Chapter Fifteen Monika
Chapter Fifteen
Monika
A familiar sound grates at my eardrums, a sound that can only be one thing. I jolt upright—or try to—but Darius’s limbs are heavy, pinning me. His arm locks over my back and his knee digs into my thigh. “What are you doing?”
I squirm. “My phone. I think my mom’s calling.”
“It’s the middle of the night. Call her in the morning,” Darius grumbles, sounding more like his old self, and deeply annoyed.
“My mom is hyperorganized and knows what time it is here,” I say on a yawn. “She wouldn’t be calling if it weren’t important.”
“Fine. Crawl,” he orders me.
“I’m not going to crawl,” I laugh, choking on the sound. “Punish me when I get back.” And in a fit of insanity, I turn over to face him in the bed and quickly dive in to give his cheek a peck.
His eyes fly open and he looks at me. Just stares.
“What?” I whisper, feeling a little self-conscious, and then even more so when he doesn’t answer. “I’ll be right back.”
I shove at him as best I can until I’m able to stumble out of the bed to his walk-in closet.
I don’t want to call my mom back while wearing nothing but my birthday suit.
Especially not after the night I’ve had.
If she knew even one of the things I got up to tonight, she’d likely hire a hit squad to kidnap me back to Berlin and never let me out of her sight.
As quietly as I can, I ravage Taranis’s walk-in closet, grabbing the first T-shirt and sweatpants I see, and book it downstairs. My phone rings again as I make it to the island.
“Annyeong, Eomma,” I say, trying to keep my voice light.
Immediately I know something’s wrong. My mom’s voice is strained as she says slowly, in Korean, “I am sorry for calling you so early your time, Monika, but Cynthia has been involved in a terrible car accident and can’t get through to her mother. Can you please go to the hospital to check on her?”
No. Absolutely not. I hate that bitch. “Of course, Eomma.”
“I know you two don’t have the best relationship,” she says, surprising me by acknowledging it for once. “But she sounded really afraid. I thought about flying in myself.” That shocks me to my core.
“What did she say happened?” I ask as I book it down the hall.
I consider going upstairs to tell Darius I’m leaving, but I can hear the sound of his snores.
Instead, I take the hallway to the left, finding the floor plan familiar even if his penthouse is three times the size of my three-bedroom.
Our places share that, in part, but absolutely nothing else.
His foyer is cold and unwelcoming, just like the rest of his penthouse.
I push the button to his elevator, my mom still talking until the connection cuts out.
“She was so excited when she caused Taranis to change into his other shape . . .” my mom says, lacking the word for reversion in Korean that would mean the exact same thing.
She cuts back in when I hit the lobby. “ . . . she took interviews for hours.” I wince, hating that more than I have a right to.
Taranis isn’t mine, even if I’m starting to feel something for Darius.
“She only wrapped up an hour ago when she drove herself home and was hit by a truck. It didn’t stop. They didn’t catch the driver . . .”
“She drove herself?” I ask, slipping into the back of a car Marsha—Taylor’s cheerier, older white-lady counterpart—hails for me, shooting a curious look down at my bare feet.
“That doesn’t sound like Cynthia.” I wasn’t even confident she had a license; her mother’s people always drove her everywhere.
“No, it doesn’t, but I guess she was so excited she thought it was a good idea.
” My mother curses, making me gasp as the car zips away from the curb.
She never curses. “Sorry, Schatz.” I stick out my bottom lip, feeling suddenly overwhelmed as she uses the German pet name my father uses for me.
“I’m just stressed. She sounded so strange when I spoke to her.
I just want you to make sure she’s okay. ”
“I can do that. She’s at Sundale Central Hospital, right?” It wasn’t the fanciest hospital, but it had the best emergency room in the country.
“Yes. She broke both of her legs in the crash and got a concussion.”
I wince. “That probably explains why she sounded so weird.”
“Yes, you’re probably right.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I speak to her, and I’ll try her mother’s assistant in the meantime.”
“Thank you.”
“I love you, Eomma.”
“I love you too, Monika.”
I get the strangest feeling that she’s relieved to be able to hear my voice. Which just makes me feel like shit. My mom was panicking and Cynthia, for all her faults, was hurting, while I was getting that good monster dick.
