Chapter 47
The sharp throb radiating from my sternum with each inhale told me I’d survived.
So did waking up in a hospital room. It was far too bland a hellscape to account for my sins, though the incessant beeping of the heart monitor and the pungent sting of antiseptics certainly had potential.
Bright ambient lights seared through my eyeballs.
I squinted through fluttered blinks and raised a hand to block most of it out.
If this were somehow heaven, someone had screwed up the sign-in sheet and needed to be shot for lack of creativity.
I jerked my elbows behind me to sit up and groaned. Just that movement seemed to suck the life out of me.
A weight on the bed, cinching the blankets around my calves, stirred, and Liam’s head popped up. His groggy, hollow eyes looked through me. He blinked once. Twice. Three times. His mouth parted with a scratchy gasp, and he tore himself up to standing.
“You’re awake.” He raked his fingers through his hair and tugged it back. “Don’t fucking scare us like that ever again. You hear me, Killy?”
“That bad?” I joked with a cough, my throat drier than the desert.
“You coded twice. Twice. I thought…We thought…” He twisted around and threw a pen across the bed at our sleeping middle brother, who slouched in a chair, his eyes closed behind sunglasses he wore against the bright glare in the room.
Brody’s bald head rested against his shoulder, and his legs were splayed out in front of him. “Oi, Brody.”
The pen smacked him across the cheek, and he startled awake with a snarl, rubbing at his face.
“You rotten bastard, that hurt.”
“Killy.” Liam jerked his head my way, teeth clenched as if saying my name might invoke the Dullahan to take my soul to the afterlife.
The wooden legs of Brody’s chair screeched along the floor, and he smacked my knee. “About time. Finally. What took you so long?”
“Eejit,” I muttered, fighting through the fatigue striving to drag me back under. “You try having a heart attack.”
Liam coughed to hide his smirk. He was lucky I didn’t have the strength to waste on him right now.
I tried to sit up again despite the ache in my chest, sharp sting in my neck, and throbbing deadness in one hand to get a better look at the rest of the room and private en suite. Liam picked up a remote, and the bed whirred to life, slowly folding up at my waist.
“We’re just happy the devil spat you out,” he said.
“Trust me. The devil tried to prolong my stay.”
I ignored their mirrored looks of concern and peered around them for the face I really wanted to see.
The vast hospital suite offered sweeping views of the city skyline through the large windows on one side and its living area on the other, but there was no head of perfectly tamed brunette curls anywhere in sight.
No purse draped over the couch. None of those colorful, oversized scarves she liked to wrap herself in.
No heels of any size. No purple-and-black laptop she used to check her work emails.
There was no sign of her at all, except for a glimmer of light through an open door, which I could only assume was the bathroom.
“Is she over there?”
I pointed toward the door but cocked my head at the sight of my bandaged hand and unresponsive fingers.
A light stain seeped through the gauze around the center of my palm.
It took my mind a second to catch up to what I was seeing, and then the world froze.
The beeping of the heart monitor faded. The quiet ringing in my ears suffocated Liam’s voice.
I was back there—when the searing heat of the branding woke me up, when Alizé’s weight blanketed over me, when Maeve’s face twisted into horror as her knife plunged down, and my fist caught the blade.
I had caught it, hadn’t I? The memories fuzzed by, nothing clear, nothing concrete.
Just blurred snaps in time. Muffled voices.
Gunshots, sharp and piercing. My stomach seized in revulsion.
“Where is she?” I snapped.
“Who?” Liam said, his tone far too gentle for the rush of pain swarming my insides.
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Brody stated. “So we know who you mean.”
“What the bleeding hell are you saying?” The implication of those words…I shook my head and threw the sheets off, my feet hitting the floor before I realized I’d moved. “Bring her to me. Now.”
Clips and wires fell off me from patches glued to my skin. The monitor droned a sharp flatline as the walls tilted and the floor drooped like mush beneath my legs.
“Whoa, Killy.” Liam caught me with a grunt and leaned me back against the edge of the mattress. “Get back in bed, bruh.”
I shoved him off and shook my head, but the room kept spinning. “I’ll find her myself.”
A stampede of footsteps hustled into the room in a flood of blue scrubs and a tangle of hurried words.
“Sir, Mr. O’Leary,” a woman in a doctor’s white coat scolded. White streaked her gray hair, pulled back in a severe bun, her lips pursed in disapproval. “You can’t be up and about right now.”
