For the next few hours or so, I was on the brink of unconsciousness--painful, extreme exhaustion that I could feel pulling at me. Consistently, continuously, and with a promise of relief.

It was relief, but something small, and maybe even the only conscious part of me, kept nagging at me. Fear, because what if I never woke up from this? What if I couldn't find my way out of the darkness once it pulled me in?

There was an ambulance at some point, the loud sirens echoing against my skull, the stark white walls of a hospital, whispers whispers whispers around me in scrubs and white coats. But I didn't panic because I couldn't really, and because Ryder had been holding onto me.

He'd been there on that bridge with me. I couldn't see him but he would be here with me too, wouldn't he? I'll be okay.

Even though I didn't know what time it was right then or what was happening or where I was anymore, I knew it would all be fine. He'd said it. He'd told me. He would hold on to me even if I let go.

And then I wanted to laugh at that thought alone, at that absurd thought. When had anyone ever held on to me?

It was a blur. A steady blur and then a dizzying one. I was there and then I wasn't. I thought I heard my mother's voice at some point and I wanted to laugh at that too. There were so many people here but was my mother here as well? Why would she be here? Was she here to tell me what a fool I was?

Was she here to tell me that I'd never done anything right with my life, not once?

There were long terrifying moments caught between consciousness and unconsciousness, one stranger or another pulling me out of it when I even thought as much as giving into the exhaustion. Painkillers, someone said. Was I in pain? They kept telling me to keep my eyes open. So I blinked and I blinked and tried my best even though everything kept spinning.

It felt like days, even though I think they were just mere hours before I gained any real semblance of my surroundings.

I was so bone-weary tired by then that I couldn't open my eyes anymore. I tried to open them one last time, wondering how long I'd really had my eyes closed, wondering how much time had passed, wondering if I was still in danger, but everything around me was dead silent so I didn't.

I was on a bed. Not the softest, not the one like back at home. Maybe I was back in my dorm. Maybe maybe maybe. I tried to move my hands when I felt cool air on my skin, rising goosebumps, and it must've just been a twitch since nothing happened.

There was the beep. Beep beep beep. A machine. I tried moving my hand again, a little more this time because I was starting to feel the nagging doubts within my hazy brain, but there was still nothing.

Except for a soft scraping noise like a chair being pushed against the floor. I twitched again, blinking open my eyes, heavy and sluggish, and tried to make out my surroundings. It felt like my head was filled with too many cotton balls.

I parted my lips to say something. Help me. But I couldn't voice it out.

And then there was something warm over my hand, over my fingers, shielding me from the cold air. A hand encircled my wrist and my cold palm and my own cold fingers, and I tried to flinch away but I couldn't. They were going to drug me. They are going to drug me. There was another series of beeps and I thought they sounded louder now and more terrifying.

The fingers around my wrist tightened just the tiniest of fractions before there was a warm brush of air near my ear, my hair, the side of my face.

"I'm here." The reassuring whisper said.

And so I stopped freaking out, as much as I was even capable of doing right then without much involvement from my brain, because everything was fine.

I'm here, the whisper in my head said. Quiet, reassuring, and then taunting, knowing, threatening. I will come after you.

•••

The next time I got past the fog in my brain, I was aware of a lot more of my surroundings than before and I was fully awake, fully conscious of everything around me. Which was just simply bad because nothing around me was what I needed to see right then--right after pulling myself out of what had felt like a nightmare, only to be shoved into another one.

Which also happened to be a hospital room. I was in a hospital room, on a hospital bed, all so suddenly expecting to find myself in a hospital gown--a blue so pale it was almost white--but it wasn't there. Instead, and to my utter relief, I was in my own clothes. The walls were white and bare. Everything around me was too white, especially the lights. I flinched and a hot stabbing pain sparked behind my eyes.

I fumbled around and tried to sit up, slow because I felt dizzy, but not too slow because there was a needle, an IV needle in the back of my hand and the sight of it was making me breathe funny.

Moving my eyes around the room, I saw it was mostly empty. There was a cushioned chair beside the bed I was on but empty. No one was in here besides me.

I frantically dug through my brain, trying to remember why I was here--was I stuck in a nightmare?--when my eyes found the glass window beside the closed door. It had the blinds halfway up and I could see the hospital hallway outside.

I had this sudden urge to gag when the smell of faint disinfectant started to cloud all over me.

I tried to look outside from my position and just about made out the outline of a man in dark scrubs and a white coat, talking with Ryder, standing just outside the closed room door.

