Chapter 900
K.C. stepped in before Caroline could fall, catching her under the shoulders with practiced care and lowering her onto the gurney. The medics took over, hands on the blanket and under her knees, careful of her right side.
Jarrod stood beside them, useless hands locked by brace and splint, his face a mask of fierce, tender regret.
This was his fault. All of it. Not because he had left the room. Not because he had failed to jump into water or tear apart steel with his bare hands.
Because he had made her trust a voice in the dark, then let her wake alone.
The gurney rolled back toward the treatment bay.
Jarrod walked beside it, not touching her, not carrying her, not pretending his body could do what it could not.
But his voice stayed with her every step.
“I’m here,” he said again, rough and absolute. “Caroline, I’m here.”
Warmth woke her this time.
Not the heat of a cave fire. Not the breath of a man wrapped around her in the dark. Clinical warmth. Controlled warmth. A forced-air blanket humming softly over her body, warm IV fluids running into her vein, and a flat medical heat pack secured low across her abdomen.
Caroline opened her eyes to the dim amber lights of the infirmary treatment bay.
For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. Her mind reached for fragments that did not belong together: black water, a ravine wall, floodlights exploding over wet steel, Jarrod’s voice in her helmet, then the hard plastic of his brace beneath her fist when she had found him alive behind the command-center glass.
She turned her head.
Jarrod was still there.
He was not lying beside her. He was not holding her. He sat in a chair near the head of the bed, a silent, brutal presence in the low light, his right arm still locked across his torso inside the heavy medical brace, his splinted left hand resting uselessly against his thigh.
His eyes were open.
He had not slept.
The sight of him sent a wave of relief through her so sharp it almost hurt more than the bruises.
“You’re here,” she whispered.
His gaze moved to her face instantly. “I told you I was.”
The answer was simple. Rough. Stripped of rank.
She wanted to be angry at him. She was angry at him. But the anger had changed shape while she slept. It no longer had the clean edge of accusation. It was tangled with fear, exhaustion, and the memory of waking alone.
“You left the bed,” she said, her voice hoarse.
“I was never assigned to the bed.”
Her eyes narrowed.
A faint shadow moved across his mouth. It might have been regret. It might have been the ghost of a smile. “Poor phrasing.”
“Terrible phrasing.”
“Agreed.”
The ridiculous exchange loosened something tight in her chest. Only a little. Not enough to forgive him. Enough to breathe.