The car glides to a stop in front of the hospital, and I don’t bother to check my appearance before going to the front desk for Cynthia’s room number. The nurse shakes her head, then seems to do a double take at my ID, eyes widening as she says, “You’re Monika Neumann?”
I nod. “I am. Can I see Cynthia?”
“Well, she’s meant to go into surgery in less than an hour . . . but I suppose if you’re quick . . .”
“I’ll be quick.”
The Indian woman with twice as many curves as I have rises and quickly leads me down a series of hallways, some bustling, some eerier than others. “I saw the pictures you took of Cynthia and Taranis tonight.”
“Pictures?” I didn’t take any pictures, just that one video.
She nods. “At first, I thought it was so romantic, but then I wondered if something wasn’t wrong, considering that Taranis hasn’t so much as called to check on her.” She gives me a curious look, asking questions I’m not going to answer.
“I haven’t seen the pictures. I just sent a video to the PR team.” The nonanswer doesn’t seem to please the woman, who gives me a pout. Luckily, we soon arrive at a door with a whiteboard mounted to the front that reads Min-hyuck, Cynthia.
“You have twenty minutes. Don’t make me regret this.”
“I won’t.” I hustle inside, the door clicking shut at my back.
Cynthia and I stare at each other. She’s way more alert than I expected her to be.
She’s hooked up to IVs and has her legs wrapped in thick layers of gauze all the way up to the thigh and all the way down to her feet.
They hang suspended off the bed in these sad-looking gurneys.
And she doesn’t look pleased to see me. In fact, she looks downright terrified.
“Cynthia?” I say hesitantly, like I’m speaking to a wounded animal, which, I guess, in a very real sense, I am. “You okay?”
She rifles desperately through the front pocket of the oversize hoodie she’s wearing.
It’s not hers. She doesn’t own an oversize anything.
Her fingers are fumbling as she pulls out a phone—a phone that looks like it was brought here straight from the nineties.
The little brick of a Nokia is gray, with buttons and no touch screen.
I shake my head. I don’t understand what’s happening.
My voice is laced with confusion as I take a step toward her uncomfortable-looking bed. “My mom was freaking out. We haven’t been able to get hold of your mom yet.”
“I don’t want my mom to come here. I just want you to take this before they come back.
” She sniffles and starts to shake, glancing around the room as if she expects the walls to open their mouths and eat her up.
“Take it. Please. I should never have gotten involved. I should never have tried to steal your man.” She starts to weep openly, and .
. . she’s not a cute crier. It’s the ugliest I’ve ever seen her, and that, more than the sight of her two mangled legs, is what strikes fear into me and even a little bit of compassion for her.
I approach the side of her bed and place my hand on her arm.
She bows her head and cries in earnest, her face puffing up and turning red.
She pats my hand, and I place my other hand awkwardly on the top of her head.
Touching her like this makes me realize I don’t have anywhere near as much experience as I should comforting people.
This feels all kindsa weird. Shit. Am I just as out of touch with humanity as Taranis is?
The thought gives me the heebie-jeebies.
So does touching her hair. The worst part is that I expected her to push me away, but she doesn’t.
Instead, she just sobs there for another couple minutes.
“Don’t cry . . . You’ll be okay. They’ll do the best work on your legs. You won’t even see the scars.”
“Scars?” she wails. “I’m gonna have scars?”
“No! I just said you won’t be able to see them! They probably don’t . . .” My voice fails me because the nurse did just say she needs to go into surgery. How do you perform surgery without cutting anything open?
“You’re such a bitch . . .”
Not the first time I’ve been called that tonight. “So I’ve been told.”
“You should never have posted those photos.”
“What photos?”
“Don’t play dumb!” She shoves me off her, but before she does, she slaps the plastic cell phone into my palm.
I curl my fingers around it on instinct while she reaches back into her sweatshirt pocket and pulls out a snazzier device.
She unlocks it and turns it toward my face.
“These pictures. The ones you took of me and captioned Only real love causes reversions.”
“Yuck. No, I didn’t. Gag.” I scroll through the slideshow, horrified at the images. If the cropped video I sent was capable of making it look plausible that Taranis went through his reversion for Cynthia, these stills hammer it home.