Chapter 90: IF SHE NEEDS A HEART, A LIVER, A KIDNEY, WHATEVER IT IS, TAKE MINE
Chapter 91
Ren
I was on my knees beside her before I’d even finished crossing the room, two fingers pressed hard against the side of her throat, searching.
It was so faint I had to hold my own breath just to be sure I wasn’t imagining it, a thin, stuttering flutter under my fingertips that felt like it could give out at any second.
She was breathing but barely, each breath shallow and slow enough that the gap between them made my chest seize every single time it stretched a little too long.
"Lumi." Her name came out of me broken, nothing like my own voice.
I gathered her up against my chest, her head lolling against my shoulder, far too light in my arms, far too still for someone who filled every room she walked into.
"Stay with me. Please, stay with me. Don’t you dare do this."
For one frozen second I genuinely didn’t know which was faster... carrying her myself, running her out to the car and driving like the road belonged to me.
Or waiting the extra minute it would take an ambulance to find its way to a house buried at the end of a quiet, half-forgotten street nobody used anymore.
Every second felt like it might be the one that mattered, the one that tipped whatever scale her body was balanced on.
My wolf made the decision before I did. He surged up hard under my skin, screaming that waiting was death, that every heartbeat spent deciding was a heartbeat stolen from her, and for once I didn’t fight him at all.
I scooped her up properly, cradling her against me, and I was already moving through the hallway, down the stairs, out through that groaning front door, before I’d even finished shouting into my phone for Darren to get an ambulance moving, to meet me halfway if he had to, to move faster than anyone had ever moved for anything in his life.
I got her into the back seat of my own car rather than wait for anyone else to arrive, laying her across the seats with her head resting in my lap.
My hand pressed flat against her chest the whole drive, needing to feel that thready, stuttering heartbeat keep going, keep going, keep going, like if I stopped touching her for even a second it might simply forget how.
The ambulance met us on the main road exactly where I’d told them to be, and after that everything blurred into hospital corridors, noises and light.
A nurse prying my hand off her wrist so they could get a line into it, someone telling me I couldn’t come any further, and me refusing to hear a word of it until Darren got both hands on my shoulders and told me, low and steady, that I needed to let them work, that standing in their way wouldn’t save her, it would only slow them down.
I don’t know how long I sat in that waiting room after that. Long enough that my knee ached from bouncing against the floor tiles without me ever once being aware I was doing it.
Long enough that Darren brought me a coffee I never touched and eventually took away again, cold, untouched, exactly as he’d left it.
How would I eat when the only woman is ever loved was inside fighting for her life.
When the doctor finally came through those double doors, pulling his gloves off finger by finger, scanning the small huddle of us in the corridor, I was on my feet before he’d covered half the distance toward us.
"Are you the one here to make decisions on her behalf?" he asked, looking between me and Darren.
"Yes." The word came out of me before he’d even finished the question. "I am. Whatever it is, I am."
"I need you to sign something," he said, and something in the careful way he said it made my stomach drop before he’d explained anything at all.
He glanced at a nurse who’d followed him out, already reaching for a clipboard.
"Before we can move forward with treatment. It concerns something we found in her bloodwork."
"Tell me what’s wrong with her. All of it. I don’t need it softened."
"She’d taken a significant quantity of a sedative," he said.
"We need to flush her system thoroughly if we’re going to give her body any real chance to recover.
But there’s something in her bloodwork that changes the approach we’d normally take, and I need you to understand it before you sign anything." He paused, and in that pause I felt the entire hallway narrow down to just the two of us.
"She’s pregnant. Very early... around two weeks along, from the levels we’re seeing. The procedure we need to carry out to save her isn’t compatible with continuing that pregnancy. I need your consent to proceed knowing that."
For a moment the corridor simply stopped existing.
Pregnant. Two weeks. Ours. This would have been ours. Our first child. The one neither of us had known was coming, the one I hadn’t even had the chance to meeting properly before it was already being taken away.
"I understand this is difficult to hear." The doctor’s voice stayed level, patient, the voice of a man who’d delivered news like this more times than he probably wanted to count.
"I can’t tell you what was in her mind when this happened. I can only tell you what her body needs right now. Without this procedure, her organs begin failing, one after another, and we run out of time to help her at all. I need an answer, and I need it quickly."
I stood there a long moment, feeling two entirely separate kinds of grief sit down hard in my chest at once.
Mourning something I’d known about for less than a minute, and terror for someone I’d loved for years already.
And underneath both of them, cold and absolute, the certainty that there was only ever going to be one answer here, no matter how much the other one cost me for the rest of my life.
"Do it," I said. "Sign whatever you need me to sign. Flush everything out of her system. Her life is worth more than anything else standing in this hallway right now.
Even if we left the pregnancy untouched, it was never going to survive losing her. So there’s no real choice here, not one worth pretending we have."
"I would normally want the father present for something like this," he said carefully, watching my face. "Given how much weight this decision carries."
I lifted my head and looked him dead in the eye, I let every ounce of what I was feeling sit plainly on my face because I didn’t have the energy left to hide any of it.
"I am the father," I said. "And I am telling you, as clearly as I know how, to do whatever is within your power to save the mother.
There will be other children, if we are fortunate enough to ever get there. There is only one her in this entire world. Do you understand what I am telling you?"
He held my gaze a moment longer than necessary, and then he nodded, once, and turned to the nurse beside him.
She brought the clipboard to me, and I signed where she pointed, my hand steadier than I had any right to expect given how the rest of me felt.
Then the two of them disappeared back through those doors, leaving me alone with Darren in a corridor.
It felt like hours before the doctor reappeared. It might genuinely have been hours. I’d lost any real sense of time somewhere back near the beginning of all this.
"We’ve flushed her system," he said. "But she’s still critical. We’re working now to stabilise her, and I won’t stand here and promise you it’s guaranteed, because it isn’t, and I think you’d rather hear that plainly than be lied to."
"Do whatever you need to." My voice came out louder than I meant it, control slipping past whatever thin wall I’d been holding it behind all day.
"She is not allowed to die, do you understand me. If she needs a heart, a liver, a kidney, whatever it is, take mine. I don’t care, take whatever you need from my own body and put it into hers.
Leave her in a coma for months if that’s what it takes to keep her breathing, I don’t care how long, I will wait as long as it takes, just don’t let anything happen to her."
"Ren." Darren’s hand landed firm on my shoulder, pulling me half a step back from the doctor, his voice the only steady thing left standing in that entire corridor.
"Let him work. Yelling at him isn’t going to save her any faster, and you know that."
I dragged in a breath that shook the whole way down into my chest.
The doctor, to his credit, hadn’t flinched from any of it, he simply nodded once, told us he’d update us the moment there was anything more worth saying, and went back through the doors, leaving the two of us standing there in the wreckage of it.
I don’t remember the walk out to the car park afterward. I just remember the cold air hitting my face all at once, and my legs finally giving out from under me enough that I had to lean hard against the side of my own car just to stay upright.
Darren came out a few minutes behind me. He said nothing at first, just stood there beside me, giving me the kind of silence I think he understood, without needing to be told, was worth more right then than any words he could have offered.
"I can’t lose her." The words came out of me before I’d even decided to say it, tears spilling hot and uncontrollable down my face.