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She grips the pen in her right hand, her fingers clumsily gripping the plastic as she tries to write on the notepad. Her left hand is struggling to keep the notepad steady, so I reach over, helping her to keep the notepad still. She gives me a small glance of thanks, before resuming her sloppy scrawl of letters, blue ink across white lined paper.
She holds the pad out to me, one word scratched into the paper: ROME.
I look at the paper a beat too long, then back to her as her eyes fill with tears. She takes the paper back and writes a second word, underlining it three times.
ALIVE?
I nod slowly. “He’s alive. He’s under heavy police guard. You don’t have to worry about him. There’s no way he can get to you.”
She sags in the bed, seemingly relieved. More tears flood from the corners of her eyes, as she sobs around the tube in her throat. She turns to a fresh piece of paper and writes one more thing, not even looking at what she’s doing this time. She closes her eyes, handing me the pen and paper as she lets the exhaustion pull her down again.
I look at the messy letters, and it takes me a few moments before I piece them together. Three words that confuse the hell out of me.
ROME IS INNOCENT.
I look at the words, willing them to arrange themselves into a more logical sentence. But try as I might, there’s nothing else these three words can say. I watched on the cameras as he raped a girl in front of Avery. As he spent days with her barely conscious. As he tended her wounds - the wounds that for all intents and purposes, I assumed he had given her.
ROME IS INNOCENT.
Avery Capulet sure seems convinced that Rome Montague is a victim in this too. But for the life of me, I can’t work out what she means.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AVERY
“You’re lucky we found you when we did. Another few minutes and that overdose would have finished you both off.”
Those are the first words I hear after I wake up from death for the second time. How lucky I am. But I don’t feel that lucky at the moment. Mostly, I feel pain.
One stroke of luck is that they’ve removed the tube that was stuck down my throat. A small act of mercy. My throat is raw from being intubated, but the pain barely registers among the more serious injuries I’ve sustained. A nurse fusses with the IV in my hand as a doctor writes on my chart at the foot of my bed. I don’t acknowledge any of them. For all intents and purposes, I’m not even here. I’m still in that room, swallowing those pills dry. Letting them pull me under. Surrendering to death with the one person in the world who knows what I’ve been through. The one person who knows why I didn’t want to survive.
“Your family is here to see you,” the cop’s words slice through my addled thoughts.
Oh, God. My family? I feel a stab of guilt as I realize I didn’t ask about my father when I first woke up. Is he alive? Did he survive the bullet that signaled the beginning of this nightmare? I want to ask now, but I’m too scared. I can’t hear that he’s dead. I can’t bear it.
I blink rapidly, my senses on high alert. Everything is too cold, too metallic, too loud. I know they’re only trying to help me, these nurses and doctors and police officers. But it’s not helping. Nothing is helping.
I want Rome.
We’ve become fused as we bled under the earth in the dark. I have become his; he has become mine. Now he’s gone from my side, and I should be relieved that we’re getting medical treatment. But I’m not relieved, because his absence is agony.
“Where is Rome?” I ask the detective who was sitting next to my bed when I woke up. He doesn’t look like he’s slept, deep circles under his eyes. He looks at the floor. My heart drops -did he lie to me before?
“Is he dead?”
Please don’t let him be dead.We took the pills at the same time, and he’s bigger than me. If I survived, he should have survived.
“No,” the police officer replies quickly. “He’s not dead. He’s downtown, being processed.”
My eyes sting. The damn fluorescent light. Something wet dribbles down my neck, and I bring my fingers up to the tender spot where the collar’s barbs were embedded into my skin.
It won’t stop bleeding. The symbolism of that doesn’t escape me.
“Processed?”
The guy clears his throat. “He’s been charged with murder.”
I sit up so fast, my head swims. The old me would have started panicking right now, but when I put my hand to my chest, it just feels empty. Aching. There’s a void that only he can fill.
