33. Blaze
BLAZE
I’m numb all over.
That’s the first thing I notice when I wake up. My mouth is dry, my arms heavy.
The world looks strangely narrow. Ceiling. Light. Curtain. Bed.
My hands, my body.
The tubes stuck into my arm. An IV. I must be in the hospital.
I have to turn my head to see the couch and the one person sitting there.
For a split second, with the shadows and the lighting and the world being so narrow, I think it’s my father.
I blink, and the hazy image resolves itself. It can’t be Dad. His hair was more gray than that, and he’d never be caught dead wearing sandals.
Sandals, in winter?
The person is on his phone, not paying any attention to me. I look away, to the other side of the bed that was completely dark, and spot the tray with the water bottle on it. I reach for it, but that takes so much effort that my hand lands on the tray with a hard thud.
The noise alerts the person on the couch. He puts his phone away and gets up, walking over to me, and picks up the water bottle.
“I thought you’d be asleep for longer,” he says.
I know him. I know I do, but the name is slipping through my brain right now, like all the images of the world around me.
“Who?” I ask.
His eyes widen. “Wait. Are you going to pull an amnesia on me? Sorry, Sir, I don’t remember my own name!”
I shake my head. “I know. Blaze Bouchard. I was with…”
Pandora.
I sit up, clutching the side of the bed. “Where’s Pandora? Is she okay?”
The man takes a sip of the water and rolls his eyes. “Okay, you are not getting points with me just for being worried about her.” He sets the water bottle down on my lap. A few drops spill from the straw onto the sheet.
Points?
Realization flashes through me.
Giulio Pavone.
I’m alone in a hospital room with Giulio Pavone.
I swallow hard and reach for the bottle. It takes me a few times to grab it, because my hands don’t go where I want them to. “Is she all right? I remember… we were in the explosion. We were about to be freed, I think? I heard Asch and River. But I don’t remember anything else.”
Giulio pulls one of the chairs closer to my hospital bed and rests his arm on the bed railing. He stares me in the eyes, and something is off, but I still don’t know what.
After a few seconds, Giulio nods. “Yeah. She’s alive, and in one piece. According to Damien, and I think I can trust him.” He taps the bed railing. “I should kill you here. I’m pretty sure I gave you a shovel talk about how I would destroy you if anything ever happened to her.”
Maybe it’s the painkillers that keep me from panicking.
“You just said she’s all right,” I point out.
Giulio bursts out laughing. “Fuck. I hate that I can see what she sees in you, Baby Bouchard. You’re fucking ballsy.”
I don’t think any of this situation is funny at all, and I’m not sure I want Giulio to know what she sees in me, but if it keeps him from stabbing me in the hospital bed, I’ll take it.
“Where is everyone?” I ask. “Why are you here?”
He grins at me. “I just told you. I’m here to maybe kill you. And everybody else got sent home. I saw your buddy Asch beg to be allowed to stay, but they’re busy with the triage from the fucking explosion you caused. Also, the cops started sniffing around, and River wisely pulled Asch away.”
Cops. Fuck.
With my dad dead, I won’t have half the sway I had before. Anyone who was there might be able to pull strings too. We still have all the data we stole from them, but this won’t go away that easily.
“How fucked are we?” I ask Giulio. “In the event you don’t murder me.”
“In the event…” Giulio leans back and stretches his arms over his head. “Well. Pretty fucked. That was public as hell. Even I have the good sense not to blow up entire buildings, Bouchard.”
Frowning makes my face feel weird. “I didn’t plan the explosion. Somebody else did that.”
“Okay, so you planned what? A big public gathering with the who’s-who of your Chaos alums? And then… profit?” Giulio leans forward, a strangely sudden movement. “What was the goal here?”
The goal was to prove to my dad that I wouldn’t be pushed around anymore.
It was to put everyone in their place.
But above all else, it was to get John Allers to come out of his high-security home and make him a much, much easier target.
“Pandora wanted a murder theater,” I answer quietly. “So I gave it to her.”
Giulio doesn’t say anything for a few long seconds.
Then he sighs and sits back. “What the fuck? Are you playing me? Just saying shit you know I want to hear?”
“No? It’s the truth.” I finally raise the water bottle up, and my movements are so uncoordinated I knock the straw against my lips before managing to take a proper sip.
“Did you have a clean-up plan at all?” Giulio asks. “Not that I think you needed one, because it’s really funny this way, but…” His phone suddenly rings, obnoxiously loud. He sighs and taps the button to answer the call.
“Giulio? What room are you in?” a deep voice asks.
I can’t believe he set it to speaker. We’re in a hospital.
“Papa! Don’t kill Blaze!” Pandora’s voice adds in the background. “He saved me!”
