Page 16 of Wicked Promises (Fallen Royals 3)

Why they decided not to bring me to a hospital—since clearly Caleb found me, and he probably didn’t run into them.

Which means Matt is still on the loose.

I shiver. My fingers are still on my opposite wrist, scratching at the sticky residue.

“You okay?” the nurse calls through the door. Her voice is jarringly loud.

I step away from the door and reply, “Yep, almost done.”

The detective and Angela haven’t said anything else—probably because the nurse is hovering outside the bathroom door. I scrub my hands until my skin is pink.

I cast one look at myself in the mirror, afraid of what I’m going to find.

There’s a wound on my head that’s been bandaged—and presumably stitched underneath. Various scrapes across my face. There’s a bruise on my temple, coming down onto my cheek, and the skin around my eyes is puffy. If I had more time, I’d do a more thorough examination. But in this moment, I can barely stomach to see my bare legs and socked feet. If my ankles are in the same shape as my wrists, I don’t want to see.

I breathe. My ribs don’t hurt as much as they did when Ian kicked me, but there’s still a deep ache.

Enough stalling. I open the door and smile at the nurse. She doesn’t have to help much on the way back, and soon enough, I’m tucked back into bed, hooked back up to monitors and the IV.

The detective drags the chair back to my bedside. Angela is once again leaning on the wall.

“Can you walk us through the day? Everything you remember.”

“I got home—”

“Who dropped you off?”

“Caleb.”

“So he knew where you were going?”

I narrow my eyes. “Objection—leading the witness.”

He jerks, then laughs.

“Caleb dropped me off, then left. Robert and I went to the prison soon after that. I visited with my dad for the first time in…” I shrug. Not relevant. “I left, got in the car with Robert, and we were hit.”

I try not to think about the crunch of metal. The car flipping. Or the way he hung upside down. He’s in the ICU while I’m being interrogated.

And what about Caleb? Did they arrest him?

Is he sitting in a jail cell?

“We were off the road. I had hit my head, so everything is kind of blurry…”

“Just do the best you can,” Masters says.

“Someone helped me out of the car.”

“Did they unbuckle you?”

I frown. “No… I think I did that. I was right-side-up, about to check on Robert, when…”

I was dragged over glass.

“They kept apologizing. Saying it was going to be okay.” My fingernails are on my wrist again, scratching. “I believed them up until they put something over my face. It hurt to breathe.”

“They took blood,” Angela tells me. “The hospital is running a full lab to figure out what happened.”

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