The fluorescent lights hummed above like a broken hive, too bright, too sterile. The kind of place that made Kai Kealoha’s skin crawl, because it smelled of antiseptic and blood and endings. He had spent too much time throughout his life and his career standing in the halls of these places, hearing things he didn’t want to hear.

From the intel he had gathered, Chechnya had been fire and gunmetal and a fucking close call for all the Pathfinders, but especially Chris Hogan, and now—this. A white room where everything looked clean, but nothing felt safe.

Hogan was too exposed here as far as Kai was concerned. If the fuckers who were after him learned how much the big man in the bed in the room in front of him meant to him, then they would be closing on this hospital so fast, no one but God could stop them.

Kai adjusted the pale blue scrubs he’d lifted off a laundry cart, the cheap stethoscope slung around his neck doing nothing to hide the weight of the Glock strapped flat against his spine. He’d been invisible before—ghosted through safehouses, cartel compounds, DEA black sites—but never like this. Never walking into a hospital pretending to be something he wasn’t while his chest cracked wide open.

Because Hogan was in this room.

Alive. But broken.

Kai paused at the door, hand tightening on the chart he’d stolen from the nurses’ station. His knuckles were white. He should turn around. Walk away. Leave Hogan in ignorance, in safety.

But the need to see him—to make sure he was breathing—was a compulsion Kai couldn’t fight.

He pushed the door open.

Hogan lay half-upright against stiff pillows, bandages wrapping most of his head, his right shoulder and side, an IV drip whispering life back into him attached at his left inner elbow. His steel-blue eyes were barely open, but hazy, unfocused. Pupils dilated from the concussion. His jaw—square, strong, familiar—was bruised purple, a cut bisecting his lip. He looked like hell. And yet, he still looked like home.

Kai shut the door softly behind him. He forced his shoulders square, forced the smirk he’d worn through firefights and interrogations. “Evening, soldier,” he said lightly, pitching his voice lower, steadier, not wanting to agitate the concussion. “How’s the view from your luxury suite?”

Hogan blinked at him, slow. Frowned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ve met,” he rasped.

The words gutted him.

Kai swallowed hard, but the smile stayed in place. “Because I’m new on this rotation. Lucky you, getting me as your nurse. I don’t usually do sponge baths, so don’t get any ideas.”

A low chuckle escaped Hogan, wrecked but real. His eyes tracked Kai fuzzily, struggling to focus. “You don’t … look much like a nurse.”

Kai moved closer, careful, until he was within reach but not touching. If he touched, he wouldn’t stop. “That a complaint?”

“Not at all,” Hogan muttered, lips curving in that cocky half-smile that had carried them both through too many near-deaths. “Best-looking nurse I’ve ever had. And I’ve had a few.”

It was the concussion talking. It had to be. And if it wasn’t the concussion, then surely it was the drugs. But Kai took that comment and held it close to his heart, wanting to memorize it forever so that he could replay this moment again and again in times to come, but in the moment he let himself laugh, soft and broken. “Flattery, Hogan? That’s how you’re gonna play it?”

“Only card I got left to play.” Hogan’s voice cracked, but the smile lingered. Then his eyes fluttered, heavy. “You’ll … be here tomorrow?”

Kai froze. The truth was right there, already sitting on his tongue.

He wanted to tell him everything—that he’d been here all along, that they loved each other, and had loved on each other for the last eight months, that they were each other’s safe place, that he wasn’t staying because the mission he was walking into didn’t have a guaranteed return ticket. But to burden Hogan with that when his brain was fog and his body was fighting to hold on? It would be cruelty, not love.

So Kai leaned in, close enough that Hogan could see him even through the blur. Close enough that if this was the last time, it would be carved into both of them. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Hogan’s eyes slipped shut, lashes trembling. “Good,” he whispered. “Don’t leave me hanging, Rip.”

Kai’s breath hitched hard. Hogan had no idea what he’d just said. No idea what that name meant—at least, not anymore. Maybe somewhere, deep in the haze of his injured mind, the memories of them still existed, but not here, not now. Calling him Rip—Riptide—was just muscle memory, a fragment of their past slipping free. Hogan had no real recollection of who Kai was to him. Hearing that nickname, the one only Hogan had ever used, made Kai’s heart leap with joy even as it shattered him in the same instant.

He stood there until the heart monitor evened into a steadier rhythm, until Hogan’s breathing smoothed into the fragile cadence of drugged sleep.

Only then did Kai step back, every bone in his body screaming against it. He opened the door, the sterile hall yawning like a void.

He looked back once—at the man who didn’t remember him, didn’t know him—and whispered, “I’m sorry, Ace. Love you. Always.”

Then he slipped into the corridor, leaving his heart on the bed beside Chris Hogan.