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“What are you going to do to me?”
“I haven’t quite decided yet, Darling.” Her heels click across the floor as she brings me a towel. She holds it open, silently instructing me to get out of the tub. As I stand, she wraps it around me, the bottom dusting against the water and soaking the edges.
“I’m not going to kill you.” She takes my hand and helps me to step over the high edge of the clawfoot tub. “I need you to be a constant memorable reminder, not a quickly forgotten scare. I’ll have one of the girls bring you some ice for that eye.”
“Madame?” I call after her in vain as she walks from the bathroom.
Not bothering to find any clothes, I climb into the bed with the towel still wrapped around me. Grabbing the pillow, I wrap my arms around it and squeeze it tightly. I bury my face in it to hide my screams. Violently expelling my lungs into the pillow until I’m exhausted, I continue to hold it to my face to muffle my uncontrollable sobs.
I try to get some rest while I’m left alone, but when I close my eyes, all I can see is Samuel.
The knife sliding from his stomach. Him crumpling to the floor. A pool of blood oozing from beneath him as he stared into my eyes. Those normally dark eyes filled with sadness and regret like nothing I have ever seen.
Silently telling me how sorry he was as he slipped away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
SAMUEL
“Fuck,” I groan as I groggily wake up. The pain in my side now a throbbing ache instead of a searing pain. My eyelids flutter, but they feel ungodly heavy and as though I have no control over them—as with the rest of my body.
There are people here—wherever this is—but I can’t keep my eyes open long enough to see who they are. I can hear them talking, but my head’s so fuzzy that I can’t place any of their voices.
How fucking high am I?
“Relax, kid.” a deep voice echoes through my head. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
Fragments of a thousand thoughts run through my clouded mind, but darkness begins to creep back over me before I can put them together.
* * *
Opening my eyes, I look around, trying to place my surroundings. Slowly, I turn my head, and I’m surprised at who I find sitting beside my bed.
“Grant?” His name cracks from the dry and scratchiness of my throat.
“Welcome back, kid.” His voice has a hint of warmth to it that I’m not used to. At least not when he’s talking to me. He presses the call button resting on the bed and alerts the nurses' station that I’m awake.
“Cora?” I ask, but Grant doesn’t have a chance to answer before the doctor enters the room.
“We can get into that when he’s done checking you over,” Grant reassures me as he stands from the bedside seat and leaves the room.
“You gave us all quite a scare, Mr. Millington.” The doctor flashes a—too bright—flashlight into my eyes as he talks. “You’d lost a lot of blood by the time we you got here. We were a little worried for the first couple of days.”
“Days?” I fight the overwhelming urge to climb from this bed and run after Cora, even though I can barely lift my own head from the thin mattress beneath me.
The doctor continues his examination, thoroughly checking my vitals and examining the cleanly sutured stab wounds in my shoulder and abdomen.
“These are healing nicely.” He replaces the gauze covering my stomach before taking a seat beside my bed. “But I’ll be honest, I’m a little more concerned with what we found from the laceration on your scalp.”
“I got whacked in the head, Doc.” I lightly shake my head. “I’ve taken plenty of helmets to the head over the years. It’ll be fine.”
“That was actually the issue, Mr. Millington. We did a head CT to ensure there weren’t any contusions or brain bleeds from where your friend said you hit your head on the parking lot.” He pauses briefly to open my chart on the tablet in his lap. “It showed something concerning, so we ran additional tests. The PET scan showed significant evidence of Traumatic Brain Injury.”
“I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.”
“It’s likely that years of helmet-to-helmet contact is the culprit. I would assume that you played since childhood to have been as successful at it as you were.”
“Yes.” I nod. “Since about ten.”
