“I couldn’t stop the bleeding and they were shooting at us. They killed the kid’s mom. I got her blood on my face. It was on my lips and the kid was crying for his mom and she was gone, and we were covered with blood spatter. All I could taste was her blood.”
“It’s okay,” she soothed.
“I saw them out there on the ice, in my mind. I saw the kid. His mom.” His ragged breathing caught in his throat. His whole body shuddered. “I tasted Gabe’s blood when it aspirated out of the crit hole and sprayed my face. I hate the taste of blood.”
Her eyes welled with tears. He’d been through so much, but he’d kept it together for Gabe. Nobody who had seen him out there on the ice would’ve guessed what he was going through inside. “This was different from the kid and his mom. You saved Gabe’s life.”
“You don’t know that.”
No, she didn’t, but she had to hope. “That’s what you and I are going to believe until we hear otherwise, okay?”
“What if I killed him? What if I screwed up? What if I screwed up with the kid and killed him? I shouldn’t have taken him into that clinic.”
“You didn’t take him into the clinic. Remember? He ran into the building before you could stop him. You didn’t screw up. Not with the kid and not tonight. You didn’t. I watched you. You were a soldier at the top of his game.”
His face contorted as though the battle against shedding tears was a painful one. “I was a soldier.”
“You still are a soldier.”
He opened his eyes and looked between their bodies to stare at his trembling hands, turned red-brown with caking blood. Then he raised his head, his attention shifting past Marlena. His dull, pained eyes turned sharp and angry in the span of a heartbeat. He rose to his full height and wrapped a protective arm around Marlena’s shoulders. “I need to get out of here. There’s too many people. Fucking civilians, like we’re some freak show.”
For the first time, Marlena looked around. There was a circle around them, cutting a wide berth. He was right that most of them were civilians, and people she didn’t recognize, but also Olivia, Allison and Theo with baby Katie, Brandon, and the rest of Bomb Squad, all of whom wore expressions of worry and despair.
Marlena cupped Liam’s cheek with her hand and shifted his face until his gaze locked with hers. “They’re not treating us like a freak show. They’re here because they’re worried about you, but you don’t owe them anything right now.”
She’d never felt so protective, so fierce in her love or commitment to any one person, ever. It coursed through her like a superpower, all-consuming in its ferocity. “We’re going to walk to my car. You don’t need to say anything to anybody, and you don’t need to look at anybody. It’s just you and me and breathing, got it?”
He swallowed. “Yes. Let’s go.”
She wrapped her arm around his waist, locking them together as a unit.
After they’d taken only a few steps, Olivia stepped into their path, hugging herself, her eyes red, though she was no longer crying. “Liam, are you okay?”
Beside Marlena, Liam tensed and stopped short. He closed his eyes. “I can’t deal with her right now.”
Normally, Marlena’s heart ached for Olivia and the way Liam treated her. It was clear by the look in Olivia’s eyes that she’d absorbed the full brunt of the barb. But tonight, all Marlena felt was single-minded defensiveness.
“He’s fine,” Marlena said. “But we need some space.”
At her urging, Liam started moving again, but Olivia wasn’t done. “You did great in there, Liam. I’ve never seen you like that before, and I—”
“Olivia, please,” Marlena said, sidestepping her. It no longer mattered that she was caught in the middle of their sibling feud. She could see it from Liam’s point of view, how smothering Olivia could be, despite her good intentions. Olivia wasn’t picking up on the cues that now wasn’t the time. “We’ve got to go, but I need a favor. Will you go to the hospital and text me with updates about Gabe?”
“I will, of course,” Olivia called behind them. “Take care of him, Marlena.”
Most people in the crowd parted, letting them through. Those that didn’t, she pushed past with sheer will, propelling them toward her car. There was nothing in her mind except getting her warrior home where she could tend to his wounds in peace and privacy.
She drove through the dark streets in a haze. Liam was silent, his eyes closed.
