Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Valerio
T he first thing that I noticed when I woke up was the scent of antiseptic that filtered into my nose. It was sharp, and burned the sensitive parts of my flesh. I tried to move my arm but, for some reason, it felt heavy, like there was something weighing on it.
I blinked my eyes open, but I quickly shut them closed again when the harsh lights that hung from above hit them. I groaned from the intensity and shifted my body slightly, only to be met with a searing pain in my abdomen. I groaned again, but this time another voice filled the room I was in.
“Rio? Are you awake?” Andres ? What the hell was he doing here?
Then I paused. Wait, where is here?
I peeled my eyes open slowly, giving myself some time to adjust to the lights that hung above me. The fluorescent beams kissed the contours of my skin, and I turned to the side to find my brother standing at my side. Dark circles littered his under- eyes, and he looked like he had aged at least five years since I had seen him last.
“You look like shit.” My voice came out much rougher than I was used to. I tried to clear my throat, but it was too dry. “Water.”
Andres blinked and reached for a jug of water at my bedside, then poured it into a glass. When I tried to lift my arm up to take the glass from him, I failed. It was then that I looked down and saw that my arm was taped up into a cast.
I tried to ask Andres what the hell had happened, but a spar pain pierced my skull. I groaned in agony, trying to find my equilibrium.
Andres pressed the rim of the glass to my lips and helped me drink. I gulped the cold liquid, downing it within seconds. He filled another glass, and I downed that one as well. When I was done, the headache seemed to have subsided, and I eased my back into the pillow.
For the first time since I had opened my eyes, I looked around the room. I was in a hospital, and I was sure of that. It was what you would expect any hospital room to be. Cold, sterile, and generic. To the side, there were machines which were lined up by the bed. The heart monitor beeped steadily as my chest rose and fell gently. There were several other machines that I had no idea what they were, but if I had to take a guess, they were keeping me alive.
I turned my head to the side to look at my brother. His eyes moved up and down the length of my body as if trying to see if I had any injuries. When he was satisfied, he lifted his gaze and looked into my eyes with a mixture of relief and anger.
“Are you okay?”
“What happened?”
His eyebrows pulled together. “Don’t you remember? Do you know where you are?”
I tried to rack my brain, and that’s when it all came back in little flashes that banged against my skull. The more I thought back to the accident, the more pain my head had to endure. I squeezed my eyes shut and then forced the memories back, trying to relieve the pain. But as the pain passed through my mind, that's when she came.
I caught the short glimpses of her. Her eyes. Her necklace. The strands of wet hair clung to her skin. I couldn’t get a clear picture of who she was. But I knew that she was the woman who had saved me.
For that moment, that short split-second glimpse of her, I felt more at peace than I ever had in my entire life. It was like basking in the sunshine on a warm day. I couldn’t put the exact feeling into words, but she felt like peace—like light.
When I opened my eyes again, my brother was looking at me concerned.
“I was in an accident,” I started. “A woman pulled me out of the rubble. Where is she?”
“Who?”
“The woman, the one who pulled me out of the rubble and saved my life. Where is she? She couldn’t have gotten far, I'm sure we can find her.” I tried to sit up, but my brother pushed me back down. “I need to find her, is she in the reception area? Did she leave?”
I hoped that she didn’t. I needed to thank her. I needed to know her name. But in truth, I wanted to be in her presence again. I had never felt so at ease like that before. I wanted to feel it again, it was… addictive , just like drugs.
“There is no woman, Valerio.”
“No, there is a woman. I saw her, she saved me. Look, she wears this heart-shaped necklace. She had dark brown hair and she—ah!” A sharp shooting pain radiated from my abdomen. It spread all the way up my side, until it settled in the center of my chest.
“Shit,” I hissed.
Andres pressed a small button that was by my bedside. After a few seconds, I felt some of the pain die down. I looked at him confused.
“Morphine,” he said simply. “You need to go easy on yourself. You had surgery two weeks ago, and your stitches are still fresh.”
