Page 36 of Inside the Maelstrom: Part Two
The nurse was busy checking out my responses when an ambulance arrived. “We’ve got a victim from the courthouse accident. Female in her twenties. Coding in the bus, but we’ve managed to get her back,” the EMT yelled, wheeling a woman in a torn blue pantsuit past us. My stomach rolled as medical personnel swamped the stretcher, hiding it behind another closed curtain. But I could still hear them.
Heard when she crashed again.
Heard when they called time of death.
I looked over at Aviva, my heart breaking at the tears streaming down her face. The nurse watched us with compassionate eyes that probably saw so much loss every day, her hand gently stroking Viva’s back.
I pulled my girlfriend between my knees and held her close to my chest, trying and failing to protect her from this heartbreaking reality. I whispered soft things in her ear, sweet little lies, until her tears dried, though her sadness remained.
The nurse cleaned up my head wound, which apparently didn’t need stitches. Luckily, I had no other concerning symptoms. We were hustled out to take X-rays of Aviva’s arm, and when she finally saw a doctor, we were told that it was a nice clean break. They plastered her arm up, and three hours later, we were out the door.
We were a bruised and battered family, but we were still alive. It might have been a freak accident, though my heart said that was a lie.
Drix’s father had upped the stakes, and I didn’t know how to keep the people I loved, who owned my heart, safe from his evil.
Chapter20
Aviva
Two dead. Three in critical condition.
They were calling it a tragic accident, and from the outside, it definitely looked that way. Just an elderly man having some kind of medical event—the news didn’t say what that medical event was—and jumping the curb, mowing down the crowd gathered to see us exit the courthouse.
The elderly man was going to be charged with vehicular manslaughter, but no one seemed to expect he’d get any jail time.
After seeing the sympathetic attitude of the media toward the man, I stood corrected—a ninety-year-old assassin totally made sense. Though if he’d been paid to kill us, he’d done a shitty job.
We’d arrived home from the hospital, and just huddled together in the cinema room. The guys had pulled mattresses in from the different bedrooms, laden the whole thing down with blankets and put on a movie, something sweet and stupid that you didn’t have to pay attention to. The hospital had given me some pretty awesome painkillers, which had knocked me straight out before we’d even reached the meet-cute part of the story.
When I woke up, most of my lovers were asleep around me. Evan was pacing around, staring at his phone, then at us, then back at his phone. He looked more stressed than I’d ever seen him.
“You don’t think it was an accident.” It wasn’t a question.
“No.”
Fear surged up through my veins, and I climbed slowly out of the weird nest we’d created. I motioned him out of the room, not wanting to wake the other guys. It had been a huge day full of every emotion on the spectrum. We were all exhausted, including Evan.
As he walked out ahead of me, I noticed he was moving a little stiffly. “Are you hurt?!” I hissed.
He waved a hand. “It’s nothing.”
Oh, it wasn’t nothing. We might be new lovers, but I knew enough about Evan to know that if it was minor, I wouldn’t even be aware. “Show me.”
“Chaos—”
“Just do it, Evan. I’m not going to let it drop.”
He huffed, muttering under his breath as he dropped his pants. All down one side of his body was a bruised, angry purple. I sucked in a breath.
“You got hit.”
His hip seemed to have gotten the brunt of the impact, and it was almost black, it was so swollen. I hooked my fingers around his boxers and pulled them down gently, hissing as the full extent of the damage was revealed. From his ribs to his mid-thigh was a rainbow of color.
Tears sprung to my eyes. That was too close. If he’d been a fraction of a second slower…
His finger came out and caught the tear rolling down my cheek. “Don’t cry, Chaos. Looks worse than it is. I’ve had worse.”
“Not while protecting me.”
