“Oh lord,” Merrick grumbled. “Giovanni, what did you do?”
“I know…” I said.
Milli dropped down into the seat next to me and leaned his head back. “Things are about to get a lot more complicated and difficult, aren’t they?”
Before I could answer, the locked doors near reception opened and the same nurse who’d spoken with me earlier came striding through. “Mr. Raines?”
I stood up and walked over to him. “Yes?”
He looked over his shoulder nervously and then turned back to me. “I’ve been told I can’t say anything else, but I just wanted to let you know. Miss Narzand has woken up.”
31
AVION
Waking up assaulted by pain was one of the worst ways to welcome a new day. I groaned as I opened my eyes, not enjoying the way the inane beeping in the room split my head open with pain each time. I shifted and felt the uncomfortable bed sheets underneath me--this was the most uncomfortable place I’d slept in a long time.
“Gio?” I managed to hum out.
“Not so much.”
I yelped at the voice and attempted to sit straight up, but my midsection screamed out in pain. There was a spot right in my center that burned like someone was stabbing me with a branding iron, and then all the space around it felt like it was roasting in a bonfire. It made me feel like I was going to look down there and find that the spot on my stomach was charred and flaking like a roasted marshmallow.
Even as my eyes blurred from the pain, I peered out across the room and realized I was in a hospital room. There were several machines strung up to me like I was a marionette puppet, and there were two people sitting against one wall, each with their legs crossed, looking back at me. I squinted through the screeching in my body to find the owner of the voice I’d just heard. I was hoping I was wrong, but as my vision narrowed, I saw someone I neither expected nor wanted to see sitting not far from my hospital bed.
“Vincent,” I grumbled. “What are you doing here?”
He was wearing a white, button-up shirt that was partially transparent in the bright, halogen, hospital lights, and I could see that his right shoulder was wrapped in bandages. I must have really shot him exactly as Milli had told me I had.
Not that it inspired any confidence in the fact that he was sitting ten feet from me.
“Why else would we be here?” Vincent replied. “Our baby sister gets shot, of course we’re going to be there.”
“How are you feeling?” Next to Vincent was my other brother, Anton. He didn’t look nearly as smug, and in fact seemed as uncomfortable with the situation as I was. “You’ve been out for quite some time.”
“I’m in pain,” I responded. “Is dad here too?”
Vincent crossed his arms. “He’s waiting by the phone for an update, but we all decided that it’s best for him to stay away from here.”
Part of me wanted to ask why, but I could think of about ten reasons just off the cuff, and that was really without considering it too deeply. Honestly, I didn’t expect my brothers at all, and I felt like they tolerated me just a sliver more than my father did. Vincent and I hated one another for all intents and purposes, but for my father and me, it often felt like I was just an accessory to his political campaign. When he offered me up as collateral to Gio in exchange for his unpaid gambling debt, that pretty much sealed the deal for me that he didn’t really care about me much at all, and if it didn’t, the fact that he made no attempts in months to make any sort of payment towards his debt certainly did.
That alone was enough reason for me to understand why my father wouldn’t be there to visit me at the hospital, now all I had to do was figure out why my brothers were there, when they were trying to kill me not that long ago. If anything, I would think that they’d be upset the bullet didn’t do the job for them.
One other thing didn’t make sense to me that I didn’t dare ask Vincent and Anton about, and that was where Gio was. I couldn't imagine that he would leave me alone in the wake of getting shot. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t aware of the fact that I was just an anchor until he could get his money back from my father, but I had just offered to work off the debt, and when it sounded like I would be around for a while, he seemed as happy about that as I was. There was something between us, however big or small, and that was enough that I simply couldn’t believe he wasn’t there at all.
“Is there a nurse I can speak to?” I asked.
Anton stood up immediately. “I’ll go get one.”
Leaving me alone in a room with Vincent wasn’t really my preference, but I just tried to breathe through the pain and wait quietly.
“So, Avion…” Vincent began, and I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. “What happened? Did your new suitor turn on you?”
“Of course not,” I replied right away. “We…” Then I stopped talking. Suddenly, I felt like I shouldn’t share the details of what happened. If there was someone trying to kill Gio, and given that my brothers seemed to want him dead as well, if they knew there was a way they could achieve that easier, they might just take them up on the chance. “We don’t know what happened.”
“Hmm,” Vincent hummed. “I wonder…”
Anton came striding back into the room with a nurse right behind him. She rushed over to my side and immediately started checking the various machines I was attached to. “Miss Narzand, how are you?”
