Chapter 19 Megan
MEGAN
Bruno takes control.
I hold Amber’s hand in the helicopter when she is airlifted to the hospital.
I hold her hand when she is wheeled into the emergency room on the mobile bed.
The medical staff work around me while I cling to her fragile fingers, stroking her hair, and murmuring to her so that she knows I’m there with her.
“You’re safe now, sweetie. Everything is going to be alright. You’re so brave, Amber, the bravest person I know.”
Everything else is a blur.
I watch them take blood samples from Amber’s arm.
I watch them monitor her temperature and give her fluids via a drip attached to an IV in the back of her hand.
I watch the monitor beside the bed going blip-blip-blip.
The only time I take my eyes off my little sister is when they carry out x-rays and scans to check what’s going on inside.
Her face is so pale, I can trace the veins beneath her skin like delicate rivers.
Her hair is tangled, knots clinging like sticky weeds to what’s left of the pigtails I made the last morning I saw her.
Her eyes are pink and raw. Whenever she looks at me, I feel my own hot salty tears stinging behind my eyelids, but I blink them away before she can see them.
I don’t get to cry after what she has been through. I get to make it up to her. I get to make sure that she is never frightened again. I get to thank the universe every day for the rest of my life that he didn’t kill her.
She doesn’t speak. When the doctors ask her questions, she simply nods or shakes her head, and I worry that she might never speak again because of the horrors she experienced at the hands of her father.
Demi stays with her when the consultant is ready to speak to me. Amber’s eyes follow me to the door where they seem to lose interest even before I’ve stepped outside, and my stomach twists itself into tight gripping knots. Does she think that I’m leaving her again?
“I won’t be long, sweetie.” I hesitate in the open doorway, waiting for the smile that doesn’t come.
“Your sister will make a full recovery.” The doctor has kind brown eyes beneath silver-tipped brows, smooth dark skin, and a slight overbite when he smiles.
“She is severely dehydrated, and her temperature is a little high, but the medication will bring that under control over the next forty-eight hours.”
“Is she…” I can’t bear to ask if she suffered any injuries. The thought of him hurting her makes me want to scream until I’m hoarse. “Did he…”
“There are signs of bruising on her upper body and limbs, but the x-rays have revealed no broken bones or internal injuries.” He hesitates.
“Physically, your little sister will be fine. Mentally however, these things take time to process. She has suffered a trauma that will stay with her for life. Children are resilient, but these scars are the hardest to heal.”
My tears start flowing unchecked, and before I realize what is happening, the doctor is guiding me into a seat in the waiting room, and a nurse is crouching beside me asking questions that I’m struggling to process.
I try to stand, and the room spins out from under my feet. A cardboard basin appears from nowhere, and I retch into it while the nurse holds my hair out of the way. It reminds me of Gio sitting with me in the bathroom of the cabin, and my tears grow even hotter.
“Is this the first time you’ve been sick?” The nurse looks around the same age as me, her glossy black hair cut into a neat shoulder-length bob with red streaks.
“No.” I blurt it out before I can even think about lying. Now they’ll think there’s something wrong with me, and I want them to concentrate on Amber. “It’s happened a few times.”
Her eyes search mine. “Have you been eating?”
“Yes. I’m fine.” I force a smile. You see, there’s nothing wrong with me.
“Have you been sick in the mornings when you first wake up?”
“Yes, but it isn’t morning sickness.” I’ve no idea what time it is or how long it took us to get here, but I know it isn’t morning sickness because it has been happening throughout the day.
“When did you last have your period?” She asks this like she’s trying to find out when I last caught a bus into town or got hiccups or enjoyed a night out with my friends.
I blink. “I-I don’t know. A few weeks ago.”
It was before we flew to LA. A couple of weeks before if I think about it.
I’ve lost track of how long we’ve been here, and my brain can’t seem to work out the dates, but I can’t be pregnant because I haven’t known Gio long, and this kind of thing simply doesn’t happen to people like me. People who don’t have a sex life.
An image of Gio rubbing his cock around my wet sex pops into my head, and my cheeks feel like they’re on fire.
“I think we should take a blood sample, just to be sure.” The nurse rises and gives me a helping hand back onto my feet.
“I’m fine. I don’t need—” Pain flares in my foot, and I wince pathetically.
I’ve kept going because of Amber, and now it feels as if my body is yelling at me to sit the fuck down and let the doctors takes care of me for a while.
“We’ll take a look at your foot while we’re at it.”
The nurse guides me in the opposite direction to Amber’s room, and I dig my heels in—well, my one good heel—and stop dead.
“I’m not leaving my sister.”
She glances at the doctor who responds with a perfunctory nod. “Come on then. I can take your blood samoles just as easily from your sister’s room.”
Realizing that I must look a mess, I breathe deeply, rub my damp cheeks with the palms of my hands, and smooth my hair.
I’m about to open the door to Amber’s room when I spot a porter turning a wheelchair around at the far end of the corridor so that he can back into the elevator.
I don’t know what makes me stop, but for one crazy moment, I think I recognize the young woman in the wheelchair.
I blink and shake my head to clear it. From a distance, she looked like Nikki, a little paler maybe, but it’s just my eyes playing tricks on me because I miss my best friend.
Amber watches me enter the room and sit down in the visitor’s seat next to the bed. She doesn’t smile, but her eyes track the nurse’s movements as she prepares the syringe and the arm wrap to take my blood, and she seems to shrink beneath the covers, trying to make herself invisible.
“It’s okay, Amber. The needle is for me. The nurse wants to test my blood.”
She watches the nurse place the wrap around my upper arm and tighten it before rubbing the crook of my elbow with an antiseptic wipe.