In his apartment, while the shower water heated, she stripped him out of his hockey uniform. He stood still and let her work, his dull eyes following her every move as she took her own clothes off and led him by the hand into the shower.
With gentle purpose, she scrubbed the blood from his hands and face and neck. Then she washed the rest of his body, including his hair, making sure every inch of muscled, scarred, and tattooed skin on her warrior received her loving touch. When there was nothing more to do, she wrapped one arm around his back, then set her other hand over his solar plexus, right on top of his personal power chakra—his survivor chakra—and poured her strength into him. Everything she was, her vitality, her peace, her courage. She gave it all over to him.
His arms came around her, holding her close. Gradually, she felt the life stir in him, the pain fading. He took to rubbing a circle over her spine. She pulled her face back and studied his expression. His eyes were clearer, but so, so tormented.
“I want to go to the hospital to check on Gabe,” he said.
She knew that hospitals were a trigger for him, one of his worst. After all he’d gone through at the Iceplex, the idea of him forcing himself to confront one of his worst triggers brought out the fierce protector in her again. “I asked Olivia to text me updates, so as soon as we’re dry, I’ll check my phone. That’ll tell us all we need to know tonight. We can think about going to the hospital tomorrow.”
“The rest of the team will be at the hospital. We’re a unit. I should be with my unit.”
She cradled his cheeks. “I don’t want to see you hurt any more than you already are.”
“If I can’t go in, then I can’t. But I have to try.” He caressed her arms. “Will you come with me?”
She rocked to her tiptoes and kissed him. “Of course I will. I’m not leaving your side, for as long as you need me.” Maybe forever.
He kissed her again, lovingly. “It’s just you and me and breathing.”
She curled her hand around his neck as her lips found his jaw. “Yes,” she said. “I love the way that sounds.”
He gazed into her eyes and beyond the torment in them, she saw love. “What the hell did I ever do without you?”
Chapter Seventeen
If Liam had considered, for one second, that there might be local news vans on the hospital grounds, with reporters holding microphones and squawking into cameras that were sitting atop beefy men’s shoulders, he might have thought twice about visiting Gabe. He should have figured they’d be there. Gabe’s injury and Liam’s emergency procedure were sensational enough to help television ratings. At least they weren’t right at the hospital entrance, but at the edge of the parking lot next to a sign of the hospital’s name, probably because it made for a more picturesque shot. Probably, it had nothing to do with patient privacy, though it should have.
“We can still turn around,” Marlena said.
He unclamped his molars. “No. I need to do this.” If the cameras filmed him, then so be it. He didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about him. “What about Olivia? Is she here?”
“I texted her that we were on our way, so she could go home.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Marlena parked in a structure a long way from the hospital entrance. They kept an eye on the news reporters as they moved through the cars in the lots, and Liam fought to keep his head clear of anything except the act of breathing.
He could do this. He could go into the hospital and not have a panic attack. With only one more week of P.E.T., his understandi
ng of what happened to the kid and his mom had shifted dramatically. He knew on a lot of levels that what happened that day wasn’t his fault, but after Gabe left in the ambulance, doubts had filled his head again. The logical part of his brain continued to battle the doubt, but it was a hard sell.
His sister, in her frequent texts to Marlena, said that Gabe was in surgery. He hadn’t died on the way to the hospital. She’d texted that the doctors were hopeful. But Liam needed to talk to the docs himself, to make sure the story in his head was the correct one. That was something he’d never been able to do with the kid. All he had was his memory, and he didn’t trust it at all—not after it’d proven so wrong about so many things.
Marlena’s hand in his calmed him. She calmed him. It wasn’t a magic cure, having her by his side, but it helped ground him and remind him what was real and what mattered most. Her, him, and breathing. That was going to be his new motto from here on out.
When the first layer of sliding glass doors at the hospital lobby opened on their own, he backpedaled instinctively, his heart pounding. Marlena stepped back with him, matching his every stride.
