Chapter 2 #2
A heavy black cloud seems to pass over my head. Either he was sitting directly outside the door where I couldn’t see the shape of him through the window, or he is lying to me. I saw multiple shadows pass by the window, I’m certain of it. But why would he lie about where he has been?
“How are you feeling?” He perches on the edge of the bed, smooths my hair away from my eyes, and studies my face as if searching for fresh wounds.
His voice is still the voice I’ve grown to love, his brown eyes still have tiny black shards of jet stabbing the pupil, his hands are still gentle, so why am I questioning where he was while I was sleeping off the medication.
The answer is obvious: Amber.
“Where is Amber, Gio?” I hate how fragile and broken I sound.
He takes a beat too long to answer, and all my fears come hurtling back at me like a bunch of wrecking balls. “We’re looking for her, Meggie. Everyone I know is out there looking for her.”
“Everyone?”
Everyone but him, he means. He promised to keep her safe. It keeps running through my head like words on a digital matrix: he promised to keep her safe.
“Everyone I know and trust, Meggie. I’ve called in every favor I’ve ever earned over the years.”
“Ric?”
He shakes his head, and I can see the bruise-colored smudges under his eyes. “Ric didn’t make it.”
I try to swallow, but there’s a boulder stuck inside my throat, and Gio raises a cup of water to my lips, supporting my head with the crook of his arm, and the shock of the icy liquid is enough to bring hot stinging tears to my eyes.
My memory of Ric will always be of him holding a gun outside the back of the cabin and warning me to keep moving, Meggie, don’t stop for anyone or anything.
“Meggie.” Gio tilts my chin towards him with his thumb and forefinger. “None of this is your fault. I’m only grateful that you came into my life before the… Before Amber’s father found you.”
He wraps his arms around me and holds me for the longest time.
“Who were you talking to outside?” I ask, pulling away.
Another pause. “Enzo and Demi.”
Demi? That must’ve been the woman’s voice I heard. “She’s back?”
The day we left New York City feels like a lifetime ago. Amber was safe then. We were living in a penthouse apartment with a private pool and an aquarium worthy of a sea life center. Perhaps we should’ve stayed. I can’t even recall now what was so important that I insisted on leaving.
“Demi never boarded the private jet in New York.”
It seems as if there’s a whole bunch of stuff attached to this story, but I don’t have the bandwidth for it right now.
“Gio?” His eyes meet mine, and the monitor standing beside the bed is a dead giveaway of the butterflies pirouetting across my heart. There’s no easy way to say this, so I just blurt it out. “Why are you here?”
His lips quirk upward, and his smile does all kinds of things to my body that it shouldn’t be able to do in a sterile hospital room with my foot in plaster, and the night terrors still chasing my thoughts around my head.
“I’m not leaving you again, fiore. You’re stuck with me now, whether you like it or not. ”
I do like it.
I suppress the urge to tell him that there’s no one else in the world I would rather be stuck with because it’s sidestepping the point I was trying to make. With my brain like cotton candy, if I don’t get the point out there soon, I’ll lose it, and who knows when it’ll come back to me.
“I need you to find Amber.”
“Meggie.” He climbs off the bed and kneels beside me. “My men are keeping me updated every step of the way. When they track him down, I will go there, and I will make sure that he never hurts you or Amber again. But until then, I’m keeping you safe.”
“I’m in a hospital.” I mean, how much safer can it get?
“You’re still recuperating. The gunshot to your foot severed a tendon, and a couple of bones, but the doctors said that there shouldn’t be any lasting damage.” He’s deliberately holding stuff back.
“When can I leave?”
“Soon, mio fiore. Soon.”
I drift in and out of sleep. I’ve never slept so much in my entire life, and each time I wake, my head is so woozy that it’s easier to close my eyes and slip away again with Gio stroking my hair or murmuring to me in Italian, words that roll off his tongue like foamy waves.
But always, the last thing I see before I close my eyes and the first thing I see when I open them is Amber’s wide panic-stricken eyes as her father grabbed her waist and dragged her away from me with one hand clamped over her mouth.
I couldn’t stop him.
I tried, but there was the danger of triggering the explosives he’d strapped to me.
I’m no use to Amber dead. It was the only thing that stopped me—I’d have happily blown him to pieces even if it meant sacrificing myself—but I couldn’t do it to my little sister.
I promised my mom that I would take care of her.
My drug-induced sleep is fitful, plagued by the nightmare vision of his twisted smile and the chilling sound of his voice yelling at me: “Shut her up!” I wake up shivering, and drenched in sweat, like I have a fever, the hospital room morphing into hazy shadowlands that make no sense.
One time, I open my eyes and feel as if I’m on a strange carnival attraction, the bed swinging around and zooming along a corridor. My eyelids flicker. The overhead lights are so bright they hurt my head, so I squeeze them shut and wait for the illusion to vanish and for sleep to claim me again.
But the voices are back again.
More urgent.
The click-click-click of the bed’s wheels crossing a threshold.
A cool breeze on my face.
I turn my head toward the whisper of air, trying to catch hold of it like a fan to cool my overheated cheeks, but I can’t see where it’s coming from.
More lights, only these are not in the ceiling.
The bed jolts, sending pain shooting up my leg and through my spine to the top of my skull.
Then another sound that turns my breath to icy mist and my blood to ice.
A gunshot.