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ROCCO
I fought my way out of the darkness slowly. Someone was praying over me, and I followed along in my mind, more out of habit than anything. When I blinked my eyes open, Mamma was standing over me, rosary beads in hand.
“Mamma?” Fuck, my body hurt. Maybe I was dead.
She crossed herself. “Grazie a Dio. Rocco!” She kissed all over my face, like I was a tiny boy again. “I’ve been so worried. They said you would wake, but then nothing. You just sleep on and on and on. Let me get the nurse.” She pressed the button on the wall, still thanking God.
A nurse appeared with a smile. “Good to see you awake, Mr. Passero.”
I was in a hospital room—that was obvious—and it was filled with flowers. But no Tally. “Mamma, where’s Tally?”
Mamma frowned. “Who?”
I tried to sit up, and pain raced up and down my body like a whip. “Tally, Mamma. My wife. Where’s my wife?”
It was coming back to me now, like a horror sequence in an action film.
The train.
Her screams.
The roof of the car crumpling in on me.
The nurse pursed her lips in my mother’s direction. “Easy, Mr. Passero. Your wife has just gone home to shower and sleep. She’ll be back soon. She hasn’t left your bedside.”
“She’s okay?”
The nurse smiled. “She’s okay. Banged up, but miraculously uninjured. The other gentleman, Hayes…” She flushed pink. Clearly, Hayes was pretty handsome in that All-American kind of way. “He has a fractured leg and more than a few busted ribs, but he’s also okay. Your wife tells me he’s at home recuperating.”
“Yes, your wife’s other boyfriends are all fine, Tesoro Mio.”
Is it too late to pretend to be in a coma again?
I sighed. “Not now, Mamma.”
Rafa came into the room, pulling up in surprise when he saw me with my eyes open. “About time you woke up from your nap, brother.” He strode over and kissed both of my cheeks. “You scared the shit out of all of us there.”
Sucking in a shaky breath, I just wanted to hold Tally, but it was probably best to get this all out of the way before she came back. “What happened?” I looked down at my body, at my broken hands and my leg in a cast.
It was Rafa who answered. “You got the brunt of the train. You’d taken your seatbelt off, which was probably what saved you, but your big head was what broke Hayes’s ribs. It was also lucky that the airbags had already deployed, because it cushioned you all a little. You broke your left hand and wrist, and your right leg. They said it was lucky that you have such great neck muscles, or you would have snapped your neck. You did have some swelling on the brain, and they put you under to allow it time to heal.” He shook his head. “How you all got out of there alive is nothing short of a miracle.”
Mamma sent up a prayer of thanks again.
“We were waiting. We got rear-ended onto the tracks.” It was hazy. So fucking hazy.
Rafa nodded. “The cops have come by a couple of times, and now that you’re awake, they’re going to want to talk to you. Tally was awake for nearly all of it, so she filled them in on most of the accident. You’ll just have to corroborate.”
“It was an accident?”
His jaw tightened. “They aren’t treating it as such.”
I blinked at him. Maybe my brain was still sluggish. “Are you saying someone tried to kill us?”
He shrugged. “The police are treating it as a malicious event. From what Tally says, the eye witnesses said there was a truck that rear-ended a car three vehicles behind you. They said it didn’t even try to slow or stop. If anything, it sped up. It injured the people in the two cars behind you too, but not quite as badly as you guys.”
I was being dragged back down into the darkness again, and the more I struggled, the harder it was to stay awake.
“Sleep, Rocco. Heal,” Mamma murmured, and just like when I was a baby, her voice sent me off to sleep again.
