Page 87 of Songbird
“Songbird?”
My eyes drift shut on their own accord, so I reach out my hand, and relief swamps me as Rosie twines her fingers around mine.The warmth of her skin and the subtle flutter of her pulse are the most magical things I’ve ever felt.
“You’re all right,” I say with a sigh as I force my eyes open.
Her tired smile swims in my vision. “I’m all right,” she echoes. “And so are you, or you will be.”
I grunt at the discomfort in my left leg, glancing at the dressings wrapped around my thigh. “Is it bad?”
“She got your femoral artery,” Rosie says, trying to sound clinical even with her voice shaking. “You’re going to be fine, and with rehabilitation you’ll make a full recovery, but if John hadn’t been there or if he hadn’t known what to do…”
Fuck. A close-range gunshot wound to the femoral artery is… not good. I’ve seen first-hand how it can play out for the worse, and I take a moment to process how close I came to the end.
I’m intimately acquainted with death. I’ve had wounds that could have killed me and watched enough people die to have long ago come to terms with my own mortality. It’s part of the reason why purpose has been essential to me—and so elusive. Nothing in my life has ever felt so significant or so profound it’s made me afraid to die. But then again, I’ve never had a reason like Rosie to keep living.
“Why was John there?” I ask. “How did he know?”
“Drew heard everything over the phone,” she says. “He called John for backup.”
“Ah.” I sag back in the bed with a small sense of triumph. “At least I did one thing right.”
“What were you thinking throwing yourself at Lauren like that?” Rosie chokes up as tears leak over her cheeks. “It was rash and reckless and selfish.”
Something about the way she says it, like she knows how silly it sounds but sticks with it anyway, makes my eyes well and my mouth tick up. “I’m sorry.”
“You should be,” she retorts but the words come out thick with emotion.
I try to swallow, but it hurts. Rosie responds to my wince with a cup of water and a straw to my lips, and I struggle to sit upright before I take a sip.
“Are you hurt?” I ask, my focus drifting until it snags on the blood staining Rosie’s dress. There’s a bandage wrapped around her upper arm, and the machine beside us starts beeping erratically.
Rosie hurries to stroke my hair. “Shh. It’s okay. I’m fine. The bullet barely grazed me. It doesn’t even need stitches. I’ve also got a slight bump to the head where I fell against the wall, but I’ve had every scan and test available. The doctor says it’s nothing to be concerned about.”
I wonder briefly why nobody has brought her clean clothes to wear, then realize I have no idea how much time has passed. I don’t have the energy to ask right now, so I close my eyes, breathing slowly through the easing panic and rising pain. And guilt. So much guilt.
“I’m so sorry, Rosie.”
“Oh, baby. What for?”
“For missing the signs. For not realizing before it was too late that Lauren was a threat to you. I was distracted. I was too busy loving you when I should have been protecting you, and I got my priorities all backward. If anything had happened to you…”
I trail off with a broken groan.
“But it didn’t,” Rosie says as she lowers herself into the plastic-upholstered chair by the bed. She picks up my hand again, taking care not to disturb the tubes wrapped around my wrist, and carefully kisses my fingers. Her tears hit my knuckles in warm, wet splashes.
“Please don’t cry,” I beg. “Please.”
“I’ve never been so afraid in my entire life,” she confesses, head bowed and gasping in breaths between choked-back sobs.
Rage for Lauren and what she put Rosie through fires in my system, barely dulled by the pain medication. “Lauren is going to pay for what she did today,” I growl. “I promise I won’t rest until—”
“She was arrested,” Rosie interrupts. “She’s going away for a very long time, but that’s not what I meant. I wasn’t afraid of Lauren. I was afraid I’d lost you and I—I—couldn’t—”
She can’t talk through her tears, and my heart breaks into a thousand pieces, shattered into oblivion by regret for all the things I did wrong this last month. And frustration at all the choices I made that led us here. And devastation that Rosie trusted me to keep her safe and I failed. Worse. She handed me her heart believing I would never break it and I’m watching it fracture before my eyes.
I sweep my fingertips over her cheek as best I can with all the machines and sedatives hindering my coordination. “Marry me,” I say.
Rosie’s head jerks up and her baby blue eyes, red-rimmed and watery, grow wide. “What?”
