“Over there.” She hooks her thumb in the direction opposite the SUV at the exact moment the back passenger window of the SUV glides down, and a tattooed hand clutching a Molotov cocktail pops out of the opening.
As the oily puddles beneath Ophelia’s car finally make sense, the goon tosses the now-lit Molotov in the direction of the gas tank.
“Get down!”
I feel like I’m shouting, but my words are produced as slowly as the steps I take to protect my savior from a criminal entity that will massacre its own blood for profit.
I snag her wrist, yank her into my chest, then spin in preparation to run into the safety of the damp marshlands.
We don’t even get two steps away when the flames engulfing Ophelia’s car ignite the gas tank. Its furious blast sends me and the unknown woman flying through the air at a rate too fast for me to counteract.
Our crash into sloppy mud is as brutal as the blast that burned my shirt off my back. It knocks me out for the third time this evening and has me panicked my father claimed more than my life tonight.
He returned an angel to heaven as well.
My attempt toprotect my thumping head from the annoying beep of a monitor is thwarted by a cool, steel material wrapped around my unbroken wrist. The smell alerts me to the fact I’m waking up in the hospital, not to mention the incessant beep of a pulse oximeter.
Although grateful I survived the blast, there isn’t a lot to celebrate. My baby sister is dead, the murmured whispers of the nurses prodding me expose the prognosis isn’t much better for the woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’m cuffed to my hospital bed.
“W-What’s wrong with h-her?”
Since I’m lying on my stomach, I have to contort my neck to read the lips of a plump nurse with strands of gray hair twisted off her face with an old-fashioned clip. She warns the younger, less rule-following half of the duo to remain quiet before she continues caking my back with a greasy substance.
“Is s-she okay? Can you a-at least tell me that?”
It’s hard to determine if the brunette’s grimace is because she’s about to give me bad news or because I’m yelling. My hearing is so bad right now, I’m beginning to wonder if the vital monitor was responsible for my return to the living or the cracks of my decimated heart fusing together.
“I need you to stay still.” I assume she is going to give me the same line the pretty mixed-race lady did about internal injuries being hard to assess from the outside, so you can picture my shock when she adds, “The fluid loss from your burns could cause severe damage to your internal organs.”
“B-Burns? What burns?”
The only part of my back I can see is the top of my shoulders, but I don’t need to see more than that to understand why I’m lying on my stomach. My back is badly burned, and it has me worried my rescue scarred my savior with more than nightmares.
“Did she g-get burned? Is that why her p-prognosis isn’t good?” When the brunette’s eyes shoot to the clearly inferior of the two, I shout, “Answer me! Did she get burned?”
I don’t know why I’m so frantic to be informed of the condition of a woman I’ve not been formally introduced to. I guess you could say Ophelia is dead, so I’m thrusting my remorse for not protecting her onto my savior, but that’s a weak response.
I’m so desperate for an update, while the nurses discuss protocol, I use some of the gel coating my back from the top of my shoulders to the base of my tailbone to loosen the grip of the handcuff curled around my wrist.
It’s almost halfway down my hand when the young nurse’s eyes lock with mine. “She wasn’t physically injured by the blaze.” If she’s speaking out loud, I can’t hear her. Unlike when I woke, her girly pitch doesn’t sound like she’s talking under six feet of water. I can hear the guilt in her shallow breaths, but her words are silent. She must know I can lip read. “She—”
When her eyes rocket to the left, so do mine. The reason for her abrupt silence is understandable when I spot who’s entering my room.
The devil is walking the halls, seeking new victims.
“Leave.” When the head nurse attempts to tell my father they haven’t finished dressing my wounds, he shouts so loud, even through the bandages curled around my head and the hearing disability he gave me, the vibration of his threat vibrates my eardrums. “Leave of your own accord or in a body bag. The choice is yours.”
The head nurse charges out of the room like her ass is on fire. It takes me wordlessly convincing the younger of the two that I’ll be fine before she shakily steps past my father, then disappears into the corridor.
After closing the door, my father unhurriedly stalks to my half of the room. Although the scrub of his jaw almost has me missing what he mumbles under his breath, the disdain in his eyes tells me everything I need to know.
The wrong Petretti child perished tonight.
He wants me dead, and when my eyes lock onto the official-looking document in his hand, I understand why. It’s the will I had drawn up when Dimitri and Roberto followed our father’s footsteps instead of our mother’s. The declaration that says the millions of dollars I’m set to inherit in only a few short weeks will be solely awarded to Ophelia in the event of my death.
“S-She wouldn’t have g-given you a dime,” I mutter out fearlessly since the only person I was living for is no longer here.
The groove between my father’s brows deepens before he finds a way to soothe his anguish. He stabs his pointy nail into the goop coating my back before he treks his finger over the grooves in my spine.
