Irina’s POV

*Slow-acting compound.*

The words hit me like a fist to the sternum.

I couldn’t move. I was standing in the hallway outside Nicholas’s door, and my hands — I looked down at them, and they were shaking. They were shaking so hard the tips of my fingers had gone white, and I couldn’t make them stop. I pressed them flat against my thighs. They kept shaking.

My ears were ringing.

I knew that voice. Roman’s voice. I knew the way he said it — low and controlled, every word measured, the kind of tone a man used when he was forcing himself to stay calm because everything else was burning down around him. I’d heard that voice before. When things were very bad. When things were past the point of pretending they weren’t.

I hadn’t heard it like this.

My back hit the wall. I hadn’t meant to move. My legs just — buckled a little, and I was leaning against the stone, and the cold of it soaked through my shirt, and it didn’t do anything. Nothing was doing anything. The cold didn’t ground me. The sound of my own breathing didn’t ground me. There was nothing to hold onto.

I pressed my hand over my mouth. Forced it back down. The hallway was still full of people — Nicholas’s men, the physician’s assistant with his metal case, two guards who’d been standing at attention so long they’d gone rigid — and none of them were looking at me. They were all looking at the door. At Roman.

I had to hold it together. I had to —

Roman turned.

His eyes landed on me the instant he turned, like he’d known exactly where to look. His expression didn’t change — not his mouth, not his brow, nothing that someone else might’ve caught. But something shifted in those dark eyes, just for a second. Something that wasn’t quite pity and wasn’t quite relief, but sat somewhere in between the two. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

He cleared his throat.

One sound. That was all. A single quiet sound, and the room started moving — the doctor folded his clipboard against his chest, the men shifted, the guard at the door stepped aside. Roman said something low and brief that I didn’t catch, and bodies began filtering out. Past me. Around me. Shoes on the stone floor, murmured voices, the soft click of equipment being moved.

Then Roman was in front of me.

He didn’t say anything at first. Just looked at me — and there was something exhausted in his face, something carved deep that I hadn’t noticed before, the look of a man running on pure grit and refusing to let go.

Then he reached out and put his hand on my shoulder.

Once. Firm. The kind of grip that said *hold on* without any words attached.

"He’s still breathing," Roman said quietly. "Don’t fall apart yet."

And then he was gone too. His hand lifted. His footsteps receded down the hallway. I heard the low voices of the others trailing away, the soft shuffle of movement getting farther, until the corridor was quiet enough that all I could hear was my own pulse hammering in my ears.

The door was right there.

Just a door. Heavy wood, dark grain, brass handle worn smooth from years of use.

My hand went to it.

I pushed it open.

---

The room was dim.

The curtains had been drawn — thick ones, blocking most of the afternoon light, letting in only a pale thin strip at the edges. It made everything softer. Made everything look like something you’d see in a dream, or a memory, or a place you weren’t sure was real.

Nicholas was in the bed.

I stopped just inside the door.

My brain had been running a version of this moment all the way down the corridor. Some part of me had been constructing a picture — building it frame by frame, telling itself it wouldn’t be that bad, that he’d just be asleep, that it would look like it always did when he was sleeping, that dark hair against the pillow, that slow rise and fall, something that could pass for normal if you squinted hard enough.

It didn’t look like that.

His face was white. His lips had gone purple at the edges. His hands were lying loose on top of the covers, and they looked wrong — too still, no tension in the fingers, none of that coiled-spring readiness that was so much a part of him that I’d stopped noticing it until it wasn’t there.

I crossed the room. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t decide. My feet moved and then I was at the edge of the bed and then I was sinking onto it, onto him, my hands grabbing at the front of his shirt, my face pressing into his chest, and the sound that came out of my throat was something I didn’t recognize — not a word, not a cry, just this raw broken thing that had been packed down so tight for so long it didn’t know what shape to take anymore.

His chest rose. Slow. Too slow.

But it rose.

"Nicholas." I said it into the fabric. Felt it press back against my mouth when I breathed. "Nicholas, come on."

Nothing.

I lifted my face. His was just there, right there, and I’d spent so many nights close enough to see every line of it, memorize every piece — the hard jaw, the dark lashes, the faint scar at the corner of his brow that he’d never explained — and right now all of it looked wrong. All of it looked like something I could lose.

My hand found his chest. I pressed it flat, felt the beat under my palm. It was there. Unsteady. Wrong rhythm. But there.

I exhaled.

The sound that came with the exhale wasn’t anything dignified. It cracked somewhere in the middle and came out wet. I didn’t bother stopping it. There was no one here to see it. Just Nicholas, who couldn’t see anything right now, and the thin pale strip of light from the curtains, and me — falling apart against a man who was too unconscious to tell me to stop.

"You weren’t supposed to—" I started.

I stopped.

Because what was I going to say?

*You weren’t supposed to get hurt.* Like I hadn’t been the one. Like the bottle in my hand, the powder on my fingers, the nights I’d stood in the dark counting out how much was too much and how much was just enough — like none of that had been real. Like I could say *you weren’t supposed to get hurt* with a straight face, with clean hands, with any right at all to be sitting here crying into his shirt.

My throat closed up.

The tears were coming anyway. They didn’t ask permission. They never did — they’d just shown up like this my whole life, at the worst times, at the moments when there was nothing left to hold them back, and I hated them, I’d always hated them, but right now I couldn’t stop them and I wasn’t trying.

I grabbed his hand.

His fingers were cold.

"No," I said. Out loud. Just that word. A single syllable cracking apart in the quiet room. "No, no—"

I pressed his hand between both of mine. Rubbed it. Stupid, useless reflex — like I could just warm it back up, like that was the thing that needed fixing, like I wasn’t sitting there watching the bruised color of his lips and understanding exactly why they looked like that.

I pressed my forehead to his hand. Felt the cold of his knuckles against my skin.

The tears came down in earnest then. Hot. Unstoppable. Dripping onto the blankets, onto his fingers, onto the back of my own hand where it was pressed against his.

"No," I said, into his chest, into the fabric, into the dark and the quiet and the cold hands and the wrong-colored lips and all of it. "No... how did it come to this..."