Chapter 2 THE Dying Man's One Request

The ambulance came in nine minutes.

Sebastian counted every one. He stood at the edge of the road, jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled, hands stained red up to the wrists. Not his blood. Theirs.

He didn't leave. He couldn't call anyone from the life he'd been living twenty minutes ago. That life belonged to a man who still had a fiancée. That man was dead.

He followed the ambulance to the hospital.

Fluorescent lights. Antiseptic sting. The squeak of rubber soles on tile.

He couldn't register any of that, instead he sat in the waiting area, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. His shirt was ruined. His watch, eighty thousand dollars of Swiss engineering, was cracked and smeared with someone else's blood.

A young nurse found him twenty minutes later.

"He's asking for you."

"Who?" Sebastian asked.

"The older patient. Mr. Bennett. He keeps saying, the man from the car. Bring him."

Sebastian blinked. "Me?"

"He won't stop asking."

Sebastian stood. Followed her.

The room was small. Beeping monitors. IV lines. The old man lay propped up, his face was grey, his lips cracked. His eyes found Sebastian immediately.

"The girl," he rasped. "My daughter. Is she—"

"She's alive." Sebastian's voice was rough. "Being treated. She's going to be fine."

The old man exhaled. His whole body seemed to deflate, as if that single answer had been the only thing holding his spine upright.

The old man looked smaller under the fluorescent lights, tubes threading into arms too thin, but his eyes were sharp when they found Sebastian's face.

"Come closer."

Sebastian stepped to the bedside, unsure what he was bracing for.

"Marry my daughter."

For a moment Sebastian assumed he'd misheard, or that the man was slipping into delirium. "Sir, I didn't get that?" He said in a low voice.

"Marry my daughter." The old man said firmly this time and Sebastian had stared at the old man in shock. Then he spoke carefully this time.

"Sir, all you need right now is to focus on getting through this. We can talk about—"

"There is no later." The old man's hand shot out, gripping Sebastian's wrist with a strength that startled him. "I know what's happening to me. I've known for a long time this day would come. Alisha has no one. Her mother is gone. No brothers, no sisters. When I die, she will have nothing, no one to stand between her and this world."

His grip tightened.

"I don't blame you for what happened on that road." His voice cracked, but his eyes didn't waver. "I forgive you. Do you hear me? I forgive you. But I am asking you for one thing in return. One thing only."

Sebastian stood frozen, the words landing like blows he had no way to block.

He tried to buy time. "You're in shock. Let the doctors—"

"Promise me." The heart monitor's rhythm spiked, jagged and frantic, and a nurse glanced toward the bed with new alarm.

The old man's breathing turned ragged with the effort of his own desperation.

Sebastian looked at the monitor. At the man's graying color. At a father who was not asking for revenge, not asking for money, not asking for anything a man like Sebastian was used to being asked for.

Just don't let her be alone.

"Anything," Sebastian heard himself say, low and rough. "Just don't die on me."

Then, clearer: "I'll marry her."

The old man's whole body seemed to exhale. The agitation drained out of him at once, like a held breath finally released.

Sebastian assumed that was the end of it. A promise, spoken and meant, to be honored properly once the emergency had passed.

He was wrong.

"Now," the old man suddenly said again. "It has to be now."

"Sir, you're about to go into surgery—" The helpless young nurse said.

"Now." His hand hadn't let go. "Before. I need to see it done before they take me."

Sebastian opened his mouth to argue and found no argument that would hold against a dying man's eyes.

The nurse out of helplessness, couldn't help but to step forward. "There's a notary's office two buildings over. I know the lawyer. I can call him."

Sebastian had stared at that nurse and the old man in disbelief.

Twenty minutes. It took twenty minutes for a lawyer to arrive with the kind of speed only cash and urgency could produce, papers in hand, the situation explained to him in the clipped, efficient language of people racing a clock.

The doctor appeared at the door, mask lowered just enough to speak. "His numbers are dropping. We need to take him back now."

Sebastian didn't debate it. He took the pen the lawyer offered.

This wasn't affection or some fated pull toward a stranger he'd struck with his own car. Sebastian Blackwood didn't believe in fate, and he certainly didn't believe in falling in love in a hospital corridor.

He believed in one thing: a promise was a debt, and Sebastian Blackwood did not leave debts unpaid.

He signed his name.

The door burst open before the ink had fully dried.

A young woman stumbled in, hair wild, a shallow cut above her brow still seeping, blood on her clothes that wasn't entirely her own.

But the girl didn't seem to see him or the lawyer... The documents... Or the stranger in the blood soaked shirt standing in the corner like a ghost.

She didn't register the lawyer, didn't so much as glance at the papers on the rolling table. None of it mattered. Her father was lying in a hospital bed with a tube in his arm and blood crusted along his hairline, and that was the only fact in the entire world that existed for her.

