Page 117 of Killing Me Softly

Aaron swallowed hard, bracing himself.

Jack lowered onto the chair beside Aaron. He didn’t speak. Didn’t fill the silence with empty words or forced reassurances. And somehow, what should have been awkward,uncomfortable, just…wasn’t. The quiet between them wasn’t heavy. It wasn’thollow. It was justthere, offering a presence that didn’t need explanation.

After a while, Jack rubbed a hand up Aaron’s back, moving his palm in soothing circles. Hesitant, uncertain, as if he didn’t know what else to do. Maybe he wasn’t even surewhyhe was doing it, only that hehadto.

Aaron inhaled, long and shaky, and lifted his head. “They won’t let me see him.”

“He’s in surgery.”

“When he gets out. They won’t let me see him, will they?”

“I’ll make them.”

Aaron leaned back in the chair, the tension in his muscles momentarily easing and Jack slipped his hand away, resting it on his knee and tapping his fingers idly instead.

Aaron clenched his jaw, staring at the floor. “Will he be okay?”

Jack waited an excruciating beat. “I don’t know.”

Aaron’s breath hitched. He couldn’t do this. Couldn’t survive the thought of losing Kenny. Couldn’t picture a world where Kenny didn’t exist in it.

“If I lose him…” Aaron choked, gripping his knees. “I can’t, Jack. I fuckingcan’t.”

“I know.” Jack shifted, leaning in. “Andheknows that, too. And if I know Kenny, which I think I do, he’s in there fighting for his life. Not for himself.For you.”

Aaron’s gaze snapped to his.

Jack smiled, just a little. “He’s got a lot to live for.”

Something passed between them then. A quiet understanding. A truce carved from the chaos. Maybe even the fragile beginnings of friendship built on the wreckage of everything they had endured.

A voice cut through the moment. “Sir?”

Still slouched in the chair, still wearing his real self, not quite jerking back into his detective skin just yet, Jack glanced up to the officer. “Yes, Jenkins?”

The officer cleared her throat. “Melanie Bennet is out of trauma. On the ward. Would you like us to question her?”

Aaron was already on his feet. “Can I see her?”

Jack didn’t make him wait, didn’t make him fight for it. He nodded. “Yeah. Of course.” He turned back to the officer. “Take him to her.”

The officer led Aaron through the hospital’s maze of sterile white walls, past the curtained cubicles where the groans of other patients echoed. The smell of antiseptic clung to the air, mingling with the distant hum of beeping monitors and the occasional burst of rushed voices from nurses navigating the chaos of A&E. Jenkins led him deeper into the department, away from the immediate emergency cubicles, toward the more stabilised patients.Mel wouldn’t be in critical care—if she had been, she’d still be in surgery or in the ICU.That thought settled Aaron’s gut, at least. The knowledge that she was well enough to be placed in a recovery bay but still injured enough to warrant extended observation.

Then there she was.

In a standard hospital bed, propped up against sterile pillows, she looked almost unrecognisable beneath the harsh fluorescent light. Her face was pale—too pale—verging on grey, her skin clammy, strands of damp hair clinging to her forehead. One arm was bound in a sling, her wrist and forearm swathed in fresh bandages. Her thigh was elevated, thick white dressings peeking from beneath the flimsy hospital gown, stark against the deep bruising shadowing her exposed skin.

But it was her face that hit him hardest.

The stitches.

Thick, black sutures jagged across her cheek like a cruel afterthought. Areminder of the blade that had torn through her flesh. The swelling around the wound had already begun, distorting the familiar sharpness of her features, bruises blooming beneath her eye. The stitches pulled at her skin with every shallow breath she took, tight and crude. The raw, angry wound stretched from just below her temple down toward the corner of her mouth, twisting what should have been a smirk into something haunted.

She looked small.

Exhaustion clung to her as heavily as the blood coating her hands, and she fluttered her eyelids open. Heavy. Struggling. But awareness surfaced from the drugged haze, and her gaze found his. Not quite registering. Not quite awake. But saw him. And in that fleeting moment, she looked exactly how Aaron would imagine someone who’d been dragged back from the edge of merciless, unforgiving violence.

Haunted.

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