In Pieces
by
A.K. Hunter
Chapter Eleven
When Kevin opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was his sister's tearstained face.
"Gwen?" His voice was thick and rough with disuse.
"There he is." She squeezed his hand, mindful of the IV attached, and her voice took on a scolding tone. "You've never scared me so much in my life, Kevin Ryan."
He blinked rapidly, his eyes dry and his eyelids heavy. Memories settled at the forefront of his mind, just out of reach of his sluggish recollection, like a word stuck to the tip of his tongue. He licked his dry lips. "Got any water?"
A mauve-colored cup with a helpful straw was placed at mouth level, and he drank until the cup was empty. It wasn't nearly enough. He opened his mouth to ask for more, but a nurse chose that moment to come into his room.
"Mr. Ryan," she greeted him, helping him sit up. Gwen watched with unconcealed worry as his arms shook from the weight of pushing himself up. He felt weak and fragile as a newborn kitten.
The nurse began to chart his vitals onto a clipboard. "It's good to see you awake. Your partner will be happy to hear the news."
His awareness sharpened a bit at mention of Javi. "Where is he?" Memories began flickering through the mind-numbing exhaustion. Bits of gravel biting into his cheek. The salty-sour scent of the Hudson.
"Downstairs getting some coffee," Gwen supplied. "I don't think he's slept since he picked you up. He almost didn't find you in time." She swallowed with some difficulty, her eyes filling with tears. "You could have died."
More images shuttered in, a full and perfect recollection of his trauma, and he flinched, his eyes slamming shut as if closing them could stop the memories from pouring in. His heart monitor picked up a new cadence.
"Kevin?" Gwen took his hand.
The warmth of her fingers helped to ground him, and he forced some semblance of a smile to his face, though he was sure it looked more like a grimace. He tried to take deep, slow breaths. "I didn't though."
"What happened to you?" she asked. "You didn't show up at work. Nobody could get you on the phone…"
"Mr. Ryan, if you don't mind, I'll need to check your wound." The nurse said, slipping on latex gloves in an efficient manner. It sounded like a request for permission, but it wasn't. She turned to Gwen. "You might not want to see this."
"I'll go get Javier." Gwen wiped her face and stood up. "Ma and Dad will want to know you're awake, too. They're trying to get the first flight out of the Bahamas."
He frowned at the news, guilt twisting his empty stomach. "Tell them I'm sorry to ruin their vacation."
"They won't be sorry. They love you, Kev. We all do." Gwen kissed his head and left the room.
The nurse pulled the covers down his legs and then tucked his hospital gown up around his hips. If Kevin had been in a better mood, he might have joked with the nurse about getting too familiar with him. Instead, his eyes fell down to the gauze and medical tape on his thigh.
"You lost a lot of blood before you got here," the nurse explained, "and there was quite a lot of tissue damage from the GSW. It wasn't a through and through, so we had to remove it with surgery. But we cleaned it, stitched it, and transfused the blood volume you lost. We've given you broad-spectrum antibiotics to prevent infection and morphine for the pain." She peeled up the bandage to reveal the wound. "It really is healing nicely."
Kevin nodded. "Thanks for that." His focus narrowed to the bruised, bloody, malformed hole in his own leg, stitched closed like a bad patch job or something from a horror movie. He didn't feel anything, likely thanks to the morphine drip attached to his hand. Still, the wound was unsettling. "It'll scar?" he asked.
She nodded then replaced the bandage with the same effortlessness she'd used to peel it back. "You're lucky it didn't hit your femoral artery. You wouldn't have survived that."
"Lucky," he mused. He remembered the bathtub, the third-rate first aid Morgan had given him, designed to slow the rate at which he would bleed out, but not stop it altogether. He remembered slowly losing the feeling in his fingers and toes, his body temperature dropping steadily with each ounce of fluid lost.
He'd screamed for help till his throat was raw. He'd tried to lift himself out of the tub with ever-weakening arms, slipping on his own blood and sliding back into the porcelain death trap on each attempt. He'd held pressure on the wound until he had no pressure to offer, till all he could do was feel his life essence slip through his fingers, pooling cruelly, uselessly outside of his body.
Chills ran through his frame, and he heard the heart monitor speed up again. Fear had been a visceral, clawed thing, slicing through his heart, his lungs, and severing his mind of everything but panic, desperation. And sure, the pain had eventually abated, the fear has eventually dried up, but Kevin knew he would never forget those hours he'd spent dying.
He didn't feel lucky.
The nurse touched his shoulder, and he flinched back with a gasp. She seemed unphased by his behavior. "Mr. Ryan, would you like something to help calm you down?"
He shook his head. Words were failing him, and he struggled to pull air into his lungs.
She helped him sit up straighter, tugging his blankets back over his legs and offering a warm hand on his back. "I need you to calm down. If you can't calm yourself, I'll have to sedate you."
"I c-can't," he gasped. "N-need to t-t-talk to my p-partner." He didn't have time to waste. Alexis was still out there. Morgan was almost certainly still walking free—
Her hand drew soothing circles on his back. "You're safe now. I know you might not feel that way, but you're going to be just fine. Keep breathing for me, okay?"
Kevin nodded, sucking down great gulps of air. While panic burned through his nerve endings, he kept breathing, kept ignoring that faulty mechanism that told him he was dying all over again. He had to keep it together. He had to help Alexis. He had to get Morgan off the streets. That was his new mantra: help Alexis, catch Morgan, fall apart later.
"Much better," the nurse praised when his breathing had evened out and his heart monitor slowed to a normal rhythm. "Are you sure I can't get you anything?"
"I'd like some water," he rasped.
