Page 119 of Fighting With Light

Kai frowns, and I look at Emerson.

“He’s living in a lightless hole. How do you think he is?” Emerson says.

I glance at Aelia, and she frowns.

“Maybe when this is all over, we can…let him go? I know you weren’t best friends, but...” I trail off, not sure what to offer her.

“Come on, we need to get that jacket off and check your wound,” Aelia says, trying to pull me out of the chair.

Emerson is already snoring across the aisle, and Kai is texting, likely Cordi and Mom.

I follow her into the larger of the two bathrooms on the plane, and she shuts the door. There’s plenty of room to move around the shiny walnut-covered room with mirrors at every angle. I flip the sink on and grab a towel from the small cabinet to wipe the blood off of her face.

“Thanks,” she rasps.

I nod, and she reaches for the buttons and zipper on my jacket. Grinning, I help her pull it off, still wincing in the process. “If you wanted to punch our mile-high club card, all you had to do is ask, princess. It’s an immediateyes,“ I tell her.

She rolls her eyes and yanks my jacket down.

“Ow!”

44

Aelia

“I don’t know howyou can be making sex jokes at a time like this,” I grumble at him.

Tossing his jacket to the floor, I lift his shirt sleeve to get a good look at his wound. It’s still bleeding pretty good, but there’s no bullet in his arm.

“It’s just a graze. I told you, not a big deal.”

“The hell it’s not, Liam, this could’ve been a bullet,” I mumble and reach for the hem of his shirt.

“It’s not, princess, it just stings, that’s all,” he says and helps me pull his sweaty t-shirt off.

“You don’t seem to understand this could have been significantly worse,” I say, my voice cracking in the process.

I bite my tongue, trying to swallow the feelings of possibly losing Liam in the Andes mountains as we were trying to get away from a drug cartel. It’s hard to describe the feelings associated with the thought. I know I shouldn’t feel any of them, but I do, and they are almost too much to handle. I love him so much.

Ignoring that thought, I inspect his wound, trying to gauge how bad it is. Of all the things I’ve learned growing up, I also learned how to do stitches. My brothers got hurt a lot during mafia business, and they came to me because my hand was steadier than theirs. It got to the point I kept a large first aid kit in my bathroom because they would show up at all hours of the night to have me patch them up.

Weakness is not something any of us could show our father, so asking him for help if they got grazed, stabbed, or needed a finger reset was not an option. We had to figure it out on our own.

“I can stitch myself up, princess,” Liam says.

I shake my head, coming back to the present moment. “No, no, it’s fine. I can do it. I used to do it for my brothers all the time.”

“Oh, okay.”

I open the cabinet, looking for their first aid kit under the sink. This one is pretty extensive and includes blood clotting pads and other things I would have never thought to get. “Stay here,” I tell him.

He nods, and I go back to where they were keeping water bottles and grab one, taking it back to the bathroom with me.

I grab a needle and poke it in the bottle a few times. He leans over the sink, and I squeeze the water bottle, spraying the water into his wound. His jaw ticks a couple of times, but he remains still, swallowing the pain. After I’m satisfied with how clean the bullet graze is, I pour peroxide over it and dab it dry. Then I clean my needle, thread it, and start stitching him up.

Liam grits his teeth and stays quiet while I work. “You are very good at this,” he says, wincing.

I pause, looking up. “Thanks, I guess.”