Hands locked around me, shoving and pulling. I scrambled around them and struck medical equipment and bedside furniture, knocking some to the ground.
“Where is she?”
Air crashed through my lungs in heavy pants, yet the world swerved and tilted. Faces went foggy. I clutched the back of an armchair with one hand and cradled the pain radiating from my chest with the other. My heart battered against my ribs, trying its hardest to beat its way straight out of me.
“Tell us who, sir,” another female voice said. The understanding in her tone was enough to steady my focus.
“My wife. Where is she?”
“She’s one of the two women who came in with him,” a third voice whispered.
“She’s here?”
A wave of dizziness seized what little strength I had left, clipping my hold over my limbs. As the floor rushed up to catch me, a multitude of arms stopped me short.
“Where?” I panted against them. “Tell me where.”
“Alizé De Villier,” the doctor stated over the clicking of a keyboard as people carried me back to bed. “Your wife just left a successful surgery, Mr. O’Leary, and has been moved to recovery.”
Surgery. My body slumped against the mattress, and my head thumped against the pillow. Successful. Alive. The words played on repeat, soothing the restlessness burning in my veins.
“How…” I licked my lips. “How bad was it?”
“A minor bowel perforation, easily repaired with no complications.”
She side-eyed my wrapped, useless hand. The pressure of that look cut my guilt and failure deeper than the wound, and I rubbed at the bandage to focus on something other than this sudden sensation of being dragged down into a pit.
“Your wife was lucky. Any deeper, and it might have reached her kidneys.”
Those words weren’t the reassurance she thought they were. Had I not let my guard down, Alizé wouldn’t have needed surgery at all.
“She should be up in her room in the next couple of hours.”
I rallied effort to glare at the doctor.
“This is her room. With me.”
I’d have it no other way, even if I had to find her and roll her in here myself. It’d give me something to do and focus on.
“We’ll see what we can do.”
“No. You do whatever it takes, you understand? She comes into this room. No matter what.”
“As long as you sit your bum in that bed and don’t move.
Don’t look at me like that, young man. I’ve lived through far worse than your intimidation tactics, but you won’t live another twenty-four hours if you don’t give your heart a rest and your system time to flush out the rest of the toxins.
” She rolled the bedside computer flush against the wall.
“In the meantime, one of my colleagues in orthopedics will be up to discuss options for your hand.”
My hand…I glared at the pattern in the ceiling tiles. What did I care about my hand if it saved her life? I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but I’d squeeze harder this time so the tip never pierced her skin.
After readjusting the lead wires and the heart monitor, the pack of nurses filed out.
As the pounding in my ears calmed, my eyes trailed over the perpendicular metal grid lines of the ceiling and counted the number of removable tiles.
Soon, I’d see her, hold her, and know for certain she was safe. The moment couldn’t come soon enough.
Liam nudged my leg. “You could have just told us you meant her, you big dope.”
I glared at my brother, my teeth grinding. “Who else could I have possibly meant?”
Brody shrugged as he pulled his laptop from a side table onto his lap and opened it. “We thought you’d be worried we hadn’t caught LK.”
“More than the woman I strangled my brother for?” He had the decency to show a little shame. “Did me not flying down to Colombia and dragging you two shite stains with me not clue you in?” I shoved a finger at each of them with my good hand. “Let me make this clear. No one matters more than her.”
“Not even us?” Liam teased, collapsing in his chosen armchair.
“No. One.”
“I’d argue you’ll change your tune once you two have a daughter.”
The beeping of the heart monitor pitched up in an accelerated tempo as the image came in a sudden flash.
A chubby-cheeked child with Alizé’s face and light eyes, surrounded by a head of dark-ginger curls.
Longing swelled up from my gut in a wave of warmth unlike anything I’d felt in a long time.
I wanted that more than my next breath. A family.
A future. There was no longer a need to hold back.
“Until that time and not a moment before, if I talk about a woman with the slightest concern, there’s only one person it can be.”
Liam raised his arms in surrender. “Aye, aye, captain. We’ve heard you loud and clear. Zero concern for us. Not a sliver for LK, who, in fact, by some fucked-up circumstance, happens to be our sister.”
“Half. Sister,” Brody corrected, barely looking up at us.
“Tomato, tomahto.”