Chapter 37: Lose My Thoughts
The hallway was a tunnel of synthetic light and hushed, overnight sounds. The disinfectant smell was so thick it coated the back of Maya’s throat. She’d come back after her shift, drawn magnetically, unable to stay in her silent apartment with its watching plants. The two bulky men flanking Logan’s door—Leo and the other one—recognized her now. They exchanged a glance, then Leo gave a minute nod, stepping aside just enough to let her see through the narrow window.
The scene inside was a still life of exhaustion. Roman’s expensive jacket was draped over the back of the chair, his tie was loose, and his sleeves were rolled up past his forearms. The election was over, the votes being tallied in some distant, brightly lit room. The performance for the cameras was done. Yet here he was, in a chair pulled so close to the bed its metal legs were almost touching the frame.
Logan was awake. He was propped up, the high-flow cannula hissing. He looked gaunt in the low light, the angles of his face sharp enough to cut. He was saying something, his voice a low, gravelly hum Maya couldn’t hear. He moved his hand, a weak, dismissive gesture, trying to shoo Roman away.
Then his body tensed. A tremor ran through him, prelude to the storm. His head turned away from Roman, towards the empty side of the bed, and his shoulders hunched as a cough tore its way out. It was a wet, wretched sound, even muffled by the door. His whole frame convulsed with it. Maya saw the tremor in his hand as it flew to his mouth, saw the way his spine curved like a bowstring.
Roman didn’t flinch. He didn’t call for a nurse. He just leaned in closer. One hand came up, not to Logan’s back, but to the side of his neck, a firm, grounding pressure. His other arm went around Logan’s shoulders, holding him steady through the shaking. He was speaking, his mouth close to Logan’s ear, the words a continuous, low murmur lost beneath the medical din and the sound of Logan’s suffering.
Logan tried to pull away, a feeble twist of his torso. He was always stronger than he looked, but now he was a puppet with cut strings. Roman’s grip, effortlessly gentle and immovably firm, held him in place. He didn’t force him still; he simply contained the tremor, became a wall for the earthquake to break against.
The cough subsided, leaving Logan gasping, his forehead damp. Maya saw the bloody spatter on the white sheet near his knee. Roman saw it too. He didn’t recoil. He reached for the plastic cup with the straw, held it steady while Logan took a sip, his hand guiding Logan’s wrist down afterwards with a practicality that was somehow more intimate than a caress.
Logan’s head fell back against the pillow, his eyes closed, spent. He said something, lips barely moving. Maya could read the shape of the words: I’m fine. Go.
Roman didn’t go. He shifted his weight, and then, with a simple, unthinking motion, he sat on the very edge of the hospital bed. The mattress dipped. He kept his arm around Logan’s shoulders, his hand still a solid weight on his neck. He was still talking, the murmur softer now, his own head bowed slightly.
Logan’s resistance leaked away. The rigid line of his body softened, incrementally, until he was leaning into the support, his temple almost touching Roman’s shoulder. His own hand came up, fumbling, and gripped the fabric of Roman’s shirtsleeve, not pushing, but holding on. His knuckles were white.
Maya watched, her own breath held. She had seen Roman’s calculated concern, his politician’s performance. This was not that. This was something stripped bare. The power dynamic wasn’t gone—it was wired into their very history—but here, in this moment, it had transformed. It was the stronger one holding the broken one together, not for a photo, but because letting him come apart was unthinkable. The whisper at his ear wasn’t strategy. It was an anchor.
She took a step back from the window. The vinyl floor squeaked under her boot.
Inside, Roman’s head turned slightly, his eyes flicking towards the door. He saw her. There was no surprise, no irritation, no invitation. His gaze held hers for three full seconds across the dim room and through the glass. His expression didn’t change—the same exhausted, unguarded determination. Then he gave a single, shallow nod and turned back to Logan, his focus absolute once more.
Maya turned away. Leo and the other guard were studiously looking at the opposite wall. She walked down the hall, her footsteps echoing in the empty corridor. The image was burned onto the back of her eyelids: the sharp, vulnerable angle of Logan’s jaw against the dark wool of Roman’s sleeve; the utter stillness of the man holding him.
She had been so sure. The user, the prop, the cold calculation. It was all still true, probably. But it wasn’t the whole truth. Some bonds were forged in darker fires than she understood. Some debts weren’t about money or power, but about who showed up when the air was poison and held you through the bloody aftermath.
The main waiting area was empty. A TV mounted high in the corner was on mute, showing a news desk. Graphics flashed: SIONIS PROJECTED TO WIN DISTRICT 10. A grainy photo of Roman, from what looked like years ago, younger, sharper, stood beside the graphic. Next to it, a file photo of Logan, laughing, from some forgotten diner shift. HERO AIDE’S SACRIFICE SEEN AS CATALYST.
