Veil of Deception: The Replacement wife

Fourty one hours

Alexander POV:
I hadn't left this room in forty-one hours.
So I waited. I sat in the same damn chair until my spine screamed, holding her hand like it was the only thing keeping her heart beating. The nurses had stopped trying to make me eat. They'd stopped asking if I wanted to lie down. They just refilled my coffee and let me stay.

This is what I needed. I needed her to be okay or was it I needed her.

The surgeons had warned me she might wake up swinging from shock, pain, and disorientation. They'd used polite medical words, but I knew my wife. More than she knew herself her spirt.

I knew the second her mind caught up with her body she'd fight every tube, every wire, every reminder that she was still tethered to this world.

It wasn't going to be pleasant.

I'd been watching the numbers on the monitor the way sailors watch the horizon for storms calming and frightening all in the same note.

77 bpm. O₂ sat 96 %. Blood pressure 108 over 62.
Steady. Beautiful. Mine.

Then, without warning, her pulse leapt: 77 → 110 → 140 in the space of three heartbeats.

Her fingers twitched in mine, hard. Once. Twice.
Her eyelids snapped open so violently I heard the lashes brush the tape holding the oxygen tubing in place.

For one frozen second she just stared at the ceiling, pupils blown wide, black swallowing the beautiful I loved. Then every muscle in her body locked rigid. The ventilator hissed as she tried to drag in a breath that wasn't timed to the machine. The alarm started its shrill, climbing shriek.

"Scarlet—" I panicked
She jerked upright, a strangled cry ripping out of her as the movement tore at the wound. Her free hand flew to the thick dressing over her left side, nails scraping at the tape like she could claw the bullet back out. The monitors went berserk. She yanked at the IV line, at the pulse-oximeter, at the nasal cannula.
Fuck.

A sound came out of her that wasn't human: low, guttural, pure animal panic.

Her free hand flew to her throat, clawing at the tape securing the breathing tube.

"No—no—no—" It was barely a whisper, rasping around the plastic in her airway.

I lunged across the bed, catching her wrist before she could tear the tube loose. "Baby, stop, you're intubated—" I attempted to calm her.

She didn't hear me. She definitely couldn't. Her eyes were wild, glassy, fixed on something I couldn't see.

Her legs thrashed under the blanket; the arterial line in her groin tugged dangerously. The cardiac leads ripped free from her chest one by one, electrodes peeling away with sticky, wet sounds.

Monitors screamed in overlapping chaos: ventricular tachycardia, loss of waveform, O₂ sat plummeting.
She arched off the mattress, spine bowing so hard I was terrified she'd reopen every suture in her abdomen.

Her mouth opened around the tube in a silent, endless scream.

I threw my weight across her shoulders, pinning her down without crushing the chest tube. "Scarlet, look at me. You're safe. You're in hospital. It's me."

Her head whipped side-to-side, eyes rolling, searching for exits that weren't there. Panicking my heart was racing seeing her like this.

She found the central line in her neck and her fingers closed around it like claws.
If she pulled that, she would bleed out in thirty seconds.

I dropped my full weight onto her forearm, slammed the bed rail down with my hip, and roared the only thing I knew would cut through the terror.
"Scarlet, you will calm the fuck down!" I command using the voice I'd use on one of my men.