Chapter 43 – Rowan
ROWAN
Marcella comes over to me and grips me by the back of the neck.
“Move,” she barks, but her thumb drags along my skin.
I’d be more afraid if my hands were actually bound.
“This is gross.” She takes the hem of my shirt and pulls it up to wipe the side of my face.
“I don’t want to see Cristo’s blood anymore. ”
She faces me, her eyes boring into mine.
“Do as I say,” she mouths.
I narrow my eyes at her. “What kind of future do you think you’ll have after killing the king? After you kill me?”
A smile curls up her face. “Whatever I want. Unlike you, I’ll still be alive. And free.”
Free? There are so many things I don’t understand right now.
Once she’s finished cleaning me, she grabs Gabe and hauls the two of us into the room, pushing us against the wall with our arms—and guns—still behind us and invisible to this crazy fucking woman.
Sitting on a chair with her arms bound behind her is a young girl who eyes us as if she doesn’t know what to make of us. She has a busted lip and a bruise beneath her eye, but her features are so startlingly similar to Marcella’s that I instantly know this is the Jaqueline she was talking about.
Marcella crosses the room and cups the girl’s face before she kisses her forehead, mumbling something against her skin I can’t make out.
The girl gulps but nods.
And because I’m so focused on the girl and Marcella, it takes me a half beat longer to realize everything in here is covered in plastic.
Not like the sheets in the rest of the house over furniture.
This is completely different. It’s a killing room.
I know nothing about any of this, but I’ve watched enough horror movies to know one when I see one.
What kind of sick, twisted people are these?
I love this woman, but I can’t reconcile anything I’m seeing with the woman I thought I knew. But that’s the irony of this, right? I never knew her. Not really.
The woman comes and stands before me, her gaze cast up into my face, and she studies me before twisting her head over her shoulder to eye Marcella.
Then she laughs. Loud and rancorously.
“He’s why you look different,” Signoria says, her voice dripping in bitterness and censure.
“What?” Marcella draws back.
“You love him. He loves you. I see it in both of you. Do you not think I know what love looks like?”
Marcella’s breath hitches, and she shakes her head, but there’s no hiding the light flush on her cheeks.
“Signoria, I can assure you—”
“Don’t lie to me!” The woman lashes out and strikes Marcella’s face. I jolt, going to intercept her for hitting Marcella, but Gabe, ever so subtly, shakes his head at me. Fuck! I can’t let her hurt her.
Marcella’s head dips, blood dripping from a cut on her cheek. “I’m not lying. I don’t love him. I fucked him, yes. He fell in love with me, but love isn’t something people like us get.” She lifts her chin. “Is it, Signoria?”
The woman’s lips purse. “Perhaps not. If that’s so, prove it to me. Kill him.”
Marcella goes rigid. “We haven’t interrogated him yet.”
A knowing smile that chills my bones curls up the woman’s lips. “It’s as I thought.” She turns back to me. “Sometimes, Your Highness, a woman has to take matters into her own hands when others fail her.”
Her hand lifts, and in it there’s a small vial with a sprayer on it. She holds it in front of me, and Marcella screams.
“No!”
Before I can make sense of what’s going on, two things happen at once. One, Marcella throws herself at the woman and knocks her to the ground. The second is that Gabe takes aim and shoots, narrowly missing Marcella.
He also misses the woman because Marcella has her on the floor. The bullet whizzes through the air and smashes the wall, splintering sheetrock everywhere.
Marcella is on top of the woman who is clawing and scratching at her, trying to force the spray bottle up into her mouth.
Marcella twists the woman’s wrists until she cries out in pain.
The bottle is shoved in the woman’s mouth, and she chokes and shrieks, thrashing violently, as Marcella works to spray whatever is in that into her mouth.
She must get enough in because the hand she was scratching at Marcella drops to the floor.
Her body seizes, her eyes round as yellow-white foam froths at her mouth.
She chokes, gasping and sputtering and writhing around.
Marcella falls to the side, panting heavily, but keeping her body above the woman, her eyes pinned on her.
Signoria Batorini is dying, and the girl in the chair is screaming and fighting, desperate to get free.
“Marcella, no! You have to find it. You have to take it now!”
I don’t know what that means. I’m stuck on the woman dying on the floor, but then Marcella collapses, and she starts seizing.
What the fuck is happening?
I drop to the floor and try to pick her up when Gabe stops me, turning her onto her side and pushing me back.
