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My chest heaves. I try to turn my head but can’t. Something’s in the way, keeping my neck still. My arms bunch with tension, which draws my gaze to the needles taped there.
Needles. Drugs. Fucking poison. Get it out.
I go to rip out the needles with their plastic tubes and bags, but my hands are so useless, for a moment, I wonder if someone’s amputated them. At the ends of my wrists there are only big, round, gauzy stumps. My arms look like fucking cotton swabs.
But I’m aware of my hands inside the puffy white mittens. I think I can feel all my fingers and my thumbs. Was I burned? They don’t hurt.
“You kept trying to rip it all out when you were half-awake.”
I hear Rowan, but I can’t see him because I still can’t turn my fucking head. He steps up to the side of the hospital bed so that he’s in my line of vision. He looks just how he always does. Just how he did when I left him in Dublin.
Maybe I am still in Dublin. Maybe the flight, and everything that happened after, was a fucking hallucination.
I need to ask him what happened.
But instead what comes out is, “Where is she?”
Jesus, I sound bad. My voice is like thin wind over gravel. But the words are clear enough.
“She hasn’t gone far. Just to the cafeteria. Don’t worry, Tommy’s with her.”
My brain is slow to parse the words. Cafeteria. Tommy. What the hell is happening?
“She finally went to take a piss and get a coffee,” he goes on. “She hasn’t left your side in more than twelve hours.” Rowan suddenly stops and cranks his head to the side. “Speaking of which…”
I don’t need him to tell me that she’s here. The very air changes with her in it.
“Darragh!” Her fingers find my temples. I groan and let my eyes fall shut for a moment, savouring the blessed touch. But I’m unwilling to keep them closed for long. I need to see her. I feel like I could stare at her every fucking second for the rest of my life, another fifty years of Valentina, and it still wouldn’t be enough. I’d still be begging for a little more time, just so I could gaze upon her face.
“Are you well, pet?” I rasp. I try to touch her, forgetting about my ludicrous marshmallow hands.
“I’m…” She pauses, her mouth quirking downward. “I’m not hurt.”
“But you’re not fine,” I growl. “What happened?”
She sits beside me on the bed, and in halting words, recounts the events. She tells me of her shock to see Vinny alive in the wheelchair at their door, her mammy nowhere to be found. She tells me that he grabbed her, and held her, and aimed his gun at me.
“I heard the shot and I broke free,” she says. “You were bleeding from your neck, and I thought…”
She stops to take a deep breath.
“I thought you were going to bleed out. You lost consciousness so fast.” Her eyes go to my neck, then slide away. “Now we know the shot didn’t hit any major arteries. It tore through the top of your trapezius. And you hit your head. Plus, the doctors say you were pretty dehydrated, and your blood sugar was low.” Her brows come down heavily over her eyes. “Why didn’t you eat any stupid waffles?”
What the hell is she asking me about waffles for?
“Don’t like maple syrup,” I grunt. “Keep going.”
“Papà tried to stop me from helping you,” she says, frustration making her words come faster. “He said he was going to shoot you again and that I had to get out of the way. I hit him, and he fell down, and…”
She bites her pretty lip so hard I think that she might make it bleed.
“He got lucky with that shot from the bikers,” Rowan cuts in when it becomes clear Valentina can’t go on. “Apparently it only broke a rib and collapsed his lung. But he wasn’t so lucky this time. Pulmonary embolism.”
I’m pretty sure that’s medical speak for a nice juicy blood clot of the lung.
“Fatal?”
Valentina looks away.