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Chapter Thirty
Raven
“I told you she—oh!” It’s a different nurse that returns. My cheeks flush with embarrassment. “Sorry. It was a different nurse who took her away.”
“No worries.” The new nurse with dark hair smiles at me. I feel a little foolish but that ebbs away as I gaze down at my sleeping angel. She’s so perfect and beautiful, I don’t know what I’d do if anything ever happened to her. “We’re actually going to move Phoenix up to the children’s ward now. We have a side room for her. We just called by to collect you.”
“Why? Is she okay? Did the x-ray show something?” Panic floods me once more.
“Nothing to worry about,” the nurse reassures me. “We’re quite quiet today and thought it would be nice if...erm all of Phoenix’s...visitors outside could see her. With your own side room we can bend the rules a little on the number of visitors per bed.” She smiles and winks at me. “We need to wait for the doctor to check the x-ray but I’m sure everything’s fine and you’ll be out of here in no time.”
“Thank you.” I look around the space and see Thorn’s beach bag slung down by his chair, along with his and Nix’s hoodies. I grab them, the bags, and the drinks, then declare we’re good to go. With another bright smile, the nurse beckons me out of the bay and I follow along as they wheel Nix’s bed along the corridor. The hospital is so small that we don’t have to travel far, and within a couple of minutes Nix is being set up in a lovely side room.
“I’ll tell your guests where you are and send them up.”
I thank her again and she leaves. With Nix sleeping so peacefully in her bed, it gives me a minute to think about what happened downstairs with the blonde-haired nurse. It’s crazy how much she looks like the picture I have in my head of Lizzie now. Thorn’s reaction makes me believe that I’m not going crazy but still, it’s shaken me. I guess I haven’t seen her ghost for a long time now.
I’m shaken from shadows of the past by a commotion in the corridor, so I slip out of the room and gently close Nix’s door behind me. I don’t want to wake her.
Of course it’s my guys making the noise. They appear to be having an animated discussion.
“What’s going on, guys?” I ask calmly. “If this is about Nix, the nurse said we can all go in because it’s a side room and the ward’s pretty quiet right now.”
“It’s not that,” Thorn replies while Baxter and Jax remain nose to nose in heated debate. “They’re arguing over that nurse.”
Of course I don’t have to ask which nurse he means.
“They see the resemblance too?”
“Resemblance?” Jax snaps, looking away from Baxter and zeroring his dark espresso gaze in on me. I used to think his eyes looked almost black, but next to Baxter’s ebony glare, I can see the difference. Still has the power to make me nervous though. Not that I’d let on. “No. There’s no resemblance there. That is Lizzie.”
“You’re being absurd,” I say gently. “Lizzie’s dead.”
“They never found the body though, did they?” Rebel says quietly.
It’s true. They didn’t.
The memory of Michael’s taunt haunts me once more, his scathing words cutting open old wounds more painful than anything Baxter could do to me with a knife.
I heard Jax could barely identify her broken body by the time they fished it out of the sea. I guess you had a closed coffin funeral. I watched her you know, from this very spot as the waves bashed her brains out on the rocks down there. It was too dark to see the water turn read with her blood, but I have a good imagination. It got me hard all over again.
I’m racing to the nearest toilet and throwing up before I even register my feet moving. Gentle hands hold my hair back and a strong sense of déjà vu hits me.
“Princesa,” Ace murmurs gently.
“I’m sorry.” For a moment I allow the tears to fall, completely overwhelmed. Ace wraps me in his arms and soothes me wordlessly. “I can’t even hear his voice in my head without vomiting.”
“Voice?”
“Michael.” I hiccup as I try to get my emotions under control. “He taunted me, about Lizzie. I don’t know if he knew that her coffin was empty or if he was just trying to mess with my head. My parents had weights out in the coffin so that people wouldn’t be able to tell there was no body. They were so ashamed to have a daughter who ‘committed suicide’.”
“No body?” I shake my head as he asks tentatively. “So...maybe alive?”
“It can’t be, Ace. It’s just not possible.”
“Actually, it is.”
Baxter’s voice in the doorway makes me leap out of my skin.
