Irina’s POV

I couldn’t stop.

That was the thing. I kept telling myself to stop — stop crying, stop shaking, stop pressing my face into his chest like he could hear me — and my body just wouldn’t listen. The tears kept coming. My hands kept gripping the front of his shirt. The sound kept crawling out of my throat, this awful, broken, ugly sound that I couldn’t swallow back down.

"How did it come to this," I’d said. Out loud. To a man who couldn’t hear me.

I still didn’t have an answer.

I pressed my forehead harder against his sternum. Felt the slow, unsteady rise and fall of his chest. Still breathing. He was still breathing. Roman had said that. *Don’t fall apart yet.* I was falling apart anyway. I was falling apart and I couldn’t stop and his hands were cold and his lips were the wrong color and all of it was—

All of it was me.

The thought hit me like a fist to the stomach.

I pulled back just enough to look at his face. He was still. Completely still, in a way I’d never seen him — Nicholas was never still, not really, not even in sleep. There was always something coiled in him, something ready. Some edge. Now there was nothing. Just the shallow lift of his chest and the bruised shadows under his eyes and his hands lying loose on the blankets like they’d forgotten what they were supposed to do.

My fault.

The words landed in my chest and sat there, burning.

I’d put that powder on my own neck. I’d let him kiss me there, knowing what it would do. I’d done it more than once — I’d done it *deliberately*, every careful, calculated time, watching him and telling myself it was the only way out, telling myself it didn’t matter, telling myself I didn’t care what happened to him because he was a monster and monsters didn’t deserve—

But I was looking at him right now.

And the only thing I felt was terror.

"I’m sorry," I whispered.

It came out before I could stop it. Thin and wrecked, barely a sound at all. I pressed my hand flat to his chest again — felt his heartbeat, wrong rhythm, too slow, still there — and something inside me cracked all the way open.

"I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Nicholas—"

His name broke apart in my mouth.

I hadn’t said it like that before. Not like it mattered. Not like the shape of it hurt. But it did. It hurt somewhere I didn’t have a name for, somewhere behind my ribs that I’d spent a long time pretending didn’t exist.

I curled over him and I cried. Not the quiet kind. Not the kind I could control. The kind that came from somewhere deeper than dignity, deeper than shame, the kind that had been locked up for so long that when it finally got out it didn’t know how to be small about it. Hot tears dripped onto his shirt. My shoulders shook. I didn’t even try to be quiet.

There was no one here to see it. Just Nicholas, who couldn’t see anything.

Just me, and what I’d done, and the awful unbearable fact that I didn’t want him to die.

I hadn’t known that. Not until right now, with his cold hands and his wrong-colored lips and the slow shallow rise of his chest. I hadn’t known how much I didn’t want it — hadn’t let myself know, had kept it locked behind walls and silence and *he’s a monster* and *I have to get out* — and now the walls were gone and the silence was gone and all that was left was this.

I didn’t want him to die.

I wanted him to open his eyes. I wanted him to look at me with that lazy, dangerous, green-eyed gaze that made my pulse go haywire. I wanted him to say something cutting, something sharp, something that I’d have to bite my tongue not to respond to. I wanted him to pull me close without asking and breathe into my hair and I wanted—

I wanted things I hadn’t let myself want.

My wolf couldn’t talk to me. She never could — not really, not in words, not the way other people described their wolves, this second voice inside them that argued and advised and kept them company in the dark. Mine had been too broken for too long. She was there. I’d always been able to feel her, faintly, like a candle flame in a storm. Present. Barely.

But right now, pressing my face into Nicholas’s chest and listening to his heartbeat stagger underneath me, I felt something else.

A sound.

His wolf.

Nicholas’s wolf, crying.

The sound went through me like a knife. My whole body seized up. I pressed my hand harder against his chest and felt the tears slide faster down my face and I thought, *he’s in there. His wolf is in there. He’s trying.* Even unconscious, even like this — that wolf was still fighting, still howling into the dark, still refusing to let go.

And my wolf — my silent, broken, barely-there wolf — I felt her stir.

"Nicholas." I said his name out loud. Pressed it against his shirt. "Come back. You have to come back."

Nothing.

I sat up a little. Looked at his face again — the hard jaw, the dark lashes, that faint scar at the corner of his brow that I’d traced with my fingertip once, in the dark, when I thought he was asleep. He hadn’t been asleep. He’d caught my wrist and held it there and said nothing, and I’d been so embarrassed I’d pretended it hadn’t happened, and now—

Now I would have given anything to have that moment back. To not pretend.

"Come on." My voice cracked. "Don’t do this. You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met in my life, you don’t get to just—"

And then I felt it.

A shift.

Under my hands, against my palms, in the rise and fall I’d been counting like a prayer — something changed. A shudder. A small, involuntary sound from somewhere deep in his chest.

I froze.

My whole body went rigid. I stared at him.

Another sound. Low, barely there. Like something surfacing from a very long way down.

"Nicholas." I scrambled upright. My hands went to his face, his jaw, his shoulders. "Nicholas. Can you hear me? Nicholas—"

He didn’t open his eyes.

But his brow furrowed. Just slightly. The faintest crease between his brows, like something was bothering him, like there was a sound he was trying to track back to its source.

That was enough.

I was off the bed before I’d decided to move. Across the room in three steps, pulling the door open, stumbling into the corridor — and then I was just screaming.

"Doctor! Someone get the doctor — now, *right now* — "

---

The room filled up fast again.

The doctor came first, medical bag already in hand, like he’d been waiting just down the hall. Behind him came two assistants. And behind them, taking up too much space in the doorway with his jaw set and his eyes sharp and dark — Roman.

I pressed myself back against the wall to let them through. Watched the doctor move to the bed, listened to the clipped professional exchange of information, watched hands check pulse and lift eyelids and do all the things that doctors did when they were trying to figure out how close someone was to the edge.

I watched Nicholas’s face.

The crease was still there. Between his brows. That small, stubborn furrow.

*He’s fighting,* I thought. *He’s still in there.*

Roman came to stand beside me.

I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes on the bed, on the doctor’s hands, on Nicholas’s face. My own hands were clasped in front of me, fingers twisted together, knuckles white. I couldn’t make them loosen. I couldn’t make myself breathe evenly. I just stood there and watched and tried not to fall apart all over again.

"He’s stronger than this," Roman said. Low. Half to himself.

I nodded without speaking. My throat was too tight for words.

Roman was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It wasn’t low anymore. It wasn’t half to himself. It was quiet the way a blade is quiet — controlled, deliberate, every syllable landing with weight.

"Whoever did this," he said.

I went very still.

"I will find them." His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. "I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t care what I have to do. I *will* find them." A pause. His jaw tightened, a muscle jumping in his cheek. "And I will make sure they spend every day wishing they’d never been born."