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“You were severely dehydrated. I was trying to set up an IV, but I couldn’t even find a good vein—that’s never been my specialty, so I called in the big guns, and we brought you here. You’re in a private room reserved for hospital donors and receiving the best care. You’re already leaps and bounds better than you were when we brought you in. How do you feel?”
I have more questions, but I stop to consider hers first. I feel… better. I’m not burning or freezing anymore, my double vision has cleared, and the world seems balanced again. My head is clear enough to recognize that despite her thick accent, she speaks in perfect English. “I’m okay.” I say, and this time my voice doesn’t crack when I speak.
Mentally, I’m still certain I’m fucked, but physically, I feel a world away from where I’ve been before.
“Okay,” the doctor nods. “I’m glad to hear that. Now I have some questions for you, and I need you to be completely honest with me.”
Something about the way she says that sends a chill over me; suddenly I feel like I’m being interrogated. Does she know what I’ve done? Am I going to be thrown in a Costa Rican prison? The nausea in my stomach roils, but I fight it back by taking another sip of water and nodding my consent for her to continue.
“Are you in danger?”
I blink, unsure of how to answer that. I’m in danger of being found a murderer, of having my whole life wrenched away from me, of being locked away and never seeing the light of day again. I’m also in danger of losing my grip on sanity, of being dragged to hell, of being captured again when somebody comes calling to follow up on their purchase of me.
“No.” I swallow. With Rhea, I’m safe. I’ve never had a single doubt about that. And even after what Remy and I did, after he’d pulled a gun on me on the boat and pinned me by the neck against his wall, I knew that I was safe with him. He proved as much when he found me in that filthy warehouse and single-handedly took them all down.
“Okay,” she nods, tucking a loose strand of her dark hair behind her ear. She doesn’t sound entirely convinced, but she lets it go, moving onto the next question. “Your injuries—were they caused by anybody in the Boudreaux home?”
“No!” I answer that one quickly, because it’s easy to see where she’s going with this. I don’t want to give her any reason to think that the only people who are keeping me safe are causing me harm. “Rhea is like my sister, and Remy has been… he’s making sure I’m taken care of.”
“And in the time that you’ve been with them, you haven’t been forced to do anything you don’t want to?”
“I…” I’m not sure how much she knows about what happened. Hopefully none of it. I’m not going to tell her I was kidnapped and sold, which I most certainly hadn’t volunteered for. “Not at their hands, no.”
“Good.” The doctor looks reasonably more relaxed by that admission. “One last question, and then you can tell me how you’d like to proceed. Okay?”
I press my lips together, noticing how dry they feel, and nod again.
“Other than the sleeping pills, have you taken anything that may alter your consciousness? Alcohol, illicit drugs, stuff like that.”
“Not recently.” I shake my head. “We went to the club—I don’t know when that was, but that’s the last time I drank. As far as drugs, just the stuff that Rhea or Elaine gave me.”
“Hmm,” she mulls over my response a minute, trying to figure out what her next words are, before she speaks again. “Well, your blood work came back.” She holds up a tablet, which I presume holds the results of whatever tests she had run.
“Is everything… okay?”
It’s been a while since I’ve had any sort of testing done—four years, almost to the day, since I tried to take my life and was admitted to the hospital for a litany of tests and questions that my social worker had helped me field. I did an STD test not long after I began at Darrington, but otherwise I haven’t seen a doctor in years. I also threw myself at Remy the other day without stopping to consider any sort of protection, although I trust him not to put me at risk considering what we’ve been through together.
Panic starts a drumbeat in my chest and my overactive imagination roars to life as I consider the possibilities of what she’s about to tell me—that I’m sick, that I’ve been exposed to something like herpes, that I have blood poisoning from that dirty blade Slick had dragged over my skin, even the possibility of pregnancy, though I’m not sure testing can tell so early considering I wasn’t with Remy until last night.
None of those possibilities prepare me for reality when the doctor looks levelly at me.
“You’ve been poisoned.”
Chapter eleven
Remy
Rhea’s face is dry by the time she steps out onto the church’s stone stairs with me a few moments later. She looks sad, but also somehow relieved, as if she’s just grateful to have made it through the last few hours. I certainly understand that.
Pretending to care about a man who didn’t give a damn about a single person beyond himself is as mentally taxing as it is physically, and I’m ready to get out of the public eye. Some of the crowd has dissipated by the time I step outside, and even more have left by the time Rhea joins me, but it doesn’t take long for the procession to begin again as people come to tell us what a beautiful service we pulled together or to offer their condolences.
“I’m going to punch the next person who tells us that the service was lovely,” I grumble loudly enough for Rhea to hear, prompting a cross between a giggle and a snort to escape her.
I’m already feeling murderous by the time Wes turns up with Dimitri and Michael close behind. I consider pulling Rhea after me back into the church, but my desire to go back in there is even less than my desire to deal with our annoying-ass illegitimate brother.
I choose wrong, and Wes makes that clear when he pulls Rhea into a hug and catches my eye over her shoulder, the ever-present smirk on his lips deepening as I glare at him. He wipes it clean quickly when Rhea pulls away and takes a step back to fix him with a small smile. “The service was lovely.” He tells her.
Fuck. If I had any doubts about him being related to us, that clears them up. He knows how to piss me off like it’s his job— the way only family can do.