Maya stared at it. The narrative was already solidifying, a clean, simple story for public consumption. It felt obscene, seeing it here, with the real, raw, coughing truth of it just down the hall. But she also understood, with a cold jolt, that Roman’s presence in that room wasn’t just personal. It was the core of that narrative. He believed it. The power and the care were the same thing to him, inseparable. He would use Logan’s suffering to build his kingdom, and he would sit vigil through every second of that suffering because, in his own twisted lexicon, that was loyalty.
She pushed through the heavy glass doors into the night. The city air was cold and tasted of diesel and distant rain. It was a relief after the sterile hospital smell.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A number she didn’t know. She answered.
“Maya.” It was Clarissa, the woman from the ballroom. Her voice was hoarse but clear. “You left your card at the clinic. I… I got your number from the desk. I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s fine,” Maya said, walking towards the bus stop. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I swallowed a cheese grater. But I’m okay. Listen, I just… I needed to tell someone who gets it. What he did. Logan. He wasn’t a hero because he was brave. He was a hero because he was pissed. He saw that guy just… enjoying it. And he decided to ruin his day.” A weak cough. “It was the most human thing I’ve ever seen. I just wanted you to know that part, too.”
Maya closed her eyes, leaning against the bus shelter. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Is he…?”
“He’s alive,” Maya said. It was the only certainty she had.
She hung up. The bus arrived, hissing like the oxygen tubes. She climbed on, the fluorescent interior empty save for a driver who didn’t look up. She took a seat by a window, watching the darkened city slide by—the shuttered stores, the flickering neon, the occasional glow of an all-night diner like the one where Logan worked.
Her anger wasn’t gone. It was more focused now. It wasn’t just at the city’ decay, or at faceless injustice. It had targets. The biochemist in his coma. The systems that created such lonely, toxic rage. Roman Sionis and his kingdom of calculated loyalty. Even Logan, a little, for his beautiful, stupid, self-destructive courage.
But her idealism, the naive hope that vines could gentle this place… that was gone. In its place was a colder, harder understanding. Some plants grew to heal. Others grew to strangle. And some, the most interesting ones, could do both. You just had to know how to cultivate them.
She let herself into her apartment. Her plants were shadows in the dark. She didn’t turn on the main light. She walked to her small, crammed bookcase and pulled out an old botanical text, a gift from a professor who’d seen her potential years ago. She flipped past the peaceful illustrations of medicinal herbs, past the warning pages on poisonous berries, until she found the section she was looking for.
Symbiotic Mycorrhizal Networks. The Wood Wide Web. How trees communicated through vast, underground fungal networks, sharing nutrients, sending warnings about blight or pests.
She traced the diagram with a finger. A forest was not a collection of individual trees. It was a single, connected, living system. The poison and the antidote often grew from the same root.
Sitting there in the dark, the faint glow from the streetlight etching the lines of the page, Maya began to plot not with hope, but with strategy. She had access to a medical clinic, to patients, to information. She had a growing understanding of toxins and antidotes. And she had, she realized now, a connection to the very heart of the new power structure in her district.
Logan would survive. Roman would win. And the city would keep turning, thinking the story was over.
Maya closed the book. A faint, determined smile touched her lips, unseen in the dark. It was just beginning.
The door clicked shut behind her, sealing out the hallway’s fluorescent glare and leaving only the room’s dimmed hum. Roman felt the shift instantly, a pressure change in the air. Logan’s weight against his arm was a familiar burden, both fragile and stubborn. He’d seen Maya’s pale face at the window, those watchful eyes absorbing the scene like she was documenting evidence. He’d met her gaze, held it—a silent, deliberate acknowledgment—before she vanished. Her presence was a fresh irritation, a reminder that other attachments existed, other hands that might try to claim pieces of what was his.
Logan tried to pull away again, a feeble twist. “You can… go now,” he rasped. “Show’s over.” The attempt ended in a wet, rattling inhalation that promised another cough.
Roman’s hand on his neck didn’t budge. “It’s not a show.” His voice was low, stripped of its public cadence. He felt the tremors building under Logan’s skin, the seismic warning before the eruption. “And I’m exactly where I need to be.”
The cough tore through Logan, a brutal, body-wracking spasm that bent him forward. Roman moved with him, his arm encircling Logan’s shoulders, holding him upright. He felt the heat of it, the violent juddering, the damp spray against his own sleeve. He didn’t speak empty comforts. He just held on, his cheek against Logan’s temple, a solid wall against the convulsions. “Breathe,” he murmured into the sweat-damp hair. “Just breathe. I’ve got you.”