“Is the stuff airborne?” Gabe asks the girl.
“You have to help her!” the girl cries, openly sobbing.
“Is it airborne?” Gabe yells, holding Marcella with one hand while looking like he’s about to get up in the girl’s face.
“No! She must have breathed in the spray. Please help her. She’s going to die,” the girl wails, twisting and trying to get free. “Marcella!”
I look up at her, frantic with panic. “What do I do? Tell me how to help her.”
“There’s an antidote.”
“Where?” I bellow, shoving the woman’s dying body out of the way so I can hold Marcella’s face. “Fuck, she’s not breathing. Holy shit, she’s not breathing.”
Her eyes are open, but they’re fixed, sightless, and her body is spastically jerking, but her lips are blue, and there’s blood trickling out of the side of her mouth onto the plastic. She put her life in danger for me. That’s twice now that she’s saved me. I have to save her.
“It’s in her bag. In Signoria’s bag!”
“I need a medivac at Samil Batorini’s bay house,” Gabe says into his phone. “I have the coordinates. I’ll send them. We need it here immediately. Send ambulances too. A young woman has ingested poison.”
“Where’s her purse?” I shout at the girl.
“Over there.” She wrenches her body, her arms still bound, but she nods her head. “It’s in the other room on the table. Hurry. It won’t take long.”
I get to my feet and sprint into the room where the dead man is on the floor. Frantically, my head swivels about, my eyes searching.
“We’re losing her, Rowan. Hurry!”
Jesus! I can’t. My body is shaking, my bones rattling, and my heart can’t take this. Not any of this. I spot Signoria’s purse on the far table, and I race to it, opening it as I speed back into the plastic room.
I fall to my knees and dump the contents out.
A litany of female shit spreads across the floor.
Gabe has Marcella on her side, holding her body as she continues to seize.
Her eyes are closed now, her face ashen, and her lips caked in blood.
Holy shit. She’s going to die. She can’t fucking die, and there are about four bottles of random shit in here.
“It’s the blue bottle. The blue one. Spray it into her mouth.”
My hands fumble as I pick it up and uncap it. I get right in her face, open her mouth, and spray.
“How much?”
“Four or five sprays, I think.”
I don’t know if it’s five or six I end up doing. I can hardly count, let alone think. I simply spray the antidote into the back of her throat. Can I give her too much? What happens if I give her too much?
“Come on! Fucking work!” I growl.
It does. She stops seizing, her body sagging into the plastic. Thank fuck.
Gently I roll her onto her back, but something isn’t right. Gabe is on it, same as I am, checking her pulse.
“Fuck!” He starts doing chest compressions, and my world spins. No. This was supposed to fix her. Not kill her.
I glance to my side, but Signoria Batorini is dead. Her eyes are open and fixed, and her body is still. She, too, is caked in blood and foam, but I don’t care. She deserved worse. I hope that hurt like fuck and she was scared.
“Come on, sweetheart.” I cover Marcella’s head with my arms and press my mouth to her forehead. “Come on. Come back to me.”
Except I can hear that she’s not breathing. I pinch her nose and blow into her mouth to inflate her lungs.
“Gabe?” I rasp, barely able to make a sound as fear thunders in my chest as I’ve never felt before.
“No pulse. Compressions only.”
“She needs air,” I fire back.
He shakes his head as he pumps her chest. “Compressions are more important. And she likely still has the toxin in her mouth. Don’t do that again. Switch.”
He pulls back, and I take over, knotting my fingers and thrusting down into the center of her chest over her breastbone. I don’t know how long I go for before Gabe pushes me off and continues compressions.
I kiss her hair, her forehead, her cheeks, her nose. “Come on, mia stella. I love you. I fucking love you!” I rage. “You can’t leave me. We have so much to figure out, but I’m not giving up. I’ll keep chasing you. I’ll always fight for you. Please.”
Tears course down my face, dripping onto her cheeks.
Just as I’m about to give her another breath, Gabe fucking be damned, a gasp startles all of us. I fly back and cup her face, searching it. Her eyes stay closed, but her color is improving.
“We’ve got a heartbeat. It’s weak, but it’s there. She needs the hospital, though. I don’t think it’ll last without intervention. Is she still breathing?”
“Barely. It’s shallow and sporadic. Marcella, baby? Can you hear me?”
