door.
He stopped, panting and leaning on his arm brace.
The ventilators were audible through the door. The hiss-click chorus. Six machines breathing for six people. And on the other side of the door, in the room with the machines, was the only person whose presence had ever made the disconnection go quiet.
He’s in there. He’s seen them. He knows.
Asher put his hand on the door. He could feel — or imagined he could feel — the specific change in air pressure that meant Levi was on the other side.
If I open this door, he will look at me and his face will be the face of a person who knows what I’ve done, and what I’ve hidden. That face will decide whether I keep him or lose him, and I cannot control which one the face decides.
Levi was on the other side of this door. Levi was on the other side of this door. The thought repeated and did not become information. His chest was wrong. His hands were wrong. He pressed his palm harder against the door because the door was something his hand could feel, and the feeling was a fact and he needed facts.
He thought about Levi’s laugh behind his hand. He thought about the bite. He thought about the sound Levi made whenAsher’s mouth was on his neck, and the morning breath he loved, and the weight of Levi’s head on his shoulder during a documentary being narrated wrong... He thought about the way Levi saiddovey, always almost like it pained him to say. Asher knew he hated saying it. Asher still loved it anyway.
If he leaves, the name leaves. Nobody else will ever call me that. That piece of me will cease to exist. The person who could be loved.
I never even wanted this.
I can’t. I can’t go back to the version without this.
I’d rather die.
His hand was still on the door. He could hear, faintly, a sound that might have been Levi’s voice. Talking. To the bodies. To the people in the beds who couldn’t hear him.
I should have killed them when Paul told me…
The thought sat for two seconds. Then the logistics caught up: families. Missing persons reports. Six employees of a company whose CEO went comatose in his own machine. Investigators. Questions. The kind of attention that would have put Asher in a room with people who asked questions for a living and Asher was good at rooms but not that good and not for that long.
He took his hand off the door.
He waited.
He stood in the hallway and waited. His leg hurt. His chest hurt. He didn’t sit down. Sitting down was the wrong shape for what was happening. He stood with his back near the wall, not leaning on it, and the ventilators breathed through the door and Asher waited.
He waited for forty minutes.