When it subsided, Logan was gasping, a string of blood-flecked saliva on his chin. Roman reached for a tissue, wiped it away with a clinical tenderness. Logan’s eyes were squeezed shut, his face ashen with effort and shame. “Don’t,” he choked out. “Don’t see me like this.”
“I see everything,” Roman said, his thumb brushing the sharp line of Logan’s jaw. “That’s the point.” The sight of Maya had crystalized it. The city wanted to make Logan a martyr, a symbol. She wanted to make him a patient, a project. Both were forms of theft. The cold realization settled in his gut: he had almost lost him twice over—first to the toxin, then to the world waiting to sanitize his sacrifice. It was unacceptable.
Logan’s head lolled back against the pillow, his chest heaving. “I’m fine,” he insisted, the lie hollow and automatic. “Go win your election.”
Roman’s grip tightened, not painfully, but with a definitive possessiveness. He shifted, sitting fully on the edge of the mattress, his body a barrier between Logan and the empty room. “The election is noise.” He said it quietly, a truth he’d never admit outside these walls. “You stopped breathing on that ballroom floor. Your lips were blue. That matters more.” He’d watched it on the security feed Emil had procured, the grainy footage of Logan folding like paper. The memory was a cold knot in his chest.
“Bullshit,” Logan coughed, a weaker echo of his old defiance. “It’s everything. It’s why I…” He trailed off, swallowing hard. “My loyalty is with you. Only you. Not the damn district. Not her clinic. You.” The declaration was interrupted by another harsh cough, this one bringing up more blood. He grimaced, turning his head away.
Roman caught his chin, gently forcing his gaze back. “I said stop talking. You’re tearing your lungs apart for sentences I already know.” His voice was a command, but his eyes were scanning Logan’s face, mapping the exhaustion. The need for the words, though, was Logan’s last hold on his own agency, and Roman understood that, too.
“The results,” Logan demanded, his green-hazel eyes fierce and fever-bright. “I need to know. Did we win?”
For a long moment, Roman simply stared at him, weighing the stubbornness against the strain. Then, with a slow exhale, he reached for the remote. The TV mounted on the wall blinked on, silent. He unmuted it. The audio was a sudden intrusion of canned applause and a commentator’s dramatic cadence.
“—and with ninety-five percent of precincts reporting, we are now prepared to make the call. The winner in District 10, in a race forever altered by last night’s act of terror and heroism… is Roman Sionis.”
A graphic filled the screen: Roman’s campaign logo, the word “CONGRESSMAN-ELECT” in bold type. Footage played—his vigil at the hospital, Logan’s gurney, the shot of the torn mask.
Roman didn’t look at the screen. He watched Logan. He saw the tension leak from his shoulders, the faint, bloody smile that touched his lips. Logan’s body sagged with a relief that wasn’t his own, a fulfillment of a brutal, shared mission.
Another cough seized him, this one deeper, more weary. Roman pulled him closer, ignoring the dampness, letting Logan’s forehead rest against his collarbone. He could feel every vibration, every struggle. He wrapped both arms around him, one hand cradling the back of his head. “We won,” Roman said softly, the words spoken into Logan’s hair. “It’s done.”
On the TV, the final percentages solidified. The opponent’s concession speech began. The political landscape of the city had permanently shifted.
Logan nodded weakly against him. “Good,” he whispered, the sound muffled. His hand fisted in Roman’s shirt, clinging with what little strength remained. “That’s good.”
Roman held him through the next series of coughs, a shorter, weaker sequence. He didn’t let go. The city had its congressman. He had this—the weight in his arms, the ragged proof of a loyalty bought not with money, but with blood and breath. The world outside, with its cameras and its Maya’s, wanted to share him, to parse his meaning. In this quiet, stained room, Roman reclaimed what was his entirely. He would let no one else this close again.
He would let no one else this close again.
The hospital discharged him eleven days later. Roman’s black SUV was idling at the private exit, Leo holding the door. “My place,” Roman said, his tone leaving no room for debate as he guided Logan’s slow shuffle across the sidewalk. Logan’s own apartment, with its mildew and uneven heat, was never an option.
“I’ve got clean clothes at my place,” Logan argued, a faint wheeze undercutting his words. He hated the way his breath still hitched, the constant reminder of damage. “I can manage.”
“You can’t climb five flights with a laundry bag,” Roman countered, his hand a firm pressure on Logan’s elbow. “You’re coming with me. It’s temporary. Stop being a child about it.”
The penthouse was a monument to cold modernism, all sharp angles, floor-to-ceiling glass, and silence. It smelled of lemony cleaner and new money. Roman installed him in a guest room that was bigger than Logan’s entire apartment. A private nurse came twice a day for the first week. The food was bland, nutrient-rich, and delivered on schedule.