Giulio winks at me. “He’s still alive, Frog. Did you need him to have both eyes though? Because from his charts, it seems one of them was completely ruined. Squish-sploosh, destroyed.”
Wait.
Wait.
What?
I reach up, and I realize I didn’t see the hand.
I place my hand over my eye. Rough bandages bulge over where my eye should be.
Oh.
That’s why the world felt small. I literally can’t see half of it.
My hands tremble, and I stare down at the water bottle. I couldn’t reach it at first because my depth perception was fucked, not because my hands are numb.
My breathing gets faster, and I know that panicking isn’t going to help but what the fuck?
My eye is gone?
Completely gone? Did they leave any part of it in there, or is it an empty socket now? I look around—and I have to turn my head so fucking much to see the entire room—until I spot the call-nurse button. I reach for it, but Giulio grabs my hand to stop me.
“We’re in room 524. I think Blaze didn’t notice he was missing an eye. How do you not notice? Is it like losing a finger?”
Is that a joke? Is it supposed to be funny?
I’m not laughing.
I want to struggle against Giulio and get a nurse or a doctor or somebody in here, but his grip is a lot stronger than my tired, drugged up one.
“We’re on our way. Don’t do anything, Giulio,” Damien says before ending the call.
Giulio stares at the phone “Rude. Didn’t even say good bye. See you soon, Giulio. I love you, Giulio.” He snickers as he puts his phone away. “Damien would never say that. ‘I love you’s are for Vanessa.”
He raises my arm up, then pulls a knife out. I watch, helplessly, as he pushes the knife against my armpit, unable to do anything to protect my body.
“‘I love you’s are for Pandora, too, right?” Giulio asks. “Because she doesn’t want me to kill you, but if you’re not in it for the long haul, if you’re going to fucking chicken out after all this… I’ve got about two minutes to make your eye surgery extremely pointless.”
I swallow hard. “I’ve come this far. If I didn’t… if I didn’t love Pandora, I wouldn’t have done any of it. I would have grown bored of her, I wouldn’t have bothered after the first time she…” After the house fire, or after Zayden’s head, or after the way she hurt Asch.
But none of that had changed anything for me.
Even having Giulio Pavone threatening me so directly doesn’t change anything.
I want to be there for her.
I want to make sure she gets every murder theater she wants.
I want to see her smiling and laughing and kissing Asch and River.
She’s destined to be a fucking powerful woman, and I want her at my side.
Giulio lowers the knife, and my arm.
The door to my room opens, and Asch is the first one through.
He’s holding Pandora’s hand, tugging her along.
“Blaze!” Asch says, rushing to my side with Pandora trailing behind him.
Pandora gets as far as reaching for my hand before Giulio pulls on her shoulder.
“Nope. Give me a hug first, Frog, or I’ll feel left out.”
Pandora sighs, but she embraces him fiercely too. Giulio kisses the top of her head.
Huh.
I’m jealous.
My dad never hugged me like that.
He’ll never be able to, now. He’d been disappointed in me, he’d aimed a fucking gun at me—
And then he’d pushed me out of the way. He’d saved my life. I remember. Despite everything, he’d wanted me to live.
My single eye tears up.
“You know, when I told you to destroy your enemies, I did mean a quiet destruction. And just your enemies, not entire buildings,” Giulio says.
Pandora huffs softly. “You should have specified then. You know things are more fun when they’re big and dramatic.”
Asch had slowed down when Giulio took Pandora’s attention, but then he continues to my side. “Hey,” he says, his voice quiet. “How’re you holding up?”
River has followed them into the room, but he hovers awkwardly by the door, like he’s not sure what he’s supposed to be doing.
“Um.” I glance up at Asch. He’s got a few scrapes and bruises on his face, but he has both eyes, all of his teeth, and as far as I can tell, all of his limbs. “Like the world is really, really narrow.”
Asch goes silent, then he says, “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you and Pandora. But Ezio was there, and… And nothing. I’m sorry.”
Ezio.
When had Ezio gotten there?
I want to ask more questions, but Pandora climbs onto the hospital bed and squeezes up against me. She buries her head against my shoulder. It’s the side with the bad eye, so I can barely see her unless I twist my head.
“I’m so, so sorry, Blaze,” Pandora whispers. “If I’d… If I’d been less me, you wouldn’t have lost your eye.”
I notice Giulio’s expression darken.
“I’m pretty sure if you’d been less you, Pandora, I wouldn’t have wanted to be with you at all.” I sigh. “I’ll deal. I mean, I’ve only lost like, what, 50 degrees of peripheral vision? One-eyed men commandeered ships all the time. I can still be a badass.”
I don’t know that I’m actually this chill, but I’m not going to break down with Giulio Pavone in the room.