Page 166 of Emperor of Wrath

Suddenly, a door bangs open. Two women and a man in white are all up in my face: prodding and poking, telling me to take a breath and calm down. They’re asking me my name, what fucking month it is. If I know how I got here.

Good question. I don’t even know where the fuck here is.

“Where is he?!” I scream, whirling. “Where’s?—”

Something very nice hits my bloodstream and instantly, I’m chilling the fuck out. I drop my head to the side, looking curiously at the needle one of the women has just stuck into a tube that’s running into my wrist.

Neat.

Then it all fades away.

Things are less chaotic when I next open my eyes. I blink, frowning as I turn to the side. Freya grins sheepishly at me.

“Frey?”

“Okay, that’s on me,” she blurts, looking guilty. “When you were waking up before, I was trying to be funny…”

“Wellll, maybe that was NOOT so funny…” I throw at her, doing my best impression of her weird ghost voice from before.

She smirks. “Not bad.”

“Not as bad as your hospital humor,” I grumble. “What the hell happened?”

“I’m pretty sure I freaked you out and sent you into a panic attack,” she says with another sheepish look. “So, yeah, that’s my?—”

“Where is he?”

She doesn’t respond quickly enough for my liking.

“Where is he?!”

I sit up again. Freya is right there, taking my hand and soothing me as she looks me in the eye.

“He’s okay, Anni. I mean, he’s going to be on a bunch of antibiotics for a while—you both are. That water was disgusting. It’s sewer run-off.”

Bile rises in my stomach, but I muscle it back down.

“But he’s fine. He’s out of surgery for the bullet wound, and he’s sleeping.”

Then it all hits me at once: the kidnapping, the needle in my arm, the bomb, Kenzo, Valon, the swim…

I frown as I look at Freya.

“How am I alive?”

She grins. “Because you’re a badass? I’m pretty sure you broke some sort of breath holding record getting you both out of there?—”

“No, I mean, I was poisoned.”

She shakes her head. “No… You weren’t.”

“By Valon, yes,” I insist. “He injected me with something?—”

“A slow-acting sedative.”

My brow furrows. “What?”

“You were mumbling something about poison when they got you in the ambulance so they ran a blood test, and that’s what came back. You got drugged, Anni. But with a slow-acting sedative, not poison.”

---