"I'll be right back." She left the room, and Kevin sank a little deeper into the hospital mattress. Exhaustion pressed in on him, softening the edges of his anxiety. How had he ended up in this place? They'd started out the day with a visit to Jenny's grave, a last-ditch effort for Alexis to understand him, to understand why he was so desperate to help her, to see herself the way he saw her. . . And then everything had gone sideways.
His cheeks warmed the slightest bit as he remembered her lips pressed against his. An echo pierced through his mind.
I could have loved you.
Christ, he had to get out of this hospital. Out of this bed. She'd made a deal for him. She'd mortgaged her future—again—to save him. It wasn't acceptable. He couldn't let this happen. He tried to sit up again, biting back a whimper as pain flare through his thigh. His arms shook with the effort of holding himself up.
The door to his room burst open, and Javi strode through it, throwing his arms around Kevin. "You scared the hell out of me," he whispered. "Don't ever do that to me again."
"I'll see what I can do." Kevin hugged his partner back, hating how tired he was from the simple act.
Javi sat back and took Gwen's seat next to the bed. "You look like hell."
Kevin laughed at the matter of fact tone. "I feel like it, too."
His partner, however, wasn't laughing. "What the hell happened, man?"
Kevin shrank back a little further into his starched hospital sheets. Where did he even begin?
"Castle told me about your house guest." Javier's tone was flat, betraying zero emotion. "Is she the reason I found you bleeding out next to the Hudson?"
"Yes and no." Kevin sighed, "I'm sorry I—"
"I don't want to hear an apology from you. Not yet." Javi licked his lips, looking around the room. "So while I've been looking for her, thinking that I was working the case, thinking I was helping you, you two were, what? Shacking up?"
"No! No, I haven't touched her like that since the night we met. I wouldn't take advantage like that. Come on, you know me."
"I'm not sure I do know you. The Kevin I thought I knew would never have hidden something like this from me."
"It's not like that, Javi."
"So tell me what's going on here. With no warning, you miss work, show up bleeding to death in Hell's Kitchen, and it turns out you've been harboring a criminal for the last month?"
"If you let me explain—"
"Oh, I fully intend to do so. In fact, Beckett is gonna take your statement. You're part of this case now."
Kevin shook his head. "Javi, what happened to Morgan?"
Javier frowned. "We found him with you, and he came around in the ambulanec. He was checked out last night. Said the guy who shot you choked him out, too. But I think he's fine—"
"He's dirty. He's working for the Odessa syndicate."
"What?"
Kevin told his partner what had happened, starting with getting shot outside of Pi's safehouse and ending with Morgan driving him out to the Hudson to kill him and dump his body. Javier's face paled when Kevin told him about bleeding out in the grimy, old bathtub for hours on end. Kevin found himself stumbling as he described the deal Alexis had made for him, glossing over the empty resignation in her eyes, the beautiful, heartbreaking things she'd told him, the way she'd kissed him like she knew they'd never see each other again. It was too fresh a wound, deeper than the bullet wound in his thigh.
"—and when he opened the trunk, I just sort of attacked him. I wasn't going to let him kill me, Javi…." Kevin blew out a breath. "So he's in the wind now?"
"Shit." Javier rubbed his face. "I'll put out a BOLO. And we'll add a security detail outside your room."
"Get me a map."
"What?"
"I tried my best to memorize the way from the apartment. If you can get me a map, I can try to narrow the search field down."
Javier nodded. "I'll get you one. Beckett's on her way." He stood up.
"For what it's worth, I am sorry—"
"Is she worth it?" his partner asked. "Getting shot, putting your career at risk? Is she worth all this?"
In a heartbeat, Kevin saw a repaired coffeemaker, a glowing tree, a pair of tearful blue eyes.
Thank you for showing me there's still good people in the world.
"Yes," he said without hesitation. "She is."
Javier shook his head. He left the room without another word, the door slamming shut behind him.
Not long after Kevin gave his statement to Beckett, who had traded his overdue truths for probationary status at the precinct and a long speech about trust and disappointment, Castle came to Kevin's room.
The writer was pale and drawn, his shoulders hunched forward as if he was trying to make himself smaller. "Hey," he said, slumping into the seat next to Kevin's hospital bed.
"You look about as bad as I do."
"Not to diminish everything you've been through, but it's been a week." Castle patted Kevin's shoulder. "I'm glad you're on the mend."
"Any word on Alexis?" Kevin asked.
Castle shook his head, his expression twisting. "No. No sign of her. Esposito's out following your trail."
It was unbearable, being stuck in a hospital bed while the world kept spinning around him. Each breath was another second that Morgan had to evade the police, another second Alexis was missing, trapped by the head of the Russian mafia—or worse.
"I'm sorry I outed your involvement in all this," the writer said suddenly. "I didn't know what else to do. You were both missing, then you turned up, but Alexis didn't..."
"Don't be sorry. I made my bed." He cocked his head to the side. "So, is there a particular reason you look like death warmed up? Let me guess, Beckett had it out with you when she found out the truth?"
"Yeah." Castle nodded. "But that's not why."
"What is it?"
"It's about Alexis. It… What I have to say, it'll affect her. And I feel like she should be the first one to hear it."
Kevin frowned. What could Castle possibly have to tell Alexis that he couldn't tell Kevin first? Kevin's phone rang, and both men locked eyes on the display. Esposito. Kevin glanced up at Castle for permission, and the writer nodded.
Kevin answered. "Epso? You find something?"
"You could say that." Through the phone, Kevin could make out the frustration in his partner's tone. Terrifying possibilities slipped through Kevin's head.
"Well, tell me."
"We found Crespo. He's dead."
Author's Note: Thanks very much for the reviews on the last chapter, guys. I hope you enjoyed this one as well. Please review!
Next time: We catch up with Alexis and Dimitri.