**Chapter 46**
**Betha's POV**
I couldn't stop shaking.
That was the thing nobody tells you about moments like this - that your body makes decisions before your brain does, and mine had decided to shake. My hands. My shoulders. My voice when I tried to use it and found it had become something else entirely, something broken and unfamiliar that didn't sound like me at all.
I was on my knees beside them before I even knew I had moved.
The wreckage was everywhere - crystal and twisted metal and the remains of something that had been beautiful twenty minutes ago scattered across the floor in every direction. The dust was still settling. The screaming around me had shifted from sharp panic into something lower and more sustained, the sound a room makes when it has processed the shock and arrived at horror.
Cossette was underneath him.
Alaric was on top of her, completely still, his body curved over hers in a shape that made my chest collapse - protective even now, even unconscious, even with his back -
I couldn't look at his back.
I looked at his back.
The blood was immediate and wrong and far too much of it - dark against the white of his shirt, spreading outward in a pattern that made no sense to look at directly. The chandelier had come down on him completely. He had taken all of it. Every piece of crystal and twisted metal that had been meant for Cossette had found him instead because he had put himself there on purpose without a single second of hesitation.
"Alaric." My voice came out completely wrong. "Alaric, please -"
He didn't respond.
"HELP." I turned to the room, to anyone. "HELP THEM PLEASE SOMEONE HELP-"
Ray was already there. He had crossed the floor faster than I had tracked, and now he was at Alaric's side with his hands working - assessing, directing, his voice carrying that particular quality of controlled authority that cut through panic the way almost nothing else can.
"Alex." Ray's voice was sharp. "Here. Take this side. Carefully - his back, don't -"
Alex was already moving, his face the color of something drained, his jaw set with the focused determination of a man refusing to let himself feel the full weight of what was in front of him until the moment it was over and feeling it was allowed.
"I've got it," Alex said. "I've got him."
They worked together - lifting debris piece by piece, carefully, methodically, Ray directing and Alex executing with a precision that cost both of them something visible. Each piece of crystal that came away revealed more of what was underneath and I had to stop looking at Alaric's back and focus on Cossette's face instead.
Still. Pale. Completely motionless.
"Cossette." I pressed my fingers to her jaw Warm. She was warm. "Cossette, I'm here. I'm right here."
She didn't respond.
I held her hand instead and cried in a way I hadn't cried since I was a child - ugly and uncontrolled and completely without dignity, the kind of crying that happens when your body has run out of ways to contain something.
---
That was when I felt her.
A presence at my left shoulder - perfume first, expensive and familiar and entirely wrong for this moment. I turned.
Anika.
She was crouching slightly, her red dress pooling around her on the floor, her face arranged into an expression of horror and concern that was - I looked at it directly, the way you look at something you need to be certain about - constructed. Every element of it placed deliberately. The wide eyes. The parted lips. The hand she pressed to her chest.
"Oh my God," she breathed. "Oh, Cossette - is she -"
"Don't," I said.
The word came out quiet and flat and absolute.
Anika blinked at me.
"Bethany, I'm just trying to -"
"I said don't." I turned back to Cossette and held her hand tighter. "I don't have time for you right now. And if you say her name one more time with that face I will make time. Do you understand me?"
A silence.
Then the soft sound of Anika shifting away.
I didn't watch her go. I didn't have anything left to spend on watching her go.
I had exactly one thing to spend anything on right now and she was lying unconscious on the floor of a gala with crystal in her hair and her green dress torn at the hem and her hand warm in mine.
*Stay,* I thought at her the way I had thought things at her our entire lives, the particular frequency of communication that existed between us that had never needed words. *Cossette Jonas you stay with me right now. Do you hear me? You stay.*
---
Ray and Alex worked for another four minutes before the last of the significant debris came away.
Four minutes is not a long time.
Four minutes is an extraordinarily long time when you are on your knees on the floor of a destroyed ballroom holding your best friend's hand.
When they finally lifted the last piece - a section of the chandelier's central frame, heavy and twisted, that had been lying directly across Alaric's upper back - the sound Alaric made was not a word but it was something, and I heard Ray exhale sharply at the same moment Alex said something in Russian under his breath that I didn't understand but felt the weight of completely.
Alaric's back.
The blood had soaked through entirely now - his shirt dark with it from his shoulders down, crystal fragments still embedded in places that made me look away immediately and press my free hand over my mouth.
