Chapter 34: The Unspoken Apology
The hallway was cold. Not the clean chill of a hospital, but the damp, seep-into-your-bones cold of concrete and bad memories. The fluorescents overhead buzzed, one of them flickering in a jagged rhythm that made the shadows along the floor twitch like nervous things.
Cain found her just around the bend from the surgery door. She was folded in on herself, knees to chest, back against the pitted cinderblock wall. Her shoulders shook in complete silence. He almost turned around. Emotions like this were a quicksand pit, and he was a man built for solid ground, for action and sarcasm and pointed strategy.
But the sight of her—small, utterly shattered in this corridor that smelled of old antiseptic and older blood—rooted him. This was the girl Coyle had practically dismantled himself for. The one he’d risked everything to find, to bring here, to fix. And now Coyle was a broken animal on a steel table, and she was breaking on the floor.
He let out a quiet breath through his nose and slid down the wall, landing on the linoleum with a soft thud. He left a good foot of space between them. He didn’t touch her. Didn’t speak. Just sat there, his own back against the cold block, and stared at the opposite wall where a dark, rust-colored stain blossomed from the baseboard like a forgotten flower.
He’d seen that stain a hundred times. He knew which Facility 9 project had bled it there. Some nights, he could almost smell the particular shade of that kid’s fear.
Bunny’s silence broke into a wet, ragged gasp for air. Then a sob tore out of her, harsh and ugly. It was followed by another, until she was crying in earnest, the sound raw and unvarnished, echoing softly in the hollow space. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, as if she could physically shove the tears back in.
Cain waited. His knuckles ached. He realized he was clenching his fists.
Minutes bled by, marked only by the flickering light and the gradual slowing of her breaths. The sobs dissolved into hiccups, then into a shaky, exhausted quiet.
“I can’t lose him,” she whispered. The words were frayed at the edges, barely audible.
Cain’s jaw worked. He kept his eyes on the rust stain. “You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.” He finally turned his head to look at her profile. Her face was splotchy, eyes swollen. She looked young. Too young for this mess. “He’s the most stubborn bastard I’ve ever met. Survived things that should have killed him ten times over. A few broken ribs and a knock on the head? That’s a Tuesday for Coyle.”
“He said a name.” Her voice was hollow. “Before he passed out. Kellan.”
The air in the hallway got thicker. Cain felt the old scar on his face pull tight.
“Yeah,” he said, his tone flattening. “He did.”
She finally looked at him, her green eyes glassy with a fresh sheen of tears, but beneath that was a sharp, gathering horror. “That means Kellan did this. Or his people. Because of me. Because Coyle took me.”
“Or because Coyle’s been poking a stick into a hornet’s nest trying to find out what Kellan’s really doing,” Cain corrected, though it was a weak distinction. The cause and effect were a tangled knot, and Bunny was at the center of it. “Point is, we know who. Now we can do something about it.”
“What can we do?” The question was pure despair. “Ghost says he might not even… come back. That the wolf might keep him.”
Cain shifted, stretching his legs out in front of him. The linoleum was unforgiving. “The wolf’s not some separate monster. It’s him. The part of him that doesn’t overthink. The part that just wants to live. Right now, that part is in charge because the thinking part got busted up. It’s keeping the engine running. Trust it.”
She blinked, absorbing that. A new kind of tension was seeping into her posture, replacing the helpless curl. “You’re not just saying that.”
“No. I’ve seen it before. After the Facility, he’d go wolf for weeks. Couldn’t stand to be in his own skin. Came back when he was ready.” He didn’t mention how those returns were—the blank dissociation, the nightmares, the times Coyle would just stare at his own hands like he didn’t recognize them.
“What do we do now?” she asked again, but the tone was different. Less ‘what can be done,’ more ‘what needs doing.’
“Now?” Cain pushed himself to his feet, joints protesting. He offered a hand down to her. It was a rough, scarred thing, but it was steady. “Now we let Ghost work. And we get ready. Because when he wakes up—and he will—the first thing he’s going to want is a plan. And the second thing he’s going to want is to get on his bike and go find the son of a bitch who did this.”
She looked at his hand, then up at his face. Something flickered in her eyes—not the meek compliance he’d seen when she first arrived, nor the raw terror of minutes ago. It was a spark of something harder. Amber, just for a second, deep in the green.
She took his hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong.