**Chapter 47**
**Betha's POV**
The ambulance was too small and too loud and too bright and I hated every second of being inside it.
I was holding Cossette's hand with both of mine - gripping it the way you grip something when letting go isn't an option, when letting go would mean admitting something you are not prepared to admit - and I was crying in a way that had completely abandoned any relationship with dignity or control.
The paramedic across from me was calm. Professionally, deliberately calm in the way people who do this every day learn to be calm, and I hated that too because nothing about this moment deserved calm.
"She's going to die," I said. My voice came out wrecked. "She can't die. She can't die and leave me here alone. I can't - I can't lose her."
The paramedic looked at me steadily. "She's not going to die. She fainted. Her injuries are very light - she's going to be okay."
"But she's so pale." I looked at Cossette's face - still, white, completely unlike her. Completely unlike the person who had been standing in a forest green gown two hours ago looking like she owned every room she had ever walked into. "She looks -"
"She looks pale because she's unconscious," he said, patient and even. "That's normal. Her vitals are stable. She's going to wake up."
I looked at him.
Then at Cossette.
Then I pressed her hand against my cheek and closed my eyes and said nothing else for the rest of the ride.
---
We arrived at the hospital at the same time as the second ambulance.
I saw Alex the moment the doors opened - he was already out, already moving alongside the second stretcher, his hand on the side rail, his face set with that focused determined expression he had been wearing since the moment the chandelier came down. He didn't look like himself. He looked like a version of himself that had burned away everything non-essential.
I caught one glimpse of Alaric on the stretcher before they moved him through the doors.
I didn't look again.
They took Cossette to a room. They took Alaric somewhere else - further, faster, the kind of speed that meant something I wasn't going to think about directly.
Alex appeared at my shoulder.
"Go with Cossette," he said. His voice was steady but it cost him. "I'll wait for Alaric."
I looked at him.
"Alex -"
"Go," he said. "She needs you. Go."
I went.
---
The doctor stopped me at the door.
He was young - younger than I expected, with tired eyes and that particular quality of calm that medical people develop when they have seen enough to know what requires panic and what doesn't.
"Are you family?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, without hesitation and without shame. "She's my family."
He looked at me for a moment. Then nodded once.
"We need a few minutes to assess her properly," he said. "Please wait here. I'll come and get you as soon as you can go in."
I wanted to argue.
I didn't argue.
I sat down in one of the plastic chairs outside her door and held my own hands together in my lap because they needed to be holding something and there was nothing left to hold and I stared at the door and waited.
---
I had been sitting there for maybe twenty minutes when I heard them.
The doors at the end of the corridor burst open and two figures came through at a run - and I noticed immediately, in the strange way you notice small details during large terrible moments, that they were wearing different clothes than they had been at the gala. Different everything. Nathalie in something simple, Emily in a jacket she hadn't been wearing before.
*I didn't see them,* I realized, somewhere underneath everything else. *When the chandelier fell - in all of it - I never once saw them in the crowd.*
Nathalie reached me first.
Her face was completely undone - no performance, no polish, nothing of the Nathalie Sterling the world knew. Just a woman who had heard something terrible secondhand and run toward it. Her eyes were red. Her voice was cracking before she had finished crossing the corridor.
"My dress tore badly at the gala so Emily and I left to go back and change -" she said, rushed and breathless, the explanation pouring out like she needed me to understand she hadn't chosen to be absent - "we were in the taxi on the way back when my phone started ringing and wouldn't stop and they told me - they said there was a chandelier, they said -" She stopped. Pressed both hands over her mouth. Then lowered them and said: "Where is Alaric? They said he protected her. They said he threw himself - why would he - why did it have to be him -"
I understood the question underneath that question.
I understood exactly what she was really asking and I didn't have an answer that would be kind right now, so I gave her the only one that mattered.
"Alaric is going to be okay, Nathalie," I said.
She searched my face for the certainty she needed.
Emily appeared at my side and took my hand without asking.
I let her.
I was too tired to argue and honestly - the weight of another hand in mine was something I needed right now and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
"I'm sorry," Emily said quietly. "We were gone. We didn't see any of it - we only heard when they called. I'm sorry I wasn't there. I'm sorry I wasn't with you both."
I nodded. Once. That was all I had.
Ray stepped forward from behind them. His charcoal jacket was gone somewhere between the gala and here. His eyes went immediately past me to the door of Cossette's room.
"Is she okay? Where is she?"
"The doctor told me to wait outside," I said. "He said he'd come get me when I can go in. He said she's okay - light injuries, she fainted." I paused. "Alaric is -"
"What about Alaric?" Nathalie's voice cut back in immediately.
"He's in the operating room," I said carefully. "He's going to be okay. Alex is waiting outside for him right now."
I pointed down the corridor toward where Alex was stationed - alone, sitting in one of the plastic chairs outside the surgical wing, elbows on his knees, head down, the picture of someone holding himself together through sheer stubbornness.
Nathalie stared at the word *operating* like it had been delivered in a language she didn't speak.
Then something shifted in her face - from broken to urgent.
"Operation." She repeated it once. Then: "I need to call his parents. I need to call them right now." She was already reaching for her phone, already turning, already moving down the corridor toward Alex and toward the surgical wing.
Emily looked at me - apologetic, pulled in two directions, genuinely sorry in a way that for once I didn't feel the need to question.
"Go," I said. "She shouldn't be alone right now."
Emily squeezed my hand once before releasing it and went after Nathalie.
---
The doctor appeared at Cossette's door.
The same young one with the tired eyes. He looked at me and nodded once.
"You can go in now."
I was on my feet before he finished the sentence.
Ray was right behind me.
---
He was already at the foot of her bed by the time I cleared the doorway - standing completely still, looking at her with an expression I had no framework for. Not the Ray Lether I had seen at galas and meetings and his own living room. Something underneath all of that. Something that had been there the whole time and was only visible now because he had run out of reasons to keep it covered.
Then he said, very quietly, to no one in particular:
"I shouldn't have asked her to dance."
"It's not your fault, Ray -"
"I put her in the middle of the floor." His voice was flat. Certain in the way that guilt is always certain. "I led her there. I left her there." He moved to the chair beside her bed and sat down and reached out and took her hand, and with his other hand he touched her hair - carefully, the way you touch something you're afraid of damaging further - and said: "I should have been faster. I should have been the one protecting her. Not him."
I looked at him.
I thought about saying several things.
I decided against all of them.
"It's not your fault," I said instead, and I meant it completely. "You didn't know. None of us knew."
He said nothing.
I walked around to the other side of the bed and sat down.
And looked at Cossette.
Her color was slightly better than it had been in the ambulance - still pale, still too still, but the particular greyness had softened into something closer to just asleep. Her hair was loose against the pillow, some of the crystal dust still caught in it that no one had thought to brush out yet. Her hands rested on the blanket between where Ray sat and where I sat - he had her left, I took her right.
The three of us stayed like that in the particular silence of hospital rooms - the silence that isn't really silence but is the sound of everything that isn't being said yet.
I looked at her face.
*You cannot leave me,* I thought at her the way I had been thinking things at her our entire lives, the frequency that existed between us and had never needed words. *Do you hear me Cossette Jonas? You cannot leave me here. I have been by your side since the day we were born in the same hospital in the same hour and I am not doing the rest of this without you so you need to wake up.*
*You need to wake up right now.*
*I'm not asking.*
Author Name :
Thank you for reading 🤍
Don't forget to vote-it really means a lot to me!