“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath. Without thinking it through, he reached up and took hold of his cross necklace. His tribute to Lieutenant Jimmy Leighton. Jimmy would’ve kicked Liam’s ass if he’d seen him standing here like a pussy, afraid of doors and what lay beyond them.
The next time he looked up, he saw Duke standing in the open doors. Behind him, the Bomb Squad team stood at attention, flanking the entrance on both sides, forcing the doors to stay open, creating a safe passage inside.
A calm settled over Liam. Now, with his brothers standing guard, he knew he could take this previously impossible step.
“How’d you know we were here?” he said with a croak.
Brandon said, “Marlena gave us a heads-up that you were on your way, so I was watching for you out the window in the surgery waiting room.”
“Gabe?” he said. “Is he still in surgery?”
“No, sir,” Will said with the clip of a soldier speaking to a superior officer, which would have made sense if Will and Liam were still serving because Liam outranked him, but this wasn’t soldiering. “The doctors told us he’s out of surgery and in stable condition. Gabe’s parents are on their way from Ohio. We told them what you did for their son. They’re looking forward to meeting you.”
Liam’s stomach twisted into even more knots. “What exactly did you tell them?” Because from his perspective, he’d operated on their son in an unsterile environment with no anesthesia after not practicing the procedure for nearly three years.
“You saved his life,” Brandon said. “The surgeon, when he came out to update us a few minutes ago, said that if you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t done what you did, then Gabe would be dead. But he’s going to make it, the doc said. He’s okay.”
Liam had saved a life. Gabe was going to make it. The looks of gratitude in his teammates’ eyes were overwhelming. The knowledge that Gabe was okay was overwhelming. Tears pricked his eyes. He dropped to one knee and hid his face behind his clenched fist.
He didn’t deserve their gratitude because he hadn’t done anything that any other soldier wouldn’t have done. Gabe hadn’t survived because of Liam, but because Gabe was a fighter. He’d proved that when he’d lost his arms. Liam had only done what he’d been trained to, and he was just relieved his PTSD hadn’t made him screw up and gotten Gabe killed.
He bowed his head, eyes closed, and let the rush of emotion pass. He’d felt this raw before, too many times—raw and exposed and overwhelmed with pain and uncertainty. Now he understood why Will and the others were standing at attention, because falling back on their soldiering instincts was a much safer alternative to breaking down like Liam was.
His instinct to turn around and leave, to retreat into himself as he usually did, was a strong one. Then Marlena rubbed his shoulder. He opened his eyes and met her gaze. She nodded her encouragement, then offered him a hand. With her support, he stood, composing his features again.
“Sir,” Will said, “When you’re ready, we’ll escort you up to the surgery wing waiting room. The docs said they’d be back to get us when we can go see Gabe.”
He tightened his hold on Marlena’s hand as a fresh wave of panic flashed through him. “Hospitals and me don’t get along too good. Too many bad memories. I haven’t been in one since I cracked.”
Brandon stepped forward and set a hand on his shoulder, gripping it hard. “We’ve got you. We’re all in this together.”
Will’s hand found his other shoulder, then Duke’s hand settled on the back of his neck. Liam stepped one foot in front of the other until he’d crossed the threshold and stood inside the lobby, between the flanking, protective rows of his teammates.
Marlena squeezed his hand. “I’m going to walk behind you. You walk with your brothers.”
Hands found his back, his arms. The team closed in around him. They moved as a single unit to the elevators. The buffer provided by the team allowed him the distance he needed to cope with being in a hospital. In fact, he barely processed his surroundings as they moved from the elevator to one hallway, then another.
What he did think about was the day he cracked, because he remembered something new about that day. He remembered the brotherhood that had surrounded him then, too. They’d swarmed around him in the crumbling hospital clinic and kept him alive during the gun battle, then kept him safe after the kid died and Liam snapped. They were there for him in the darkest moments of that day, then every day afterward.