“I will be—wait, what?” Had I heard him correctly? “Did you just say I was in surgery two weeks ago? How long was I out for?”
“You’ve been unconscious for sixteen days, brother,” he said solemnly. “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”
My head spun. I could not believe this. For sixteen days I had been out cold and bordering between the land of the living and the dead.
“And the girl?”
He shook his head. “I got here six hours after your crash. I didn’t see a woman here, and the nurses didn’t know anything. But we can talk about all of that later. For now, you need to rest. Your body has been through a lot, and you just woke up.”
I wanted to argue with him, but that’s when the fatigue hit me.
I could feel the medication slowly coming into effect. Andres stood by my side and patted the side of my face in a loving way. He stared down at me with soft eyes. It was a look he had not shown me since we were children.
The emotion roared in his gaze, so much so I saw the thin sheen of moisture that covered his eyeball.
My brother was by no means an emotional man. He was hard to the core and didn’t care for many things. But those things that he did care about, he guarded jealously.
“Don’t tell me you’re about to cry.” I could barely get my little cheap shot out without getting choked up. “I’m fine, Andres. You’re worried about nothing.”
He didn’t speak. He simply stared at me with those eyes of his. I could not even begin to fathom what was storming through his mind. He had a good poker face, far better than mine. Even with me knowing him all my life, I still couldn’t get a good enough read on him. No one ever truly knew how he was feeling, apart from his wife, of course.
Without warning, he leaned down and enveloped me into a hug. I was a little shocked at first, but then I relaxed and returned the sentiment.
We had never been a touchy-feely kind of family. We were told to be abrasive and hard all our lives. Those were the skills that we needed to survive in this world. So, when one of us did things like this, it was often out of the ordinary.
I attempted to pull back out of his hold, but he gripped onto me tighter.
“Just allow me, okay?” he choked out.
I had never heard this man so filled with emotion in my life. I guess losing someone you love would do that to you. I stopped my movements and allowed him to hug me. He needed this moment to take in that I was truly alive, that I was still breathing.
“Okay.”
I didn’t know how long I had been asleep for, but when I woke up a nurse was taking my vitals before she left, leaving me alone in the room.
When I closed my eyes, all I could see were those green ones. They had been the most magnificent mixture of green and blue. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in my life before. My brain tried to retrieve the image of her face, but every time I thought back to the night of the accident, I would just see this blurry image.
Who was she? And why the hell had she not given her name to the staff when she brought me in?
This mystery woman had saved my life. If she had not pulled me out of the rubble, who knew what would have happened to me? She had been my heaven-sent.
I needed to find her.
I didn’t know how much time passed as I thought of the mystery woman, but the next thing I knew, sleep had found me. I was back to dreamland, where there was nothing but pitch black.
The next time I woke, I heard the door to my hospital room open. I sat up and waited to see who was coming in. But unlike the moment when I had woken up, there was no smile on his face or any sign of tenderness. In fact, my brother looked rather agitated and on edge.
“Brother?” I greeted him as he walked to the end of the bed.
Clearly, he had something to say, because his eyes were hard-set on me. He gripped the end of my bed and tightened his fist around the hard plastic.
The tension in the room was so thick I could liken it to sludge. Neither I nor my brother spoke. He just stared at me from the end of my bed with a pensive look on his face.
I could see the judgment, but most of all the disappointment in his eyes. I had no idea why the fuck he was pensive, I was the one in the hospital bed with my body hooked up to various machines keeping me alive.
“Are you just going to stand there like an overbearing father or are you going to speak, brother?” It was best to get it over and done with while I still had the energy. I could already feel the pain slowly starting to make a resurgence, and I had no tolerance for talking. “Speak, Andres.”
“You lied.” His fists tightened on the edge of the bed. “You were on fucking cocaine, Valerio.”
My heart jumped in my chest, but years of torture and interrogation had taught me to school my features. “No, I wasn’t.”
He scoffed and pushed off the end of the bed. “Must you keep making a fool out of me? At least have the respect not to lie to my face. How long have you been on drugs?”
I opened my mouth again to lie, but he held his hand up, stopping me from speaking.
