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I try to hide my reaction to how quickly they left, considering I’m in the hospital, but Jagger must notice.
“We forced her to go home because she kept trying to heal you.”
I remember that. “I wouldn’t let her touch me.”
“Thank you.” I turn my head and see Zig enter the room. He slides a cardboard tray of drinks onto the table at the end of the bed before walking around to my free side.
He leans over me and presses his forehead against mine. “I’ll never be able to repay you for what you did.” He pulls back, and the sight of his damp eyes sets me off.
“Salem surviving is payment enough.”
He drags a chair close to the bed and sits beside me, looking over at Slade and Jagger with a nod. “We sent Salem home because being near you and not being able to heal you was sending her off the deep end. She always feels a compulsion to heal, but she can usually keep it in check. But with it being you…” He takes a breath. “With what you did and nearly dying and not being able to heal you because of the baby, it was all too much. She needs to rest.”
“But she’ll be okay?”
“She’ll be okay now that I can call and tell her you’re gonna be okay.”
I blow out a breath and wince. That hurt. “I’m sorry.”
“What the fuck do you have to be sorry for?”
“The vision was all my fault.”
“How was it your fault? You can’t control your visions.”
I don’t say anything. I know he’s right, but that doesn’t negate my guilt.
“Okay, how about this? You let us tell you what we know, and you tell us what you think you know. And we’ll figure out everything in between. But first, let’s make something very clear. You are not responsible for what happened. Okay? None of this is your fault.”
“Okay,” I reply. My voice comes out sounding small and fragile, which I hate.
“Before we talk, how are you feeling? Do you need any meds?” Slade asks.
I shake my head even though I fucking do. “I’ll just pass out again, and I can’t do that until I know what the hell is going on. What did the doctor say?”
Slade growls, making me frown.
“It’s bad, huh?”
“It’s not that. The sword sliced you from your right shoulder to your left hip. You lost a lot of blood, and your heart stopped. In fact, you crashed three times before your lawyer arrived with a DNR. When your heart stopped the third time, the doctors refused to work on you.”
“What? But I don’t have a DNR.”
“I fucking knew it,” Slade snaps. “James said you fired the woman and had never mentioned a DNR before, so he called in a favor from someone he knows to check in to it.”
“She doesn’t know she’s been fired. I haven’t had chance to speak to her yet.”
“What the fuck does she stand to gain by lying?”
“Money. She has, or had, control of all my assets. So my inheritance from my parents, my income from my video games, which is a pretty penny, plus I have two hefty trust funds from my grandparents.”
“I feel like I’m missing something.” Zig looks between us all.
“My parents died when I was sixteen. Given the places they worked, they knew it was a possibility, so they made arrangements with their lawyer but updated them after the shooting—in case they died before I turned eighteen. Instead of having me emancipated and declared financially independent, they had this whole plan to make the world think they were still alive.”
“I still don’t understand the reasoning for it.” Jagger grunts, pissed on my behalf.
“At the time, I thought they had some immortality complex. People loved them for what they did. I thought they wanted that love to go on forever. And maybe that was part of it. But now, looking at it through older eyes, I wonder if, in their own way, they were trying to protect me.”