Ryder. A desperate plea left my lips, a sound so small and scared that I wasn't even surprised when none of them looked my way.

And then I was trying to scramble off the bed, pry off the needle that was embedded in my skin, and perhaps it was that hurried movement that caught Ryder's attention from outside, his eyes snapping to mine from across the glass window, and his hand instantly reaching for the door as he pushed past it to step inside.

I stilled for one horrifying second and then I was scrambling on my knees to the other end of the bed, trying to get off it, out, but then Ryder was there right in front of me, tense and alarmed and speaking, "Alice, wait." And so I did. I stopped just as fast as I'd started panicking. Even if I think I'd somewhat dislodged the IV needle in my hand and even though I was sure, pretty sure by now that I'd banged the back of my head somewhere because it was hurting just like my stomach was.

Ryder came closer and closer and leaned down, hands curling on the bed on either side of me, and fixed me with his piercing blue gaze. "Alice, easy. Breathe."

No, I wanted to scream. But instead, I ran my trembling fingers--of the hand that didn't have a needle poked into it--over the back of my head and down the back of my neck and felt a small bandage there. A stitch--a something. The gauze felt dry. I snatched my hand away and looked at Ryder, feeling the second my heart started racing faster. "R-Ryder--"

"I'm here." He said. He didn't look away. He didn't move away.

I flinched softly because I was suddenly remembering him saying those exact words to me when he'd held my hand. I think I'd held onto his hand earlier.

He'd let me hold onto his hand. For how long?

As if having a mind of its own, once again my hand reached out for his, his arm, his face, the dark shirt he wore, but couldn't because I had a needle in one of my hands and it was freaking me out.

"Get me out of here." I managed to speak, swallowing. "Please. You've got to get me out of here."

The tiniest of furrows formed in between his brows before he responded, "Not yet. You've got to get cleared before I get you anywhere out of here."

Cleared. Cleared! I was drugged. Was I being drugged?

"No." I shook my head, which wasn't very much a wise decision, and repeated, "No, please." You have to understand. I can't be drugged because then they'll ask me questions and I won't think before answering and I'll tell them everything that no one has a right knowing.

That's what the men in the white coats had done. That's what, I thought with a rise of panic, the strange boy I'd met at the bar had done right as he'd bought me that drink.

Ryder frowned, blinked until it was gone, before he carefully grabbed me by the waist and maneuvered me a little to the side. He sat down on the bed in front of me and didn't let go. I didn't know how to feel about that. Relieved, probably, since I grabbed his arm this time and he didn't even blink at it.

"You were out of it for a while, querida. I'm not letting you get out of here just because those white coats frighten you." His voice was steady but he was frowning once again.

"I..." I trailed off, eyes wide and a little taken aback. He knew. Of course, he knew about that cellar and the people there. "I'm... They're drugging me. You said they're drugging me." I lifted my hand so he could see the IV needle and I saw for myself how badly my hands were shaking.

"They're not. That's just for the blood loss."

"Blood loss?"

He stared at me with a somewhat indecipherable look before tapping the back of his neck with the hand I wasn't holding onto.

I looked down from his face and to his throat and lifted my hand slowly. For one second, I almost reached out and traced my fingers over his throat, where he'd been touching, but thought better of it and touched the back of my own neck once again. The bandage was still there. My mouth felt dry.

"Are you sure?" I asked him in a small, scared voice.

"I am." He told me, and then added for good measure, "I don't lie to you."

He never really has, my brain offered helpfully.

"Okay." I swallowed past the dryness in my throat and looked around once again, feeling my heart rate leveling just a little.

"You remember what happened at the bridge, don't you?" He asked, the frown all gone, but he was still staring at me carefully. Almost as if he expected me to jump off the bed and run away the very next second.

I nodded slowly, grimacing at the pain. I remembered the bridge. The rain. Heavy rain and night sky and silvery dangerous waters. And Brooke.

I looked back at Ryder, eyes widening a little. "Where's Brooke? Is she all right? Is she hurt as well?" The last I remembered of her was...someone shoving her off the bridge. She'd been falling. "Is she...did she..."

"Your friend is fine," Ryder said.

"Are her parents here? Is someone there with her?" What if someone wasn't? What if she was still in danger?

Ryder looked down at his hand and his sleeve that I was still gripping tightly and shrugged. "I'm not sure."

"You don't know?"

He gritted his jaw and replied stiffly, "No."

"But--"

"I don't care if she lives or dies. I only didn't let her fall off that bridge because of you." He stated, voice flat. "Which was a pretty fucking stupid idea since that made it even easier for that fucker to hurt you."