“You were in a coma for nearly two weeks, Valerio. You were on the brink of death as your body detoxed the shit that you put in your system. I wanted to have you airlifted from this shithole the moment you came out of surgery, but they said that your body was going through withdrawal from drugs. Imagine my surprise when I heard. Why, I thought, that’s impossible. My brother told me he is clean.”
I gulped. I looked away from his heated stare and stared out the side window. This was not how I wanted him to find out. In fact, I didn’t want him to find out, period. It was not only embarrassing, but I felt this overwhelming feeling of shame. I had been caught, and in the most mortifying way possible.
“What the hell, Valerio?” he asked.
The hurt in his voice was clear, but I didn’t dare look his way. I was worried that if I did, his gaze would be the sucker punch that ended me. My brother and I had always been honest with each other, and the fact that I had lied to him point-blank was not okay on my part.
“I’m not speaking to myself, brother. Why the fuck were you on drugs?” he asked again, but this time there was a little more bite to his words. “Not only that, but you are antidepressants, too?”
My head whipped around to him so quickly that I thought I would get whiplash. “Who told you that?”
“Is that really all you care about? The person who told me, rather than the fact that you hid this from me like I’m some kind of stranger?” The betrayal permeated through his eyes as he stared at me. “We are brothers, Valerio. That means that we don’t go through these kinds of things alone. Why didn’t you tell me you were on antidepressants? When did you even get onto them?”
“Does it matter?” The pressure in my chest increased. I didn’t want to talk about this right now. I didn’t even want to be on the fucking pills, but the doctor had told me they would quiet the screams at night. “Does it matter when I started taking them or if I’m taking them at all?”
“Yes! Of course it matters! You were going 200 miles an hour in the middle of a fucking storm. It’s like you were trying to kill yourself.”
“ And what if I was? ” The words exploded out of my mouth with a loud bang. “Would it matter to you or any other fucking person?”
“It would matter to me , Valerio.” He stormed to the side of my bed and stared down at me with a mixture of hurt and anger in his eyes. I could feel the rage rolling off him in waves. “It matters to the entire Brotherhood. We depend on you; we count on you. What is this really about? You’ve been off the rails for the last year. Dad? The merge of the families? What is it that has you so… not you?”
Where would I even begin? There was no beginning on anything. Even if I wanted to explain, I couldn’t. I still didn’t even understand my own complicated emotions towards the whole thing. I knew that the majority of it had to do with my messed-up relationship with my father. But I also felt like, maybe, it all ran deeper than that, much, much deeper.
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. My older brother stared at me, waiting for my explanation, but nothing ever came.
“I’m on your side, Valerio.” He sighed deeply. “But if you continue like this then I’m putting you in rehab. I cannot have you leading the Syndicate like this. You are too volatile and brash. We need to get to the bottom of what is troubling you.”
I already knew, but I didn’t utter a single word.
“Fine,” I agreed.
My brother looked slightly taken aback by my acceptance of the terms he had set. Something like this normally should have set me off, but now it didn’t. It was like I had no more fight left in me, at least for now.
“Good.” He schooled his features. “I need to make a few calls. I’m sure you need your rest. I will be back.”
He didn’t wait for me to reply. He turned on his heel and walked out of the room, leaving me to my thoughts. When the door shut, I relaxed back into the pillow and looked to the ceiling of the room.
The fight had been intense, but now that some of the things I had been hiding were out in the open, I felt relieved. A weight had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt like I could finally breathe a little easier.
But though my chest felt lighter, my mind raced with the blurry image of that woman who had rescued me from the carnage. Those angelic eyes had given my soul so much peace for a moment, I had thought that I had found heaven. And her voice, oh, her voice, it was like the sweetest of honeys to my ear.
I owed her my life. She was my savior.
I didn’t know her name or what she truly looked like. The only thing I had to go on was the small pendant that hung from her neck. There were approximately 4 billion women in the world, and I was looking for one specific one basing everything on a little necklace. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But I didn’t care.
I would find her.