Light played across Lars’s eyelids until they flickered open to slits. It was bright as heaven in here, wherever ‘here’ was. He forced his gaze to focus and found the edge of a window. The illumination came from there; the entire windowpane shone with white light. A tree’s shadows moved across the slats of the metal blinds.

He glanced to the side and tried turning his head a little. Even that small movement made pain shoot through his temples like someone was hammering a nail through his skull.

Some quack had performed a lobotomy on him, hadn’t they? Had they at least gotten rid of his demons?

He wanted to laugh. Couldn’t summon the will.

Milo had the demons, not him.

Milo.

His throat was raw dry, his mouth stuffed with invisible cotton. He slid his tongue around his palate, but even that hurt.

Why did his face feel so stiff?

An aching arm lifted, and he touched fingertips to his cheeks. Swollen. Hot. Flesh too tender for him to do more than brush his fingertips against it.

Someone had fucked him up good. Someone dressed all in white.

That trickle of memory turned into a flood.

A linen suit splashed with blood. A pissed off angel who’d lost his wings, and no fucking wonder since he’d obviously been batting for the other theological team all along.

He couldn’t summon the memory of a face, hard as he tried.

With a monumental effort, Lars pushed himself up.

His vision cleared a little.

A room. Familiar. Hospital-like in its clean lines and minimalist sterility.

The steady bleep-bleep of machinery drew his eyes. And then he looked down at himself. Heart rate monitors snaked from his chest, an IV drip from a vein in his arm.

The fuck…?

Before the blood-soaked man in white, what was there? Nothingness, and then…Angel.

That Latino motherfucker had betrayed them. Again. But for the last time.

The motel. That seedy room where his heart had thumped so hard in his chest he thought it would explode. Fear. Not for himself, but for Cora. That Zachary West had found them, and would take her. Would do to her what he’d no doubt done to Angel. Because he’d seen the bruises on that guy’s body—they were fresh, still healing. So violent as to be perverse.

A soft murmur of voices came to him. Then footsteps.

A darkly tanned face swarmed into focus. Lars blinked at it, his eyes moving down to a crisp white coat. For a moment, he wondered why there wasn’t blood on it.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “Where am I?”

“Texas.”

“I’m in a hospital?”

“Close enough, Mr. Eklund.” The doctor gave Lars a humorless smile.

“Where are they?” he asked, trying to prop himself up.

The medic shrugged, making a note in his file. “Why don’t you focus on recovering, Mr. Eklund?”

“Fuck you, where are they?” Lars wished his voice was steadier.

The doctor looked up and sighed. Then he gave his head a shake and moved to the other side of the room.

A few feet away, a curtain had been drawn around another cot. The room held four, all their curtains drawn, but he’d thought he was alone.

The doctor pulled away the curtain.

Lars tried to sit straighter, but that made the room spin.

Milo lay prone on a cot, a pipe down his throat and two more up his nose. Beside him, a machine pumped oxygen into his body. His face was bruised and lumpy and swollen. There were stitches above his eye and through one lip. Some of his hair had been shaved, and more stitches were evident in that strip of pale skull.

“He’s in a coma,” Lars said.

It wasn’t a question, but the doctor still nodded. “Chemically induced. Until he’s more stable. There may be some memory loss, perhaps even brain damage. We’ll know in a few days when the swelling goes down and we bring him out. For now, he just needs rest. And a lot of it. You both do.”

The doctor started pulling the curtain closed, but Lars let out a rough, “Please.”

The man glanced at him, a slight frown on his forehead, and then left the curtain open as he walked back to Lars.

“Cora?” Lars asked, managing to tear his eyes away from Milo a few seconds later.

“You mean, Eleodora?” the doctor corrected calmly, running the back of his pen against a nearby monitor before jotting down another figure on his file.

“Is she all right?”

The doctor’s frown deepened. “Why wouldn’t she be? She’s with Don Javier.”

Lars let out a grudging laugh that turned into a cough. “’Course.”

The doctor cocked an eyebrow at him, and then went over the bed opposite. Lars caught a glimpse of a man laying in the cot before the doctor pulled the curtain closed behind him. The two men murmured at each other, but too low for Lars to make out anything.

Lars’s eyes flashed back to the window, to the tree’s shadow. He couldn’t keep staring at Milo, wondering if that pump would malfunction and stop sending that valuable air into his lungs.

God, what a fuck up.

Why were they still alive? Was Javier going to use them as collateral?

But they’d managed to break Cora out once; how could he know they wouldn’t do it again?

He watched the tree’s shadow as the sun rose, and then sank again hours later.

Did she even know they were still alive? Would she care if they weren’t?

His heart squeezed in his chest, and he lay a trembling hand on it.

Jesus, now he was getting feels. Which was the last thing he needed in his fucking life. He let his head flop to the side and stared across the room at Milo.

Looked like they’d both been dealt a shit hand this time.