Despite the crushing sense of aloneness he’d remembered on that day and in the weeks and months that followed, the truth was that hadn’t been the case at all. Even when he wasn’t sure he wanted to go on living, they’d been there. When he’d gotten out of the hospital and rehab and felt lost and overwhelmed by his grief and guilt and PTSD, another soldier, Duke, had found him and thrown him a lifeline.
In the surgery waiting room, there weren’t enough chairs for all of them, but he was offered first choice. The team sat around him, with Brandon and Theo taking seats on either side of him. Elijah brought him a soda from the vending machine. It blew Liam’s mind that here he was, a messed-up-in-the-head former soldier with no real purpose, who’d once contemplated suicide instead of living with his guilt and grief, and who had lost the ability to relate to people or his family or do anything more than survive day by day, and he was being treated like a V.I.P.
He sat and ruminated on it all for a long time—the new memories of the day the kid died and what it meant that he was in a hospital again—and when he finally surfaced back to the present, he looked up to find Marlena sitting cross-legged on the floor in the corner.
He leapt up. “What are you doing down there? Jesus, I’m sorry. I forgot . . .” Shaking his head, embarrassed, he offered her a hand up. How could he forget the single most important person in his life? “Take my chair.”
She waved his hand away. “I’m a yoga teacher. I spend half my life on the floor. I like it down here.”
“Well, I don’t like you down there. Get up.”
Will shot out of his chair. “Liam, you take my chair then.”
It struck Liam like a lightning bolt how ridiculous and formal they were all being, how gravely they’d all been sitting in silence, awed by the emotional weight of the night. Before he could stop it, an awkward laugh, or maybe it was a cry, burst out of him.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, wiping away tears. “Gabe’s going to live. He’s going to get better. But I feel like we’re at a fucking funeral.”
As he said the word funeral, his phone chimed. A reminder to listen to his last P.E.T. recording of the day. The absurdity of the timing of the painful reminder that despite the joy in Gabe being alive, the kid wasn’t, the kid’s mom wasn’t, and nothing was ever going to change that, brought forth another wave of inappropriate laughter along with a handful of tears. He raised his face to t
he ceiling. “I’m so tired of not being okay.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you that isn’t wrong with all of us,” Duke said gently. “Why do you think I started this team?”
Liam hadn’t given much consideration to Duke’s motivation behind starting the team or his policy to hire wounded vets for his general contracting business beyond the fact that Duke was a Vietnam vet who’d built a post-deployment life for himself and this was his way of paying it forward. He hadn’t considered it from the angle that they’d all suffered blows to their minds—maybe even Duke, too—and that there was a rare and everlasting brotherhood in that. They all had horror stories of their pasts, tales of the viciousness of war. They’d all tasted blood and had memories of battling through hell and back.
He swabbed a hand over his face, then took a good long look at Duke. The wisdom and peace etched in Duke’s expression were what Liam hoped to achieve one day. He’d never wanted to be a leader, or to give back to other vets the way Duke did, but maybe that was exactly what he needed to do, to get out of his own head for once and pay it forward. “Thank you for doing that, for starting the team and for inviting me to be a part of it.”
“It should be me thanking you all for what you’ve given me”—Duke grinned, his eyes turning glassy—“but I won’t say that because I don’t want it to turn back into a funeral in here.”
Liam returned Duke’s somber smile, but his gaze soon slipped to Marlena, who was standing in place where she’d been sitting. He walked to her and took her hand, then led her back to his chair. He sat in it, then pulled her onto his lap, which is what he should have done in the first place because there was no place he’d rather she be.
“It’s almost Friday,” Liam said to everyone in the room. “Yoga’s on for tomorrow night, and then we’re doing practice on the ice afterward. That’s what Gabe would want us to do. We still have a losing streak to break. And now we’re doing it for Gabe.”
“What are we going to do about a goaltender?” Theo said.
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