This Side of the Grave (#5 Night Huntress)

She let go of my hand to gesture to the pet carrier. “It’s not sterile for an animal to be in the same room with Don. All that hair. I can take your cat
to your old office while you—”
“What aren’t you telling me?” I repeated, slapping a hand on the elevator door when it started to close.
“Crawfield.”
Both our heads whipped up, but Tate’s indigo glare was only for my mother as he approached the elevator.
“Get off this floor, Crawfield. I told you not to come within a hundred yards of Don again. Cat.” Tate’s voice softened. “Come with me.”
“Not until someone tells me what’s going on, and as we all know, I’m in a hurry,” I growled. My mother was forbidden to come within a hundred
yards of Don? What the hell had happened?
“She directly violated Don’s medical orders,” Tate said, his gaze now flashing emerald at her.
“And he’d be dead now if I hadn’t!” My mother stopped glaring at Tate to give me a pleading look. “That’s the only reason I gave him the blood—”
“Which you had no right to do. You knew he had a DNR,” Tate snapped.
Fresh tears filled my eyes as I put together what happened from the fragments of their argument. “Don had a ‘do not resuscitate’ on his medical
orders, but you gave him some of your blood when he had the heart attack to bring him back?” I rasped, looking at my mother through a haze of
pink.
She dropped her gaze. “I knew you’d want to see him one last time.”
I let go of the cat carrier to wrap her in a fierce embrace, hearing her surprised “oof” even as Tate let out a disgusted noise.
“You can hug her all you want, but she’s suspended indefinitely, so get off this floor, Crawfield, before I throw you off.”
I let her go to round on Tate. “You can’t even stop being a dick under these circumstances? What is wrong with you, Tate!”
My voice was loud. The medical staff paused in their activities to glance our way before quickly going back to what they’d been doing.
“I’ll take your cat to your office, like I said,” my mother muttered, stepping back into the elevator and hitting the close button.
Tate took my arm, leading me down the hall, and it was only because I didn’t know if Don was awake and could hear us that I didn’t send him
flying along the polished sterile floors.
“Regardless of the circumstances, she defied orders,” Tate stated, keeping his voice low. “If she wants to be on the team, then she needs to
learn to obey orders even if she disagrees with them.”
“Some things are more important than orders,” I hissed back, stopping before we got too close to my uncle’s room. “Don might be nothing more
than a boss to you, but he means a little more than that to me. At least my mother recognized that, even if you refuse to!”
“Don’t you dare,” Tate breathed, coming closer until we were nose to nose. “Don’t you dare stand there and pretend you’re the only one losing a
family member here. I grew up passed from foster home to foster home until I turned eighteen and joined the army. Spent the next five years trying
to forget everything that happened before enlisting. Then Don took me under his wing when I was twenty-three. First fucking person to ever truly give
a shit about me, to look up my birthday and send me a card. To remember that on the holidays, I’d be alone unless he stopped by pretending to talk
about work. All this was before you ever met him.” Tate’s voice thickened with emotion. “I’d kill or die for that man, don’t you ever think I wouldn’t.”
“Then why are you letting him just die?” I demanded, the last word cracking with the grief frothing inside me.
“Oh, Cat.” Tate sighed, his entire body drooping as though something inside him had magically deflated. “Because it’s not my choice. It’s Don’s,
and he made it. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, but I sure as hell have to respect it.”
And so do you hung heavy in the air, even if he didn’t say it. I glanced down the hall toward my uncle’s room, hearing the beeps from the EKG
machine that weren’t the steady rhythm they should be.
“I’m going to ride your mother until she learns that she can’t ignore orders again, but, Cat . . .” Tate raised his hand as if he were going to touch
me, then dropped it. “Despite the fact that she shouldn’t have done it, I’m glad you got here in time,” he finished, looking away with a shine in his
own gaze.
My anger deflated with the same abruptness with which his posture had slumped. It would be easier to hold on to it, I knew. Easier to whip myself
into a rage over this and every other thing Tate had ever done to piss me off, but that would only be trying to camouflage my grief over losing
someone I loved. Tate loved Don, too, I knew that. Knew it even as I flung the “boss” comment at him before. Aside from me, Tate was probably
hurting the most right now, but he was handling his pain the way he always had—by being a good soldier.
And I was handling my pain the way I always had—running from it with denial and anger. Of the two of us, I had the least amount of room to throw
stones over coping mechanisms.
Slowly, I reached up, brushing my hand across Tate’s cheek and feeling the light stubble that said he hadn’t shaved today; very unlike his military