Alex shook him gently. "Alaric. Hey. Look at me. Alaric."
A sound. Low and rough.
"He's conscious," Alex said, his voice cracking slightly on the last syllable. "Ray, he's conscious."
Ray was already beside Cossette - he reached down and took her hand, the one I wasn't holding, his fingers wrapping around hers with a careful deliberateness, his thumb pressing gently against her pulse point.
He looked at her face.
Something moved through his expression that he didn't try to control - too fast, too real, gone before it fully arrived but visible for that one unguarded second.
He kept her hand in his.
---
Frost arrived at the edge of the wreckage.
I hadn't tracked him crossing the room. I hadn't been tracking anything except Cossette and Alex's progress with the debris. But he was there now, standing at the boundary of the chaos, and he was -
I had never seen Frost Thomas look like that.
The color was gone from his face entirely. His jaw was set with the particular rigidity of someone who has locked every muscle in their body because unlocking any of them would mean feeling what is actually happening. His eyes moved from Alaric - still on the ground, Alex crouched beside him, conscious but barely - to Cossette.
They stayed on Cossette.
He took a step closer.
Then another.
He crouched slowly at her other side - the side Ray wasn't on - and his hand lifted, moving toward her face, toward her hair, toward something I had never seen Frost reach for in the entire time I had known him -
Ray looked up.
Their eyes met across Cossette's body.
Something passed between them - wordless and complicated and lasting approximately one second.
Then Ray's gaze moved slightly left.
To Anika.
Who was standing several feet back with her hands clasped in front of her and her face still wearing that constructed concern - watching Frost reach for Cossette with an expression that flickered, just once, into something that had nothing constructed about it at all.
Ray looked back at Frost.
Frost looked at Anika.
And then he lowered his hand.
Stood up.
Took one step back from Cossette and then another, his face closing back into that controlled blankness like a door being shut, and said - his voice entirely even:
"The ambulance should be here soon."
He looked at Alaric. Something crossed his face that he couldn't entirely control - grief, maybe, or guilt, or both of those things living in the same place simultaneously - and he exhaled slowly.
Then he straightened.
Stepped back further.
And said nothing else.
---
The ambulance arrived three minutes later.
The paramedics moved with the focused efficiency of people who had trained for exactly this and I stepped back to let them work, still holding Cossette's hand until the moment they needed me to let go, and then holding the edge of my own dress instead because my hands needed to be holding something.
They stabilized Alaric first - his back, the bleeding, the embedded crystal - and the sounds he made during that process were sounds I was going to hear for a long time in the quiet parts of the night. Alex stayed at his side the entire time, one hand on his arm, talking to him in a low continuous voice that I couldn't hear the words of but could hear the steadiness of, that deliberate steadiness that cost Alex something to maintain and he maintained it anyway.
They moved to Cossette.
I was already beside the stretcher before they had finished positioning it.
"I'm coming with her," I said.
It wasn't a question.
Ray stepped forward at the same moment - instinctive, immediate. He stopped when he saw my face.
"Betha -"
"I'm coming with her," I said again. Quiet. Absolute. The same tone I had used with Anika twenty minutes ago.
Ray looked at me.
Alex appeared at his shoulder, placing one hand briefly on Ray's arm. "Let her go, man," he said quietly. "Let her be with her friend."
Ray looked at Cossette on the stretcher. At her hand - the one he had been holding - now released. At her face, still pale, still motionless.
He nodded once.
Stepped back.
I climbed into the ambulance beside her and took her hand again and the doors closed and I didn't look back at the ballroom or at Ray standing there or at Frost standing somewhere further back or at Anika standing somewhere further back than that.
I looked at Cossette.
"I'm here," I told her. "I'm right here. You're okay."
I was going to keep saying it until it was true.
---
Behind us, Alex went with Alaric.
Not Frost.
Alex.
He climbed into the second ambulance without hesitating and didn't look back either, and I would find out later that he had talked to Alaric the entire ride - steady and low and continuous - about pizza, of all things. About the Neptune and whether capers were actually necessary or just pretentious. About Betha's mouse scream. About anything that kept Alaric's eyes open and his mind present and his body in the room.
Frost and Anika went home.
I found that out later too.
I didn't have words for it then.
I'm not sure I have words for it now.