“What’s this for?” Demi avoids looking at the needle being inserted into my arm. “Is it a pregnancy test?”
I widen my eyes at her, which she ignores, while the nurse sucks on her bottom lip to suppress the smile that’s trying to escape.
“It’s nothing,” I say to Amber. “I’m fine.”
This feels like the wrong thing to say. I shouldn’t be fine when Amber spent the last seven days hiding on a shelf in an underground bunker, terrified that her father would come back and kill her.
I want her to know that I didn’t stop looking for her, but I’m worried that anything I say will trigger her fear again.
How do I find the balance between telling her that I never gave up the search, trying to coax out of her what really happened after he left the mountain hut with her, and not triggering all the terrible thoughts she must’ve had while she was trapped inside the bunker?
How?
How do I even get her to speak to me?
“All done.” The nurse slides the needle from my arm and tells me to press hard on the wedge of cotton covering the pinprick in my arm.
I don’t recall having a blood test before, and I never thought I’d get queasy at the sight of blood. But I suddenly feel dizzy, and before I know it, my head is between my knees, and the nurse is rubbing my back, while Demi’s voice is saying from afar, “Is she alright? Did she pass out?”
But it’s Amber’s voice that slices through my whirling brain cells and drags me back to the present.
“Meggie!”
It is late that evening when Amber drifts into a deep untroubled slumber.
The drip is still attached to the vein in the back of her hand, ensuring that her body receives a steady influx of fluids, but her skin is a healthier color, and her eyes are bright again.
Demi picked up some coloring and sticker books from a nearby store, and a fluffy pink unicorn which is now clutched tightly to Amber’s chest.
I haven’t asked her what happened that day. I’ve seen the way her eyes keep flicking back and forth between the books and the door like she’s still worried that he might come back for her, and the way she jumps whenever she hears a sound she doesn’t understand.
It breaks my heart to think that he has done this to her. No child should ever have to fear for their life. But I hope that, in time, she’ll learn to talk about it, and maybe even find a way to separate it from real life.
I slump in the visitor’s seat, bone-weary. The nurse offered to come back once Amber was asleep with some pain meds and something to help me sleep, but I’m so tired, I don’t think I need them.
I glance at Demi who is smiling at her phone screen.
She insisted on staying with us, and I wonder if she has changed her mind about going back to the NYPD now that she has had a taste of working for Gio.
Maybe he’ll take her on as part of his security team now that Ric is gone; I could get used to having her around permanently.
I haven’t heard from Gio. I remember as a teenager getting frustrated whenever a boy promised to text and didn’t. It always seemed like such a big deal; why say you’ll text if you have no intention of sticking to it?
But it’s different with Gio. Sure, we’re older, but I instinctively know that wherever he is, he’s thinking about me the way I’m thinking about him.
There are no fraught moments during which I worry that I might never see him again, no disappointment when my phone doesn’t beep, no overthinking conversations that we’ve had.
Thinking about Gio is like being wrapped inside a cozy blanket with a cup of hot chocolate. We haven’t exactly had a regular relationship so far, but I already know that I never want it to end.
“She’s stronger than you think.” Demi drags me away from my thoughts and back into the room. “She’ll bounce back.”
I watch Amber’s chest rising and falling steadily and rest my head against the back of the seat. “He’ll never know that we found her.” I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that he didn’t care one way or the other, or that I didn’t get a chance to tell him that he didn’t win.
“He doesn’t deserve to know.” Demi watches Amber too. “It’s all over, Meggie. You can let him go now.”
It’s safe to let him go.
I hope that one day I’ll be able to repeat the mantra and believe it with all my heart, but for now, it’s still too raw.
“What will you tell her?” Demi asks. “She’ll want to know, one day.”
“I won’t tell her who he was.” She doesn’t need to know that her own father tried to kill us. “She asked me who her dad was once. The other kids in school were talking about their dads, and she came home and asked why she didn’t have one.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said that our mom was so special she was mom and dad to us.”
I swallow and close my eyes. I wish our mom was here, but I’m glad she didn’t have to find out what he was really like.
I must doze off because faint muffled voices reach me from outside the room, and when I half-open my eyes, one foot still in the dream world, Demi is on her feet.
“Stay there,” she says. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
I curl my legs under me on the uncomfortable plastic seat and snuggle under the blanket that Demi must’ve thrown over me. Within moments, I’m drifting back to sleep, images of Amber peering out of the cable car at fluffy pink unicorns skiing down the mountain slope whizzing behind my eyelids.
But the unicorns slide out of reach when I hear a scream.
My eyes fly open. Was it real or part of my dream?
My heart is thudding, and the blanket is suddenly making me feel hot and itchy.
Throwing it aside, I check that Amber hasn’t moved and cross the room holding my breath so that I don’t wake her.
Bruno’s gravelly voice stops me in my tracks. “Don’t move.” He isn’t talking to me, but my body obeys the order anyway.
“Are you hurt?” This is Demi.
Who is she talking to? What’s happened?
There’s another voice. A woman. I can’t make out the words, but my hand is already closing around the door handle, ignoring the yelling in my head telling me to sit back down and close my eyes.
I press the handle slowly, pulling the door open a crack, enough for me to press my forehead against the edge and peer outside with one eye.
What I see makes my breath lodge inside my chest. Demi is crouched over a young woman on the floor, shielding her with her body. She raises her eyes when she realizes that I’m standing there and makes a cutting motion across her throat with her index finger, a warning for me to go back inside.
But it’s too late.
From this angle, I’m looking at the woman upside down, but I’d recognize her anywhere.
“Nikki?”