Page 34 of Crossed By the Stars
My entire body was hurting asIcame awake in the semi-dark hospital room. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to move my head. It hurt to listen to the sounds in the room that were still muffled and yet sharp all at the same time. I groaned, and a body moved at my side. Fear shot through me before my eyes met Dax’s.
I should have known it would be him. He hadn’t left my side since arriving at the hospital. His eyes had been shouting at me with a range of complex emotions I was too tired to try and read.The soft kiss he’d placed on my palm earlier had about undone me. I was barely keeping myself together. I wasn’t sure I could handle his turning back into the sweet boy I’d first met. Not when I was used to the suave and sure but sarcastic grown-up he’d become. The one who normally held me at a distance even when our bodies screamed to be attached.
“You’re hurting. Shall I get a nurse?” he asked, his deep voice barely reaching me through the frustrating layer of cotton and persistent ringing filling my ears. As panic surged through me, I reminded myself that it wasn’t permanent. The otolaryngologist had said over ninety-five percent of blast victims had their hearing recover, but it could take weeks if not months. He’d given me an initial injection treatment and then left, leaving a schedule of appointments behind.
I tried to shake my head, and it caused the pain to scream through me again, but I didn’t want anything to help me escape the pain. I needed to feel every ounce of it. I needed it to remind me that my body and soul were here while Bobby’s were not. I needed it to remind me of what it meant to go up against my father and his organization. I felt childish and naïve for ever thinking I could topple it with Dawson and the FBI. I knew now that it had just been my way of striking out at my father once more, like I had with the chauffeur, and the schools I’d been kicked out of, and the money I spent like it was a disposable commodity. But instead of me paying the price, it was always the people around me who did.
Before I could respond verbally, Dax was already at the door, speaking softly to someone, and then back at my side.
“Go home, Armaud,” I said, unsure if I was loud or soft because my voice echoed through my brain like a pinball machine.
His face darkened. “No.”
A nurse hustled in with a bag of fluids, hooking them up to the IV stand. “No more pain medicine,” I said to her, slurring.
Dax growled, “Stop being a martyr. Take the damn medicine.”
“Stop telling me what to do,” I threw back.
The nurse chuckled. “You and your fiancé are adorable.”
I turned to her, barely breathing out, “What?”
She assumed I hadn’t heard her because of my hearing loss, and she repeated it a little louder.
“He’s no?”
“Thank you,” Dax said with a smooth smile that had the nurse flushing before she scrambled out of the room.
“Why in the hell does she think you’re my fiancé?” I asked, eyes narrowing on him.
With deep emotion lodged at the back of his throat, he said, “It was the only way they’d let me in.”
I closed my eyes, hurt winging its way through my soul instead of my body. I couldn’t do this with him. I’d let him into my life too many times and had him flit away on tender feet, too afraid to walk over the coals with me, too afraid of the image of a Mori at the side of an Armaud.
He’d kissed me once and then disappeared from my life for three years.
He’d held my hand in another hospital much like he’d done today, making promises with eyes and hands instead of words, and then disappeared for another two years.
I wouldn’t survive it again. I wouldn’t be able to recover and keep the frail pieces of my soul from completely shattering.
“As if I’d ever agree to marry you,” I threw out, trying to regain some level of the snark that was our norm but knowing I failed miserably.
“Never say never,mon amour,” he teased, knowing I hated being called the stupid endearment. Hated it as much as someone calling me babe or chick.
He ran a hand over my hair. It had been up in a twisted knot while I’d worked out with Lía, and I was sure it was now a bird’s nest of tangles. Even still, the movement was sweet. Tender. It made me want to sob like I had whenObaasanhad come home to find me locked in my room at her apartment a decade ago. She’d wrapped me in her arms and shh’d me as if that could make the knowledge of my father cutting someone’s finger off vanish. As if I could forget that every single thing we owned had been earned at someone else’s expense. As if I could ever look at my father again without seeing anything but a villain.
The pain medicine in the IV hit me hard, making my eyes too heavy to lift back up.
“I don’t need a husband. I don’t need you,” I told him, words slurring.
“Maybe I need you,” I thought I heard him whisper right before sleep overtook me.
???
When I woke again, the light was filtering through the blinds in the room. The antiseptic smell of the hospital hit me at the same time as the sounds of the machines and the laughter from the nurses’ station. I wasn’t sure if they were less muffled than before or if I was just growing accustomed to this new level of sound. The ringing was still there, an annoying buzz that I wanted to shake away but couldn’t.
I turned to the chair that Dax had been in. The jacket he’d had on was draped over the back, but instead of Dax, my father sat there. Eyes unreadable. Suit and hair perfect. I glanced at the doorway where Cillian was standing with a hand at the back of his waist on his concealed weapon. But I had nothing to fear from my father at the moment. He would never end my life with his own hand.
