He grabs my hand.
“What?” I whisper. Barely a word.
“That we’re all yours.”
Butterflies settle deep in my stomach. Despite everything. Despite the pain and the fear and the fact that my life almost ended.
They’re all mine.
What a strange feeling.
My body aches. My arm throbs. My throat burns.
But my heart feels full.
Chapter Thirty-One: Tigerlily
At some point, they would have to leave.
That’s what I kept telling myself every time Jax dozed off in the hospital chair, or Zephyr brought me food I couldn’t eat, or Callum made jokes that almost made me forget where I was.
At some point, they would have to tend back to their real lives. Practice. Games. Classes. Everything that existed before I became their problem.
The stillness that followed after they left each night ate me alive.
But what ate me even more was not seeing Zinnia. Not knowing if she was okay. Not knowing where she was sleeping or if she was crying or if anyone was explaining to her what happened. I didn’t have a voice to call the office to find out where she was, and it was killing me on the inside.
Then the police showed up.
They had come the first day I woke up, but I told them nothing. Blamed the drugs for my confusion. The pain for my inability to speak. My throat was too sore to talk. They took one look at me—wires and tubes and bandages—and scheduled a time to come back.
That time is now.
And luckily, the guys are at hockey practice.
Two officers stand in my hospital room looking official and out of place. One of them pulls out a recorder and sets it on the table next to my bed.
“Tigerlily,” the first officer says. “Is that your real name?”
“Yes.” I blink, looking between the two officers.
“Do you remember what happened to your arm?”
I look down at the bandage wrapped around my shoulder. The image flashes through my mind before I can stop it—my dad aiming the gun at Jax, the way the barrel looked when it turned toward me as if it was on purpose, the sound that rang through my ears and stripped everything else away.
I nod.
“I need your verbal confirmation,” he says.
“Yes.” My voice isn’t very strong. My throat still hurts.
“Can you explain to me in detail what happened?”
I swallow hard. My body trembles without my permission. “I was shot.”
“Can you tell me the events leading up to the incident? In detail?”
I take a breath and force myself to think past the noise and the pain and the fear. “Sure.” I look away and continue, “I forgot about a project that was due. I needed a book from Barnes. So I went there.” The talking hurts, but the officers don’t seem to care about my pain levels.
