He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 145

Chapter 145

Maya’s POV

I keep hitting the button three more times after the security pattern.

Then I kept my back to Alex and my eyes on the door until the first nurse came through it at a run, and then the second, and then the doctor on call who had been at the nurses’ station and had heard something in the pattern of the call that told him this was not routine.

They all looked, at me first

“Someone was in this room,” I said. “He touched, the IV line. The junction at the,secondary port…. it looks wrong. Something may, have been introduced.”

The doctor moved to the bed.

One look at,the line and his face,changed

“Disconnect it,” he said. “Now….”

The room filled in thirty seconds.

Not chaotic…. that was the thing about trained people in a crisis, the way their urgency looked like control from the outside even when the stakes were at their highest. Two nurses flanking the bed, the doctor at the line, a third person I didn’t know coming through the door with a tray of equipment.

Questions came at me from two directions simultaneously.

“When did you notice the intruder?”

“Did you see what he did to the line?”

“How long were you asleep before you heard him?”

I answered each one in sequence, keeping my voice level and the information in the order that was most useful…. the sound at the door, the figure’s movement toward the IV, the struggle, the fall, the three seconds he had at the line before I pulled him away, the junction that looked different.

“Three seconds maximum at the line,” I said. “He may not have completed what he was trying to do.”

“Or he may have,” the doctor said, not to me…. to the nurse beside him. “We can’t assume.”

The IV was disconnected

A new line went in on the other arm with the practiced efficiency of someone for whom this was a known procedure.

Blood was drawn.

I stood at the foot of the bed and watched and kept my hand at my stomach and breathed.

The pain from the fall had settled into a dull, present ache…. not the sharp escalating kind, not the kind that had

sent us to the hospital after the Zara confrontation. Present. Monitored.

I was not going to say anything about the fall until Alex was stable.

One thing at a time.

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He was still breathing. The monitor was still running its numbers. His face was still his face.

Then his arm moved….

It started the same way as the earlier episode…… the subtle, involuntary movement of a body recalibrating. His fingers against the cover.

But it didn’t stop.

His whole arm moved. Then his shoulder. The movements were stronger than before, more insistent, the body pushing against something.

A nurse called across the room without raising her voice….

The monitor changed its sound.

The even rhythm shifted…. a faster beat, irregular, the machine registering something that the body had introduced into the equation.

The second doctor moved forward….

I stepped back.

Not willingly…. a nurse’s hand at my arm, firm and brief, the professional redirect of someone who needed me out of the working space.

I let them work.

Stood at the edge of the room and watched the people around his bed move with the compressed urgency of a team that understood what was happening and was responding to it and was not explaining it to me because explanation was not what the moment required from them.

Alex’s body kept moving….

The monitor kept beeping.

The doctor reached across the bed.

Checked something.

Looked up at the nurse across from him.

And said it.

“Get me the crash team…. Now!”

The room became a different room.

Not louder…. sharper. The way a room became sharper when the people in it understood that the margin had narrowed and everything that happened in the next few minutes was going to matter in a way the previous few minutes hadn’t.

Someone pressed a panel on the wall

An alarm…. not the bedside kind, the building kind, the frequency that communicated a specific request to a specific team that was trained for this.

More people came through the door.

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Chapter 145

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I was moved to the corridor.

Not harshly… the nurse’s hand again, guiding rather than pushing, understanding that I was not going to argue and that arguing would cost everyone something.

I stood in the corridor.

The door to Alex’s room was still open.

I could see the team working through the gap.

His body. Their hands. The monitor’s sound, altered and urgent

I pressed my back against the corridor wall and kept my hand where it was and kept my eyes on the gap in the door and thought of nothing except stay.

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