Page 12 of The Heart We Guard
Mouth dry.
The thoughts keep rolling as I try to make sense of where the fuck I am and why I feel so goddamn awful.
I pat to the side of me and am relieved to find there’s no one there. Then, I let out the groan I’ve been holding in.
“Fuck. Me,” I grumble.
Must have been some party. But I can’t pull thoughts together of what we were celebrating. I force an eye open. It flickers and closes again. But it’s open for just long enough that I realize the fireplace I just caught sight of is not instantly recognizable.
“Where the fuck…am I?”
The scent of coffee hits me. Why is coffee important? Is it morning already?
“Stay where you are, Nolan. You’re going to hurt yourself,” a stern voice says. A woman, maybe?
“Who…?”
Goddamn, why won’t my fucking eyes stay open?
“I’m Dr. Greer Hansen. You were shot, twice, and your friend Smoke brought you to me.”
This time when I try to open my eyes, it works. The world is a little blurry, but there’s a pale wood ceiling fan directly over me, and I can feel the softness of a pillow beneath my head.
There’s another pillow under my knees.
I go to sit up, but my back aches like a fucking bitch, so I lie back down. Patting along the bed next to me on either side, I realize I’m not on a bed at all—I’m on a rock-solid wooden table.
When I turned forty, I went from being able to bounce out of bed to suddenly feeling every bone in my body. Takes me five minutes to get my knee and ankle joints to work together to get me up. And I’ve become a proper Sleeping Beauty. Need a decent mattress, or it feels like someone took a wrecking ball to my hips.
So this flat surface without an ounce of padding feels like a medieval torture device.
When the world finally comes into focus, I see the woman standing near me. White-blonde hair is tied up in a ponytail. She’s pretty, with sharp cheekbones and thick lips. She’s wearing gray sweats that are seven sizes too big for her and swamp her frame. And she’s holding her mug of coffee in two hands like it’s her life support system.
She leans forward. “Can you follow my finger?”
She moves it from left to right, up and down, and I do as she says.
“Any double vision?” she asks.
I shake my head. “No.”
As she visually assesses me, I take in her eyes. Never seen a color quite like them. They’re blue, with a ring of hazel and goldaround the pupil that makes it look like the Big Bang or some shit. An explosion in miniature.
Then, I get a flashback of tears filling them, spilling down her cheeks and dripping onto blue scrubs.
Everything tumbles back. The raid. Lev Zakharov. Being told he’s been shot.
The burning pain as bullets tore through my skin.
Smoke bundling me into the van. The parking lot.
Her.
“You were crying.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how bad is the pain?” She avoids my question, but I’ll come back to it later.
“Pain is a solid nine, backache a seven, need to piss, a ten.”
