Chapter 5 - The Vigil
The drive back to Saint Jude’s Hospital was a blur of flashing red lights and roaring engines. I ran through the corridors, tearing off my wet coat, ignoring the security guards who bowed as I passed.
I burst into the ICU room.
The room was filled with medical equipment humming frantically. Three nurses were placing cooling ice packs around Clare’s body, attempting to drag down the lethal fever burning through her brain.
Her skin was flushed red, contrasting sharply with the pale grey it had been earlier. Small beads of sweat soaked her blonde hair, and she was thrashing weakly against the restraints secured to the bedframes to keep her from tearing out her IV lines.
"Clare!" I dropped to my knees beside her bed, grabbing her burning face in my cold hands. "Clare, I'm here! Look at me!"
She didn't open her eyes, but her lips moved, parched and cracked.
"Cold..." she rasped through the plastic oxygen mask, her breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. "So cold... Julian... please... don't be mad..."
Hearing her apologize to me—even while lost in the delirium of a fatal fever—tore my heart out of my chest.
"I'm not mad, baby," I wept openly, pressing my forehead against hers, uncaring of the heat radiating from her skin. "I'm not mad at you. I was never mad at you. I was an idiot. I was a coward."
"He... he doesn't want me..." she muttered, her eyes rolling beneath her closed lids as she fought against the hallucinations caused by the toxin. "I'm too weak... I break things... I'm sorry... I'm sorry..."
"Stop apologizing!" I cried, grabbing her hand, holding it against my heart so she could feel the desperate, frantic pounding inside my chest. "Feel this, Clare! Do you feel that?! That is my heart! It only beats because you are in this world! If you die, I die! Do you hear me?!"
Dr. Harrison stepped up behind me, placing a hand on my shoulder. "Julian, her heart rate is 180. If we can't break this fever in the next hour, her brain will sustain permanent damage."
I looked at Harrison, my eyes wild. "What do I do? Tell me what to do!"
"Talk to her," Harrison said gently. "The auditory nerve is the last thing to shut down. Fight for her, Julian. Give her a reason to stay."
Harrison gestured for the nurses to step back, giving us space.
I pulled the heavy chair right up to the edge of the mattress. I climbed onto the bed beside her, wrapping my large, muscular frame around her small, burning body. I pulled her head onto my chest, resting my chin against her damp hair, ignoring the wires and monitors surrounding us.
"Clare," I whispered softly into her ear, my voice shaking with raw, unfiltered emotion. "Listen to my voice."
I began to speak, telling her things I had locked away in the dark vaults of my mind for five years.
"Do you remember the first day I brought you to the estate?" I asked, stroking her hair with trembling fingers. "You were twenty-two. You wore a yellow dress that looked completely ridiculous in that gloomy old house. You dropped a vase of roses in the foyer, and you looked at me like I was going to execute you on the spot."
A tiny, faint catch in her breathing signaled she was listening.
"I fell in love with you the second you tried to clean up that glass with your bare hands," I confessed, tears falling steadily onto her forehead. "I saw your kindness, your warmth, your light... and I was terrified. Because in my world, everything you love gets destroyed. So I built a wall. I made myself cold. I told myself that if I treated you like an ornament, no one would realize how much you meant to me. No one would use you against me."
I pressed my lips against her burning temple.
"I was wrong, Clare. My silence didn't protect you. It hurt you. It let a viper walk into our home and poison you while I looked the other way."
I squeezed her hand tightly, feeling a faint, microscopic pressure return from her fingers.
"You wrote in your letter that you wanted to fade away," I whispered, my voice breaking into a sob. "Don't fade away, Clare. Fight. Come back to me, and I will take you anywhere you want to go. We'll leave the estate. We'll leave the Romano name behind. We'll build a house by the sea where you never have to see another gun, another shadow, or another drop of blood."
The monitors in the room began to shift.
Beep... beep... beep...
The frantic, terrifying rhythm of her heartbeat slowly began to settle. The digital temperature readout on the monitor flickered: 104.2... 103.8... 102.5...
Dr. Harrison stepped forward, staring at the screens in utter amazement. "The fever is breaking," he whispered.
I didn't look at the monitors. I kept my eyes fixed on Clare’s face.
Slowly—so slowly it felt like watching a miracle unfold—her long eyelashes fluttered. Her pale blue eyes opened, hazy and unfocused, searching the ambient light of the room until they found my face.
"Julian...?" she whispered, her voice barely audible over the hum of the oxygen line.
"I'm here, baby," I sobbed, kissing her cheeks, her forehead, her lips. "I'm right here. You're safe."
She looked at me, seeing the tears streaming down my face, seeing the raw, shattered ruin of the cold mafia lord who had never shown an ounce of emotion in five years.
A tiny, weak smile touched the corners of her lips.
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"You're... crying..." she whispered weakly.
"Yes," I laughed through my tears, pressing her hand against my cheek. "I'm crying, Clare. And I'm never going to stop telling you how much I love you."