She doesn’t reply, and I press my fingers into her neck, searching for her pulse. I find it, but it’s as Gabe said, barely there, like her breathing. Then it fades.
“Fuck, I lost her pulse.”
“Shit,” Gabe hisses. “Is she breathing?”
I hold my ear to her lips. My eyes pinch shut. “No. Maybe she needs more antidote.”
“Or maybe it’s not strong enough,” Gabe challenges, once again doing compressions.
In the distance is the sound of a helicopter, but they’re too late. We’re too late.
I shake, holding her, kissing her, begging her, pumping her chest and blood through her body to spell Gabe. I can’t let her go. The girl in the chair is wailing, calling out to Marcella. This can’t be happening. I can’t lose her. She can’t lose her.
My chest hollows, and shudders rack through me. She has no pulse and no breath. She’s limp in my arms. Dead. Agony is its own heartbeat, pulsing through me and filling my veins and organs with bottomless grief.
“Helicopter is landing. Rowan, go let them in.”
I shake my head. I can’t leave her, but Gabe is doing compressions again, and the girl is tied up, and I have to save Marcella. I kiss her forehead and crawl up to my feet before I sprint across the house.
“She’s in here,” I call out to them as I open the door, waving desperately for them to hurry the fuck up.
“Your Highness!” The two paramedics gasp and go to bow, but fuck that.
“Move! She’s dying.”
“Sir!” They hop to attention, and I fill them in as best I can. There’s a man with a gunshot wound to his head and a dead woman on the floor beside Marcella. It’s as fucked as a situation can get.
The girl tells them that it’s a concentrated form of cyanide and that the antidote she was given was an oral hydroxocobalamin.
The paramedics set to work. “No pulse. Get the paddles on her. I’m going to intubate.”
“IV is in. First round of epi on board.”
I don’t know what they’re saying, and I don’t interrupt. I stand back as they put a tube down her throat and attach a large bag to it that they squeeze to give her air. The other paramedic is placing pads on her bare chest.
“Charged. Clear.”
They stand back and shock her. And fuck. Her body spasms, and her back tenses. They just shocked her heart. I turn around, pounding my already aching fist into the wall.
“Anything?”
“Pulseless V-tach.”
“Restarting compressions. Let’s move her.”
I turn back around as they get her onto the gurney. I glance over at the girl whose face is bruised and bleeding. “We’ll get help for you too.”
She simply looks at me, her expression calm yet distraught, with tears quietly flowing down her face like a river. “Will they put me in prison?”
“Prison?” I question, my thoughts too chaotic to make sense of anything.
“That’s what Signoria and Antonia always told me would happen if I were discovered. That I’d be put in prison. A worse prison,” she amends.
I can’t begin to imagine the torture this girl and Marcella have faced. I’ve seen it on Marcella’s back, but that doesn’t speak to what they’ve endured.
“You’re not going to prison,” I promise her. “I’m the prince of the country, and I won’t let that happen. No one will ever hurt you again.”
Isn’t that what I told Marcella? That I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her again? That I’d take care of her? Now look. I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t protect her. My heart can’t take this.
She licks her lips, and more tears fall. “You have to save her.”
“She needs an IV antidote,” the paramedic informs us. “The oral form isn’t enough. We were able to shock her and give her some medicine. It’s keeping her heart going, barely, but it’s not perfusing her tissue.”
“Then give her the IV form,” I demand.
“We don’t have that in our med kit. This level of cyanide poisoning isn’t common.”
“I’m going to give her another round of epi and shock her,” the other paramedic states. “Charged. Clear.”
Her body jolts and spasms on the gurney, and they return to squeezing the bag to give her oxygen.
“Sinus brady at thirty-two. It’s thready and won’t last. We have to move. She ingested too much of the toxin. Her vitals are fading. She doesn’t have long before the antidote completely wears off.”
The gurney lifts, then they’re wheeling her from the room, running her through the house.
“I’m going with you.”
One of the paramedics shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Your Highness, we can’t allow anyone else in the helicopter.”
Then they’re gone. Just like that, they’re taking her from me. I follow them out of the house and watch as they load her up into the helicopter. A moment later, they take off, and that’s it. I don’t even know where they’re taking her.
“The closest trauma center is Mercy West in Catalia. They’ll do everything they can to save her.”
I swallow my grief. It’s a big hospital in a big city. But I already know there’s a very strong chance she doesn’t make it. Even if they get her heart beating again, she might never wake up.