Page 6 of Fighting For You

I couldn't stop thinking about the man with the open neck wound, asking me if he was going to die.

I pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms around them.

Two years ago, I wasn't even out of nursing school. I held another man together in a parking lot while we waited for a helicopter. His neck was open from his ear to his collarbone and I kept my hands on it until they took him from me. I wasn't able to find him again, and a part of me had been wondering ever since whether the first man I ever held together made it through the night. I didn't remember his name. But I still remembered his face, and how he couldn't answer me when I asked him to tell me about himself.

Somewhere out there, under the same washed-out stars, there was a man with a scar from his ear to his collarbone. Or there wasn't.

I sat with that for a while. Then I went inside.

CHAPTER 2

Death and Transformation

KNOX

The fire was in every direction. Heat on my face, on my arms, the smoke so thick I couldn't see more than a few feet ahead of me.

"Beckett!" My voice was so small, it disappeared into the noise.

I could hear him barking somewhere deeper in the warehouse. I tried to go toward it, but the corridor was a wall of orange and the floor was too hot under my feet.

"Knox!"

My older brother grabbed me. He hauled me up over his shoulder, one arm locked around my legs, as he ran through the warehouse that was rapidly getting consumed by the flames.

"Gage! Beckett's still in there! I heard him, he's still in there!"

"I'll come back for him. I need to get you somewhere safe first!"

He set me down on the grass next to my friends, then ran back to save our dog.

I watched the building collapse on top of my brother as the beam came down on me.

Suddenly I was thirty years old.

I couldn't remember hitting the floor. My neck was wet and hot from my ear to my collarbone.

"Knox! Talk to me, brother!"

Wyatt's voice cut through my PASS alarm. He pulled me out into the parking lot where I saw her.

Dark hair. Soft hands pressing into my neck, holding me together. Her face above mine against the night sky, so close I could see nothing else. She was speaking to me in a voice that was steady and warm and wouldn't let me go.

"Stay with me, Knox."

My PASS alarm shrieked louder and louder and then⁠—

I opened my eyes.

My alarm was going off. 5:15 AM. I reached over and shut it off.

That dream again.

I rubbed my eyes and kicked off the blanket.

It had been two years since the beam collapse. Twenty since Gage died. But in the dream, it was all the same night.

I took a sip of water from the glass on my nightstand, then got up and headed to the bathroom.