"Dad!"

Sebastian turned.

And for the first time, he looked at the girl properly.

He was glad she was okay. At least her condition didn't seem as serious as the old man.

"Dad, Dad, what happened, are you hurt? Where are you hurting? Talk to me... what happened, someone tell me what happened—" She grabbed his hand, her voice cracking on every other word. "You have to help him, please, you have to—"

She was talking to no one and everyone, demanding action from doctors who weren't in the room, from a universe that had, in the space of an afternoon, taken the one constant of her life and left it broken on a gurney.

Alisha Bennett crashed against the bed, grabbing his hand, pressing it to her cheek. Her voice broke. "You're okay. You're going to be okay. Where are the doctors? Where are they?"

Her father's eyes found her and something in his face eased at the sight of her upright and breathing.

"Alisha." His voice was a thread. "You're all right."

"I'm all right? Dad—" Her grip on his hand tightened until her knuckles went white.

"Are you going to be okay? Tell me you're going to be okay too." She stammered nervously.

He didn't answer that. Instead, his gaze moved, deliberate toward the papers on the table.

"Alisha." The old man's voice was tissue paper. "Baby. Look at me."

She looked. Her eyes were wet. Fierce and terrified.

"I'm not leaving you," she said. "I'm not."

He smiled, then touched her face with trembling fingers. Then his gaze drifted. To the documents on the side table again. To the pen.

"Sign it."

Alisha frowned. "What? Sign what? Dad, I don't understand, Dad, I don't care about whatever that is. I only care about you."

"Sign it, Alisha." His voice sharpened, this time it sounded urgent. "Please. For me. For me."

"No, no, right now we need to focus on you, we need to get the doctors, I don't care about paperwork—"

"Please." He pleaded again, and for some reasons that word broke something in her, because her father never said please like that, never with that particular fracture in his voice, like a man out of time and terrified of it.

His agitation climbed, the monitor beside him ticking faster, and the fear that refusing might somehow hurt him, might make things worse in some way she didn't understand, overrode everything else.

She grabbed the pen with a shaking hand.

She didn't read a single word. She didn't ask a single question. Her father wanted this.

That was enough.

She signed.

Alisha Bennett.

Sebastian watched her do it, watched her sign away her future to calm a dying man, without the faintest idea of what she was agreeing to, and felt something shift uncomfortably in his chest that he didn't have time to examine.

The lawyer stepped forward. Collected the document. Slid it into a folder.

Sebastian's eyes moved across it once, confirming what he already knew.

Sebastian Blackwood. Alisha Bennett.

It was done. Legally, completely done.

And the woman standing three feet from him, gripping her father's hand like it was the only solid thing left in the world, had no idea she was now his wife.

"Alisha." Her father's voice, weaker now. "Water. Get me water."

"Water? You want water? Promise me you are going to be okay?" She asked as a tear slid down her cheek.

"I will be." The old man answered with a smile.

She hesitated only a second, then she squeezed his hand before hurrying out, unable to refuse him anything, especially not today.

The door clicked shut.

The old man's face changed. The softness drained. What remained was raw.

He looked at Sebastian.

"Take care of her."

"I will," Sebastian said, and meant it more than he'd meant almost anything in his life.

"She's stubborn. She'll fight you. She'll say things she doesn't mean." A wet breath. "Don't let her push you away."

"I won't."

The old man nodded once, as if that single sentence had been the only thing keeping him upright.

Then his hand went slack in the sheets.

The monitor's rhythm dissolved into a flat, endless tone.

The old man's chest rose. Fell.

Didn't rise again.

The nurse stepped forward, checked, and sighed, nothing else needed saying.

The flatline tone filled the room like a scream.

The doctor rushed in. Voices. Hands. Compressions.

Sebastian stood very still.

It was over in forty seconds.

Then the door opened.

Alisha walked in with a paper cup of water, a small hopeful smile still on her face.

“Here, Dad, I got...”

She stopped.

The room was pin drop quiet. The doctor had stepped back. The nurse from earlier was now crying quietly into her sleeve. The monitor held one long unbroken note.

The cup slipped from her fingers. Water splashed across the tile.

“Dad?”

No one answered.

She took one step closer, then another, until she was standing right beside the bed. Her father’s hand lay open on the sheet, still warm but no longer moving. She touched it. Called his name again and again.

Nothing.

Then all of a sudden the nervous look disappeared from her face. Something raw and terrifing took its place.

Sebastian stood frozen a few feet away, blood still drying on his shirt, the signed marriage papers sitting on the table behind him.

Alisha’s eyes finally lifted from her father’s body.

They landed on him.

For the first time, she really saw the stranger in the room.

And Sebastian realized, with a sinking clarity, that the next words out of her mouth were going to change both of their lives forever.