I finally let go of his sleeve and rubbed my eyes. It made my head throb but I was starting to remember what exactly had happened back at that bridge. I'd gotten hurt, obviously. Someone had grabbed me. No, not someone. It had been that person in that gas mask.

I eyed him sharply. "You know him then. That...that person wearing that horrible mask."

Ryder scooted back a little and I guessed that was because I wasn't holding him near me with a deathly grip on his arm anymore. I tried not to look down at the space between us and instead clenched my jaw.

"I do."

"Who is he?"

He merely shook his head. "Why didn't you tell me?"

I bristled. "Tell you what?"

"About him. That you came across him at that nightclub I took you to."

"I didn't think you would've cared," I told him just like I remembered telling him before, on that bridge. "You were mad at me afterwards when we were in your car and I was drunk and I didn't think...I wasn't sure how to tell you about it when I was all covered in mud and you were busy killing people."

"I wasn't busy killing people."

"You told me you killed A-Ashby."

His eyes seemed to darken almost threateningly at that name. I watched him lean forward. "I only killed him because he kept spitting vile bullshit from his mouth when I asked him where you were."

I looked down at my hands, uncomfortable heat crawling up my neck. "That man in that gas mask whispered something to me just before he left that party. Something about death. I think he was telling me about Brooke even then, what he would be doing to Brooke. I just...don't know how he knows Brooke."

Ryder pulled away once again and raked a hand through his unruly dark hair. "He put a tracker in you."

I looked at him. "I am aware he was...that he was stalking me." Even saying it felt unreal, terrifying, dreadful. He'd found me in that bar that night. Could it be that the boy I'd met in that bar and the man in that gas mask were the same person? He'd told me his name, I think, before taking me to that motel room. I couldn't remember, though. Especially not now.

"No." There was disgust lacing his voice. He curled and uncurled his fists and once again raked them through his hair. Only then did I notice a very noticeable dark stain on his shirt--one that looked much like blood. Blood loss. Was that my blood or his? Was Ryder hurt? "He put a tracker in you."

I stared at him, absorbing his words, feeling my tongue turning to lead when I thought of asking what even was he saying. I didn't understand. I didn't think I wanted to understand.

Ryder must've seen it on my face since he cursed softly, so softly under his breath before waving his hand in the direction of my own. My left hand.

I looked down at it and watched in a daze at a white bandage wrapped securely around my wrist and forearm. I didn't touch it because I didn't think I'd hurt my arm back on that bridge. Why was there a bandage on my arm then?

"I..." I looked back up at Ryder. "I don't understand."

"When you saw him at that party, he put a tracker inside you. A microchip, Alice." He shook his head briefly. "I would've known if you...if you had told me about seeing him back at that party."

It was strangely absurd since everything, all of a sudden, felt like it was moving too slowly.

"You're lying." My voice sounded raw, bewildered.

"I just said I don't lie to you."

I lifted my left hand and gazed at the bandage in an almost distracted, detached way. A small, disbelieving laugh left my lips. "This is mad. He can't have just...I would've noticed!"

"It doesn't really hurt to get it inside past the skin." He stated plainly, as if he knew and as if that thought wasn't even a little bit disturbing to him. "You really wouldn't have noticed."

He'd been tracking me. Stalking me. That boy I'd met in that bar, he must be the man in that gas mask. Maybe...maybe that's how he'd found me in that bar. I'd seen him before in the library, I was sure of it. I caught a glance of him once when I'd been lounging in The Bakery with Macy. He had been following me around campus and the places near my university and...he'd found me in that bar and he'd befriended me, asked me questions about everything--things that I still couldn't remember--slipped something in my drink that he'd bought me afterwards because I hadn't been myself after inhaling all of it, and he'd left me that message about Brooke in that motel room the same night.

He'd known Brooke was going to die because he'd been that man in that gas mask and he'd been the one who had shoved her off that bridge.

Those suggestive touches, those whispers in my ear, he'd been taunting me.

"Ryder." My voice came out brittle, panicked, terrified.

Ryder tensed, alert, and his dark brows pulled together.

"Ryder, he's after me." I forced it out, heart stuttering. "He's...he's going to come after me."

I will come after you, he'd said to me on the bridge. I remembered. It hurt to remember even something as little as that.

"Yes." He answered me, seeming almost careful to not spook me any further. "But he also knows now that I'm acquainted with you."

"We...we're not acquainted!" I exclaimed, wide-eyed with panic.