Logan chafed against the invisible walls. “This is like being under house arrest in a museum,” he grumbled, pacing the vast living room before a coughing fit forced him onto the sleek, uncomfortable sofa. He glared at the skyline. “A really boring, expensive museum.”
“Consider it convalescent luxury,” Roman said without looking up from his tablet, already immersed in councilman-elect briefings. “Complain again and I’ll have the nurse puree your dinner.”
The weakness was the worst part. It wasn’t just fatigue; it was a fundamental betrayal by his own body. A walk from the bedroom to the kitchen could leave him winded, a dull ache blooming deep behind his sternum. The bloody coughs were less frequent but more terrifying for their unpredictability. They would ambush him, doubling him over while he was trying to read briefing papers Roman insisted he review. The first time it happened in the penthouse, Roman was across the room on a call. He didn’t miss a beat in his conversation, but he crossed the space, placed a glass of water on the table beside Logan, and kept his hand on Logan’s shoulder until the spasms passed. The call continued. “…infrastructure package requires a more aggressive posture,” Roman said smoothly, his thumb absently rubbing the tense muscle of Logan’s neck.
Logan stopped asking to leave. The sprawling, sterile apartment became his entire world. The security team’s presence, once just part of Roman’s background noise, became a strange comfort. Leo’s bulky silhouette by the elevator meant safety, a barrier against the outside. He found himself lingering in rooms where Roman worked, not for conversation, but for the simple, unacknowledged fact of his proximity. It was easier to breathe when Roman was in the room.
The public acceptance speech was held in a refurbished theater in the district. Roman insisted Logan attend. “You’re part of the story. The narrative demands it.” He said it like he was discussing polling data, but the suit he had delivered for Logan was tailored, expensive, and cut to discreetly accommodate the lingering frailness of his frame.
Logan stood just offstage in the shadows, Leo a solid presence beside him. The lights were blinding, the applause a physical wave. Roman owned the stage, his voice a calibrated instrument of triumph and grim resolve. He spoke of resilience, of sacrifice, of a new chapter. He did not mention Logan by name. He didn’t have to. Every camera cutaway, every dramatic pause, found Logan’s profile in the wings, a living testament.
As the final, thunderous applause began to fade, Roman didn’t milk the moment. He gave a sharp, final nod, turned on his heel, and walked offstage. The lights were still hot, the crowd still roaring. He went straight to Logan. Not for the cameras, which were now capturing his exit, but because Logan had pressed a fist to his mouth, his shoulders tense in a precursor to a cough.
“You good?” Roman asked, his voice low, his back to the audience, blocking Logan from view. His eyes scanned Logan’s face, missing nothing—the sheen of sweat, the tightness around his eyes.
Logan gave a jerky nod, swallowing hard against the irritation in his throat. “Peachy. Great speech. Very stirring.”
Roman’s hand came up, a brief, solid clasp on the back of Logan’s neck. It was over in a second. A check-in, an anchor. “Car’s out back. Let’s go.”
They were gone before the stagehands started coiling the cables.
Maya watched it on her laptop, perched on her bed surrounded by her silent, leafy audience. She saw the powerful speech, the commanding presence. But her eyes were glued to the edges of the frame, to the offstage darkness. She saw Logan’s pale, set jaw in the shadows. She saw the immediate, purposeful turn Roman made the second the performance was technically over, bypassing aides, heading straight for him. She saw the way his body angled to shield Logan, the private, searching look that lasted only a heartbeat.
It wasn't a power play. It wasn't for the cameras, which were already losing interest. It was a reflex. A habit born from weeks of monitoring every labored breath in a sterile penthouse.
The genuine care in the gesture hit her with a startling clarity. It was ugly and beautiful and possessive all at once. It wasn't the gentle nurturing she offered her plants. This was something fiercer, a grafting of one damaged thing onto another so they might survive. Roman’s loyalty was a cage, but it was also a shelter, and Logan had willingly walked into it long before the attack.
She closed her laptop. The quiet in her apartment felt different now. Her anger toward Roman didn't evaporate, but it shifted, becoming more specific, more strategic. He wasn't just a corrupt opportunist. He was a man who protected what he considered his with a terrifying, focused intensity. And Logan was his.
This changed the calculation. Poisoning the soil around a solitary plant was one thing. Disrupting a grafted union, where the roots were now intertwined, was another. She looked at her climbing ivy, its tendrils seeking purchase on the brick wall. It grew where it could, using whatever structure was available.
A new, colder resolve settled in her stomach. To understand the parasite, you first had to understand the host. And the bond between them. She would need to get closer. Not to Roman. To the space between them.