Page 111 of Silver Secrets

“Gage?” she cried out, her throat radiating with excruciating pain. “Superman. Talk… t-to me.”

A bang came from upstairs, jumbled shouting, frantic in its pitch, reached her ears. She knew her voice was shot, but as the heavy boots stomped across her living room floor, right above her head, Sloane screamed. Barely a whisper came out.

Her body felt like it was being pulled through quicksand. When her head flopped to the side, she felt her mind shutting down. Her vision dimmed, but it was right then that she saw her only hope: a metal support post was so close to her. If she could just reach out…

Sloane used every last drop of energy she had to bring her fist up and bang against the post. Once, twice… The stomping upstairs stopped.

And then they turned, rushing towards where the basement door was. Her body was so cold, but she needed to be with Gage. Even as she felt the blood still seeping down her leg, she desperately needed to make sure he was going to be okay. The door opened, and the smallest flutter of hope lit up her chest.

“Oh, fuck.”Gunner.Sloane almost would have laughed at the profanity if she wasn’t already finding it impossible to focus her eyes. The room kept spinning, darkness calling out to her. But she had to get to Gage.

“Gage,” she croaked.

“Doc!”

“Yeah, I’ve got him.”

“Sloane? Sloane, try to keep your eyes open, okay? Here.” Warmth registered around her but she couldn’t open her eyes.

“Get pressure on her wound before you try to move her. She’s losing too much blood.” Stone’s voice sounded so close. Had she almost made it to Gage?

Something soft slipped around her exposed thigh, pressing impossibly hard against her skin, and then she was airborne.

“Don’t…” she cried out. “Don’t touch me.” God, her throat hurt. Speaking felt like trying to move her vocal cords through sandpaper.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, we have to get you out of here. Stone and Hawk are going to look after Gage, and I’ve got you.” Gunner’s voice registered in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t understand why he sounded so choked up. Unless he was worried about losing his friend. “I’ve got you, Sloane. It’s going to be okay.”

“Gage…”

Twenty-Nine

“It’s been two weeks. She won’t get out of bed. She barely eats or drinks. I don’t know… I don’t know how to help her.”

Sloane closed her eyes and rolled over in bed. Fantastic. Gage was talking behind her back to their friends.

Was he right? Had it really been two weeks since they got out of the hospital? How long were they even in there? Every day blended together in a never ending nightmare of cold darkness.

“We need to see her, Gage. She needs us. She needs her friends.”

“Someone we thought was a friend did this to her, Mae. To us. I think it’s going to take some time.”

“No!”Lily was crying. Sloane reached up and batted away another useless tear from her own face.“She’s my best friend. I’m not letting her rot away in there. We love her. I’m not giving her a chance to shrink back into herself.”

“Lily’s right. If we have to bulldoze our way in there, Gage, we will. And you won’t stop us.”

“Fuck, Em. I’m doing the best I can here. She’s not… She's not well. And I’m just trying to keep her from falling completely apart. I can’t…”

“Gage.”

“She didn’t say a fucking word for nearly a week!”Oh, he was growling at her friends. Something sparked in Sloane’s chest. Interesting. She felt protected by what he was saying, but there was an undeniable part of her that wanted to tell him to back off a little.

It was true that she was barely speaking. At first, her throat had hurt so badly from being strangled that she hadn’t wanted to talk. And then, it became the perfect excuse not to have to. The doctor she saw a week ago while lying in the very same spot she was currently in, some top of the line physician Sebastian had flown in to consult with Jake about the treatment they had received at the hospital, confirmed that she was healing. Apparently, neither she nor Gage would have any lasting damage. Which meant, it was only a matter of time before she would be expected to say more than two or three words at a time to him.

“I can’t get her to agree to see a therapist. She needs someone to process through everything that happened, but it can’t be one of us. It has to be someone neutral. And until that neutral person helps her realize it’s safe to trust her friends again, I don’t think anything will make her not feel uneasy around our group.”

God, she hated herself. Everyone around her was hurting and it was all her fault.

“You’ll figure this out, Gage. But we’re here to help. So, you tell her to get her ass out of bed, or tomorrow I’m marching in there and I’m not leaving until she accepts our help. I don’t care if I have to lay in that bed with her for weeks. She wants to rot, we’ll rot with her. Because we aren’t just her friends. We’re her goddamn family.”

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