His tense posture loosened just a little as if he'd examined enough and there wasn't any real threat around. It was weird--almost as if he'd been expecting something to go off. "Yes, we are." He spoke almost patiently. "He's got a sick way of going after those who have secrets, querida. Those who've lied to their own."

My heart thudded almost feverishly in my chest and the dread inside me only seemed to increase after hearing him speak those words.

"He came after you because he saw you with me at that party." He added, eyeing me strangely all the while. Almost as if he knew--knew that that wasn't the only reason.

I nodded, almost as if doing that would somehow make it true. Even though it wouldn't. It wouldn't because it wasn't true.

I have lied, I wanted to say. But I didn't know how to say it and not cower away. I didn't know how to say it without hearing--and knowing--my mother's own words in my head.

Ryder leaned forward, placing his hands on either side of me. I almost backed away on instinct but then I didn't. I held myself still. He was the one who always pulled away. That wasn't me.

"I will keep you safe." He told me. "You know I will."

"Will you?"

"Yes." The blue of his eyes was too intense to keep looking at, especially from this close. I let my gaze drop to the distance between us, at the hospital sheets. I only got a second of warning, one that I knew I needed, as he reached out slowly and gently grabbed onto my chin, lifting my face just so I'd look him in the eyes. "As long as you speak to me. As long as you don't hide from me."

I stared at him, the blue of his eyes holding me still (no, the awfully gentle touch of his fingers held me still) and I couldn't help but swallow hard. I had a feeling he wasn't just talking about me seeing the man in the gas mask before and not telling him about it. He wasn't asking me outright, I realized a little belatedly, but he knew there was something else. Something that the man in that gas mask knew and held over me.

I stared back at him but couldn't make myself nod. I wanted to...I wanted. But I didn't think I deserved it. Any of it. If I had, I wouldn't have been so keen on ruining things around me. I'd been so little when my mom started telling me I had a knack for destroying things around me, being an idiot just because I craved attention from her and from everyone. Only because I kept accidentally dropping one vase of hers after another--accidentally, I used to think.

But they weren't really accidents, were they? Mom was right. I was either too much or too little, never enough. And I was naive and a fool, to not notice what I was ruining until I'd done enough.

I wasn't little anymore. There was nothing accidental about the ruins that reflected around me.

"You saved me before," I murmured quietly. Even when I'd just been a stranger.

There was a second, two, and then a tiny quirk of his lips. A barely-there smile that made me want to surge forward, hold his face in my hands and tell him. Tell him something because keeping myself quiet was only making it hurt so awfully.

"And I'll do it again." The smile left his lips and his gaze mellowed, calm, steady. "You will be safe, querida." With me.

•••

Later when the doctor visited, I didn't even realize how relieved I was to see him without a white coat until I stopped shrinking away from him and the nurse right behind him.

He told me about the injury I'd sustained, which had needed stitches. I'd suffered through a little bit of blood loss due to the same gaping gash at the bottom of my head and the starting of my neck. And I was also going to have concussion symptoms--not severe, he said, and I was good to leave, but that I should still stay at a friend's or a family member's house just so they could keep a check over me throughout the night.

Ryder was talking to someone on his phone outside in the hallway, back towards the window so I couldn't have seen anything that he was saying. Not that it would've made much sense to me anyway. But he did come in shortly to announce that I was going to be staying with him, at his house tonight, and didn't stay long enough to hear my protests.

I was left too stunned and bewildered to have any protests.

One of the nurses took out the needle from my hand and I thanked her even when I had almost shrunk into a ball against the pillows, knees brought up to my chest and my left arm around them. She patted my knee softly and smiled.

I wanted to but I couldn't smile back.

Though when Nico showed up, looking harried and disheveled and carrying a giant sunflower in his hands that he practically thrust in my face the moment he saw me, I couldn't help but laugh. It was a pretty sad, distorted laugh.

"What the fuck, Alice." His eyes were wide and he looked upset. "Why are you here?"

I showed him the back of my head and he swore out loud--the kind of profanities my mother would've had a heart attack to if she was within hearing distance. It only caused me to laugh again which was a poor decision since it almost also made me throw up right then and there.

Nico fussed over me which only made me tear up, and then he started talking to me about the sunflower--the sunflower he'd brought for me--because he'd thought I'd died when he'd gotten a call from the hospital about me because he'd been one of my only two emergency contacts. I didn't understand why the hospital had called him and I was also somewhat dreading who else the hospital had called, but I didn't voice out the question right then because I noticed Nico's allergies acting up, and it only made me tear up even more.

