Page 9 of Kiss Me Like I Didn't Kill You

“My ribs feel… tight. Bruised, perhaps. And my feet sting.”

“Let’s have a look, then,” she replies, stripping off her gloves and pulling on a fresh pair.

Without asking, she lifts the hem of my hoodie. Her hands pause when she sees the deep violet spreading across my side.

“That wasn’t there before,” I mutter, frowning at the sight.

“Quite usual,” she answers. “Bruising develops as the hours pass. It often appears far graver before it begins to fade.”

Her gaze drops to my feet. I shift back on the bed and pull off my trainers, letting them fall with a dull thud. The socks follow, and I steel myself as she kneels to undo the bandages I’d wound myself.

The gauze tugs against the raw skin, catching where the cuts have begun to scab. I hiss through my teeth.

The doctor studies my feet, her expression betraying almost nothing. When her eyes meet mine, I catch the questions she holds back.

She cleans the cuts, replaces the dressings, and from there the sequence of events begins to lose its edges.

I’m taken into another room by the nurse for the scan, then brought back here, left only with the waiting.

When the doctor returns, the report is in her hand.

“There’s no internal bleeding,” she begins. “No swelling either. That is, in truth, the best outcome we could have asked for.” She places the chart on the desk and fixes me with an assessing look. “You do, however, have a concussion. Moderate in severity, enough to explain the headache, the dizziness, the nausea.”

I nod faintly, already knowing. The pounding behind my eyes makes it impossible to forget.

“You’ll feel foggy,” she continues evenly. “Your thoughts won’t come as quickly as you’d like, your balance may falter, and the headaches will linger. Rest is paramount, no exertion, no late nights, no alcohol, and certainly no further knocks to the head.”

She pauses, if only for a second, before continuing. “And given your diabetes, you must be particularly cautious. A concussion can disguise or even worsen the signs of a hypoglycaemic episode. Keep your levels checked more often than usual, and do not let yourself run low. The two together could prove dangerous.”

“And the memory?” The words slip out quieter than I mean them to.

She exhales slowly. “Retrograde amnesia,” she says eventually. “It isn’t uncommon with trauma like this. Memories near the event are the first to go, and sometimes the loss can stretch further back. In most cases, recollection returns gradually, though there are instances where it never does. I can’t give you certainty, only time will tell.”

My chest tightens, though I do my best to keep my expression even.

“As for your feet,” she adds, with a glance at them, “the nurse will change the dressings daily. They’ll heal, though you must avoid strain wherever possible. You may walk, but don’t overdo it.”

“And my ribs?” I press.

“Bruised, not broken,” she says. “They’ll settle with rest. I’ll give you something for the pain, but beyond that it’s a matter of allowing the body to repair itself.”

She gathers the chart once more.

“We’ll start you on a mild course of antibiotics for the cuts, and give you something light for the concussion and the rib pain. Keep the wounds clean, and take care of yourself. Head injuries are delicate things.”

She hands me a slip of paper and two small bottles of pills. “The instructions are on the slip,” she says.

I nod, still reeling. My mind whirls with questions, but I’m grateful she doesn’t ask her own. No demands for a report, no formal write up. I suspect I owe that silence to my name.

Bellanti.

My sister and I come from Florence, from a mafia family—respected in its legal ventures, feared in the ones that never make it to paper.

As I’ve said before, St Monarche Institute is no ordinary university. It is a fortress dressed as an academy, a finishing school for the heirs of corruption. Mafia bloodlines, corporate royalty, children born into dynasties meant to outlast empires. We are here to be shaped into whatever version of power our families demand.

Which is precisely why my father must never know. The thought of him alone chills me. If word of this reached him, if the doctor so much as whispered the state I came in, he would make certain I paid, whether for embarrassing him or for some other excuse he chose to invent.

I tell myself I’ll keep this from him, that he must never know. But the resolve falters the moment we step out of the infirmary. Faces turn, phones lift. My heart drops.