Page 86 of Marked by the Demigod

Aimes struggles to swallow down the lump in her throat, the idea of actually finding out what’s going on bleeding off the edge of the fear. "You're going to...tell me?"

Katya nods, pulling over another chair, revealing the doctor carefully, ever so carefully, putting a line of neat stitches across the scattered skin of Iakov's chest. "It's an interesting story," she starts, voice soothing.

Aimes wishes she could see Iakov again, but the doctor is still there. "When will he wake up?" She calls around Katya.

Instead of the doctor responding, Katya does. "In a few hours, he barely stayed conscious long enough to get you." She pauses, as if the thought just occurred to her. "Where...where did he put you?"

"Some...some hole in the ground bunker." The anger is still there, looming in the background of her thoughts, as if waiting to lurch forward. "I couldn't reach anyone, there was no electricity but the fridge ran and the lights were on but they weren't plugged in and the beef jerky was in Russian."

Katya's eyebrows flash up, but she continues stroking Aimes's hair, a soft moment. "We told your friends you were out on a convention and your coworkers you had a family emergency."

That answers a question Aimes didn't know she had, the knot of suffocating pain sitting in her chest slowly working itself loose. "How long was I there?"

"A little under two days."

The doctor murmurs something, something so soft that Aimes can't quite hear, but Katya nods back. "She's almost done. Then we can leave you alone to sleep for a bit."

Sleeping does sound good, but the corner of her brain that knows it would be dreadful sticks in her mind. "What happened?"

Katya nods, her work face settling in. "He came back quickly, and..."

And Aimes desperately clings to being awake, listening as best as she can, until Katya finishes and the doctor disinfects the new stitches and bandages him up in a clean white gauze, and they both finally leave.

Aimes eyes Iakov, still asleep/passed out, but his face looks less grey and more like an actual person.

Apparently, after leaving her in that hole, he came back and hatched a plan with Katya to separate the twins, and it sounds like a pretty fucking dangerous plan for Katya, but she had contacted one of the twins workers with some false information on Iakov. The plot gets confusing from there, but apparently Iakov tried to take on Vanya one-on-one with some sort of magic trap, and it sounds so much like a fairy tale or bad movie, the type that she'd turn off if she caught it on TV.

And her brain hurts, hurts so bad that she just wants to sleep despite the vague buzzing in her veins and the throb in her chest, right where Iakov's stitches are. But he's still slumped in the rickety metal chair, his eyes still closed, his breathing quieter but still ragged, and she drifts off after staring at him for way too long.

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