"You thought I died and you still brought me a sunflower?" I asked him through the tears in my eyes.

"I told you." He had the decency to look sheepish. "Flowers are for funerals."

He'd tried to ask me what had happened, how I had managed to get myself a concussion, and when I'd just shrugged, he'd seemed sad and concerned--something that wasn't Nico at all.

"Can you...maybe visit Brooke too?" I asked him when the silence between us had started to become unbearable. "She's--"

"I know." He stopped me, nudging me softly on the shoulder where he sat just beside me on the bed. "I saw Soren out in the hallway. I think I spotted Brooke's grandparents as well. There's an officer too outside."

I hummed softly.

"Was he here to question you as well?"

I shook my head. The officer hadn't once stepped into my room, mainly because Ryder had told me he'd take care of it. I didn't know what that meant but there hadn't been any officers in here, or anyone else who'd demanded answers from me of any kind. Just Ryder, and he hadn't even asked me much.

Nico soon left me when one of the nurses came inside to remind him of the visiting hours, but not before squeezing me into a quick hug, which I knew he was embarrassed about since he punched me on the arm right after we pulled away. He promised me he'd let me know how Brooke's doing, but also that I shouldn't be on my phone too much because of the concussion so he'd just call me later.

I nodded and he squeezed me into another hug (which had me laughing once again because Nico, I was pretty sure, had never hugged anyone this much in his whole life). He said he was leaving, even though he looked pretty reluctant, especially since the visiting hours were going by and he still had Brooke to check up on after I'd practically begged him to. He turned towards the door and I watched him head towards it, and only then did I notice Ryder standing by the opened doorway.

Nico's steps faltered. I watched as he eyed Nico and then me and then stared back at Nico with a look that was less calculating and more threatening after he'd spotted the single sunflower in my hands. Nico only just passed him a slightly wary look before he left.

"You should throw that away," Ryder told me as he came forward to grab his jacket off the armchair beside the bed I couldn't wait to get out of.

I looked down at my hands and the pretty sunflower. "Why?"

He paused, straightened out his jacket almost carefully, before sparing me a glance. "So that I won't have to chase your friend and shove it down his throat."

I stared at him, lips parting in surprise before I started laughing--not even realizing that I was until pain sparked up my neck and my head, and then I was groaning in pain.

"I didn't mean it to be a joke." He sounded...well, like he really hadn't meant it as a joke.

I shook my head slowly. "What have you got against sunflowers?" Especially since he'd almost bought me a whole shop of it. Well, he'd told me that had been Rafael's idea, but still.

Ryder got this strange guarded look on his face that in turn made me feel bad even though I had no idea why I was feeling bad in the first place. He eyed the flower in my hands and shrugged his jacket on.

"Throw that away," he said, "and I might just buy you more later."

"I don't need more."

Something shuttered in his gaze and he scowled at me. I realized I'd said it all wrong almost instantly, and I rushed to say it again, "I mean, I don't need you to... You shouldn't just buy me things... You can just..." You can just let me know.

I watched as an officer walked by, glancing at me from the opened door but walking past almost reluctantly.

Ryder was still frowning at me as if he didn't understand what I'd just said, and I couldn't really blame him. "You let him buy you this."

"I didn't let him. He just--"

"Get up. We're leaving." All that easiness between us, when we'd been talking earlier and when he'd let me touch his arm and when he'd touched me so gently on the face, was gone. Vanished.

"Ryder," I spoke almost desperately.

He took a step towards the door and stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets, almost as if he knew I was thinking about touching him--his arm right then. It made everything, it made me feel off balance--the sudden shift in the air.

He'd finally stopped distancing away from me, even for that one little moment, and I'd ruined that by saying something that he hadn't wanted to hear. Something that I hadn't meant to say but he'd taken the wrong way.

"Why are you--"

"We're leaving." He repeated. "Unless you wish to speak to one of the officers outside. I kept them away, but even I can't hold them off all night."

Almost on cue, the same officer walked past the room once again and I felt the unease settling in.

Fuck. "Okay, okay." I stood up from the bed gingerly, looking down at the flower in my hand and wondering if I should just throw it away after all. But obviously, I couldn't. I didn't even think I had the willpower in me right then to throw away a dead, wilting sunflower.

I stepped towards Ryder and I wish I hadn't seen him edge away from me, but I did, as he waited for me to step outside first.

Fine, then, I thought miserably. I get to finally leave this suffocating room at least.