Page 36 of The Queen's Denial

“We’re not gonna kill you yet, but you must have a fucking death wish coming here,” one of the men says as I lose the ability to stand and sink backward into a strong grip. The other man grips my opposite side and slings my arm around his neck.

“Andy’s gonna kill you, dude,” the first guy says to the one who stuck me with the needle as my head lolls forward and lands on my chest.

“But this is protocol,” the other guy says uncertainly, as my eyes close like metal shutters. The last thing I hear would make me smile if my mouth could move.

“Shit. He is going to kill me, isn’t he?”

Chapter 17

Andy

I know I’m being medicated; I can feel the false sweetness of the drug coursing through my system the second I snap my eyes open. I’m super groggy, but I will my brain to be on high alert until I can remember what happened.

Internal bleeding and a punctured lung. That’s why I’m medicated. The memories of the night before hit me like a freight train, and I remember the bomb and the weightlessness, then the subsequent impact as I hit the ground. The discomfort of waking up that way, knowing I was slowly dying. I felt some pain, despite my extremely high tolerance, which is how I knew it was very bad for me.

I knew that if I didn’t get to my friend, Miller, soon, I’d be done for good in no time at all. I made that call to Chi, despite the fact that I shouldn’t have made it. I shouldn’t have made her worry about me more than she probably was already. I lost consciousness on my way to the makeshift ambulance, wondering if I’d ever wake up.

So that’s where I am. At the military base where I had landed at least once every month, as I nearly killed myself while serving a lifetime ago.

“Ah, the prince awakens! Praise be!”

My eyes narrow, and I swivel them over to the only person that those smartass words could belong to. Doctor Miller. I go to speak and then realize that I can’t with the tube down my throat. My hands go to grab it, but he looks at me sternly.

“Scutari, I swear to God, if you mess up my placement of that tube, I’ll keep it in for an extra day.” I shoot him a skeptical gaze, but lower my hands slowly as he continues. “Chill out. I want to see that you’re breathing normally now. You’re not out of the woods yet. You took a pretty rough spill there. And I heard you were running away from a bomb that you set yourself?” He pretends to scribble on his pad. “Psych eval, 11 a.m.” I hold up my middle finger, and he chuckles.

I motion for a pad and paper, and he gives me one. How long was I out?

“There’s no way you could have gotten better this quickly, but your surgeries lasted for seven hours until about three this morning, then we had to make sure all the internal bleeding was taken care of and rush you back to surgery when we found another one, so that took another couple hours, and then you were in a sort of… semi-coma until a couple hours ago. I didn’t expect you to wake up for a day or two, if at all.”

Thanks for the vote of confidence, I scribble down.

“Yeah, well, I’m just giving it to you straight, man. You were nearly dead when I got a hold of you. We closed up four different internal bleeding sites. And you needed, like, half a gallon of blood.”

I roll my eyes at his dramatics. If I had needed half a gallon of blood, I’d be dead. He knows I realize this and smirks. “Fine. Over a pint, though.”

There’s a moment where neither of us says anything, in which I acknowledge with a nod that he saved my life, and I’m thankful for it. As much as we are constantly trading barbs and pretending we hate each other, this man is like a brother to me.

When we served together, he was the closest friend I had, and then when he left and became one of the founding medics at this top-secret hell hole called FH1, he patched me up more times than I can count. And here he is now, doing the same thing again, even after fifteen years.

“Okay, very nice, Scutari, now you like me. Time to make you very angry. Control yourself, because I can still decide to keep that tube in after I leave here.”

My eyes widen, and I pin him with a severe gaze. I run through the multitude of things he might be about to tell me and think of Cas and Mara. Before I can write anything on my pad, he speaks.

“That lady you came in with and her ‘husband’ weren’t doing so well, either. They’re both alive, and that’s about all I can say for them. Somehow, you’ve recovered before either of them.”

You’d better — I begin to write, but before I can even finish my furious scribbling, he says exactly what I’m thinking, with a frighteningly accurate depiction of my voice. “You’d better make sure they live, doc.’ Right?” He peeks over to see the words I’ve already written and gives me a shit-eating grin. “You’re not as unpredictable as you think you are. But there’s another thing. And depending on who this person is to you, it might be even worse.”

I really am getting angry now. I try not to break my pencil as I write my message. Stop the fucking games and tell me what’s going on.

He bites on his lip in a rare show of nerves, and I know he’s about to tell me something that will actually make my blood boil, whether or not it was his fault.

“This girl apparently figured out where the above ground annex was a mile off. She was snooping around there and… well…”

My eyes widen, and I go to rip the fucking tube out of my throat again, before he rushes me and takes my hands. “Fuck, I’ll do it, okay? Can’t wait to hear who she is,” he mumbles as he hastily grabs some tools and dislodges the breathing device from my airway.

“Chi?” I push out, my voice nothing but a hoarse croak.

It’s time for his eyes to widen now, as he hesitates for far too long.

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