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“You’re lucky,” she says after. “Your uterus was perforated by the IUD. If he had persisted in pulling it out, you would have bled to death in minutes.”
Lucky.So lucky. There’s that word again. Everybody tells me what a lucky girl I am. But all I feel is bitter, blinding rage.
All I feel is a hollow spot where my heart used to be.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ROME
Blinding light.Am I dead?
Then nothing. I drift along, darkness alternating with that bright light.Am I still dying?
The pain is what jolts me out of my unconsciousness. It’s not a localized pain. Rather, it’s as if every nerve ending in my body is on fire, all radiating agony.Am I in hell?
I crack one eyelid open a fraction, the effort all-consuming. Everything is a blur. Bright white lights. Scratchy sheets. Fuck, it hurts. The fact that it hurts means I’m still alive.But where am I alive?My stomach lurches. If it’s that makeshift surgery where I had my bullet wound attended to, if they’re going to do even worse things to me now, then fuck it. I’ll hold my breath until I die. The light pummels my eyelids. There are no fingers in my bullet wounds, no locks being turned on the dungeon door,onetwothreefour.
There’s only the sheets against...
Something else.
Clean clothes?
It smells clean, if clean means antiseptic and bleach. There’s another smell here, too, underneath all the cleaner. Something old and rotted, like piss and a fistfight.
I force my eyes open and the light sears them. A clang alerts me to the fact that I can’t move my wrist.
Not my right wrist, or my left. Both of them are handcuffed to the bed.
“What the fuck?” I try again, testing, because this is on another level. Lock me in a dungeon and torture me. Shoot me. Starve me. But handcuffs? Shiny silver handcuffs? Fuck that.
“Rome, I see you’re awake.”
Shock bolts through me faster than the drugs did. She’s pretty, the person who spoke. Brunette and pretty and just like the other girls the XO killer took out. If this is hell, this is spot fucking on.
“Who the fuck are you?” I demand. “Where’s Avery?”
She doesn’t seem perturbed by my bluntness. In fact, a small smirk tugs at one side of her mouth. “I’m Amara Langley, your lawyer.”
I look around the room, trying to figure out what this place is. It’s too run-down to be any reputable kind of hospital, but the medical instruments remind me of a torture chamber in a horror movie. “Am I dead?”
The woman wears a pantsuit that nips in at the waist and carries a leather portfolio. She sits in a chair by the bed with the portfolio balanced on her lap and gives me a sad purse of her lips. It’s nothing for her to scrawl a note in her portfolio. What I wouldn’t give to fight my way out of here with that pen, wherever here is.
“No, Rome. Dead clients don’t generally pay their legal bills, so we try to stick to the live ones.”
Despite being almost dead, I’ve still got a thread of snark left. “Hate to break it to you, but me being alive doesn’t mean I’ll be able to pay you shit.”
She isn’t impressed. I suppose I probably look terrifying–covered in tattoos and bruises, strapped to a bed like some psycho.
“Wait. Why do I need a lawyer?” I ask slowly. Truth is, I already have an overwhelming suspicion that my worst fears have come true. If I’m being cast as the villain in this tale that can only mean one thing - Avery is dead.
And if she’s dead, I won’t stop until I am, too.
The lawyer opens her perfectly-lipsticked mouth to answer, but I cut her off. “Is she dead?”
Amara flips her leather portfolio open to a page of notes. I try to peer over the metal edge of the bed, but from this angle, I can’t see shit.
“I take it you don’t have much memory of the events of your rescue,” Amara says.
