“Not my first time.”
“You can’t die,” I whispered, leaning down so no one else could hear me. “I need you not to die. I need… I need you.”
“No!” I yelled when hands grabbed me again.
“We need to get him to a hospital,” Fallon’s voice said.
“It’s okay,” Perish assured me, but his voice was getting even weaker. “Go with your dad.”
The choice was taken away from me then.
My father wrapped his arms around my middle and pulled me away as I kicked and writhed.
I watched helplessly as Fallon, Voss, Uncle Reign, and Uncle Malcom grabbed Perish and carried him quickly out of the building.
“Dad?” I cried, all the strength suddenly leaving me, all the fight falling away. My body went slack, and my father nearly dropped me. “Daddy?” I whimpered.
He scooped me up like he used to when I was a little girl, holding me to his chest.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s okay. I’ve got you. It’s going to be okay.”
But I saw Perish as he was pushed into the back of the SUV.
His body was slack.
His eyes were closed.
It wasn’t going to be okay.
I turned my face into my father’s chest and cried.
He never let me go. Not as he slid us into the backseat of someone’s car. Not as the car started moving. Going where, I had no idea.
It wasn’t until I was pulled back out of the car and heard the buzzer attached to the gate that I knew where I was.
Hailstorm.
“Oh, baby,” my mom’s voice said, her hand smoothing down my hair as my father carried me down the long corridors toward the inner depths of the building. Then, to my father, “Where is all the blood coming from?”
She was trying so hard not to sound panicked, but there was an electric tension in her voice.
“It’s not hers,” he said, hugging me a little tighter. “It’s Perish’s.”
The pained animal sound that escaped me had my mom’s hand going to my arm, rubbing up and down.
“Right over here,” a voice said as the scent of disinfectant and antiseptic met my nose, making it wrinkle even as I sniffled hard.
“I’m fine,” I insisted as I was lowered onto an exam table. “I need—”
“You need to get looked at,” my father said, his hands pushing me flat.
I knew far too well that there was no reasoning with a parent who was afraid for their child.
So I went limp against the stiff mattress, staring blankly up at the stark white ceiling and the fluorescent lights that made the migraine slice into my eyes.
“Oh,” my mom whimpered as she got a look at my face for the first time.
My gut instinct was to assure her I was fine, to brush it off.
