by SR Jones
“Maya, let me past.” He’s livid, and there’s more sweat on his brow.
He stares at me, swallows twice, hard, and puts his hand out toward the counter. I realize he’s reaching for it and can’t grab it, when it’s right there.
Concern floods in, replacing my doubts and my anger. What’s going on with him?
“Damen?” Alesso pushes his chair back and stands at the same time as Damen reaches for the counter again.
He misses, stumbles forward, and goes down to the floor like an oak crashing to the ground.
For a moment, I’m so shocked, I can only stare at him, dumbfounded.
Then Alesso is pushing me aside, turning Damen over and shouting at him, slapping his face.
“Damen, Damen, come on; what the fuck.”
Damen’s eyes are closed, and his face is pale and covered in a slick coating of sweat.
“Shit,” Alesso snarls. He looks at me. “Did he say he was unwell at all?”
“No,” I cry, panic rising. “Wake him up.”
“Trying, sweetheart,” Alesso grunts.
“Yes, ambulance, please.” I startle when I hear Markos say those so very serious words.
“It’s my friend, he’s out cold. Don’t know, give me a moment.”
Markos gets up and goes to feel Damen’s pulse. “Okay, he’s tachycardic. Clammy, hot, and his breathing is irregular. No, he hasn’t taken any drugs.” He glances at me, and his next words slay me. “His wife says he was feeling fine earlier.”
His wife. I’m his wife, and once more, I didn’t trust him. And now there’s something seriously wrong with him. What if I lose him? Oh, God, what if these are the last words we get to share? I might still have questions, but I always go off the deep end, don’t I? We’re so fiery together, and in bed it’s great; out of it, not so much.
“Anything happened to him, you can think of?” Alesso asks, snapping me out of my thoughts. “He’s not taken any new medication, has he?”
I shake my head, and then for some reason the memory of Damen holding his elbow out for me to inspect hits.
“He got bit, a few days ago,” I say. It can’t be that, though; it looked fine yesterday. I’m sure it did. A little red maybe, if I recall correctly, but nothing out of the ordinary, or I would have noticed.
“Help me get his jacket off,” Alesso demands.
We manage to pull his arms out of his dark suit jacket and drag it off him. Alesso rolls him over and looks at me.
“Which side? The bite, Maya, which side?”
“R-r-right,” I stammer out.
Alesso reaches up to the kitchen drawer above him and slides it open. He takes out a knife, and I gasp as he uses it to slice Damen’s shirt sleeve from wrist to shoulder. He rips the material farther and pulls it away from Damen’s skin, turning his arm to look.
“Fuck.” Alesso stares at the same mess I’m looking at.
Where Damen showed me the back of his elbow the other day, and there was a small bite mark, is now red and swollen. A deep red line runs from it, right down to his armpit.
“Shit.” I want to be sick. It looks nasty. Really nasty.
“I think it’s some kind of bite,” Markos is telling the call handler. “He’s still out cold.”
A siren sounds in the distant, growing closer, and as it nears and stops, I thank God for the speed of the emergency services. Damen needs help, and thankfully they are here.
Banging at the door, not two minutes later, has me running to answer it. My heart pounds, and my palms are slick as I try to turn the key in the lock. I open the door, finally, and start blabbering. “Oh, thank you. He’s through here. I can’t believe how quick you were, it was amazing.”
The paramedic shoots me a glance as he follows me. “You were lucky is all; we were passing by the end of the road on the way back from taking an old lady home. We’re not normally this quick.”
I realize then they were here almost as soon as Markos made the call, and of course they aren’t usually that speedy! “Oh, of course,” I say distractedly.
I lead them into the kitchen, and the first paramedic kneels by Damen. This is horrible, I’m having flashbacks to Mom dying, and me being hustled into an ambulance, but this time Damen is the one surrounded by paramedics.
How can my life have changed so much in the space of mere weeks, and why do these awful things keep happening to me? How much shit can one person take? Then I stop with the pity-fest, because the answer is an awful lot. There are people right now living in literal warzones, without food to eat or shelter from dropping bombs. I need to get a grip, get control of my emotions, and focus on Damen, who matters the most right now.
The paramedic kneeling by him checks his airway, tilts his head back, checks his pulse, and takes something out of his bag that he puts on Damen’s finger.
“What happened?” the paramedic not checking Damen out asks.
Alesso shakes his head. “It was so sudden. He’d seemed a bit off, but nothing serious. Then he just … keeled over. I cut his shirt open as his wife said he got bit a few days ago, and there’s a lot of swelling and redness, and a line going down his arm.”
The male paramedic working on Damen turns his arm over, sees the red line, and looks to his female colleague. They both appear concerned, which does nothing to calm the butterflies in my stomach.
“What bit him?” he asks me.
“I don’t know. He dropped his phone, rested his arm on the floor as he fished for it around by the bed, and something bit him.”
“Is it poison?” I ask. “A deadly spider or something?” I bite back the sob crawling up my throat.
He shakes his head. “I think he’s got cellulitis, and it’s tracking the lymph nodes.”
I stare at the paramedic, at a total loss. “It’s a bacterial infection,” he explains. “Can happen after a bite. Sometimes it can progress rapidly, and it can infect the lymph nodes, or even the bloodstream. He needs antibiotics urgently.”
“Why is he out?” Alesso demands.
“I’m not sure; I think he’s got sepsis. He’s going to need urgent treatment.” The paramedic rubs Damen’s sternum and then his face with his knuckle. “What’s his name?”
“Damen,” I supply.
“Damen? Damen, can you open your eyes for me please?”
Damen’s eyes flicker open, and he groans and closes them again.
“No, Damen, can you open your eyes please?” The man’s tone is brusque, but maybe that’s what’s needed right now.
Damen opens them again, blinking rapidly.
“Oh, hey.” The female paramedic joins her colleague on the floor, leans forward and smiles, then bends down and holds Damen’s hand. “Hey there.”
His eyes are flickering, and I hold my breath. They open twice and shut before opening once more and staying open.
“Don’t let the cat out,” he says all slurred.
He doesn’t have a cat, and I shoot a worried glance at Alesso.
“We don’t have a cat,” I tell the paramedic.
“Yeah, he’s kind of out of it. But at least he’s verbal.”
“Okay, big guy,” she says. “You’re coming for a ride with us.”
They start to get the gurney ready, and I ask if I can go with him, but they say no, it’s too small of an ambulance.
“I’ll take you to the hospital,” Alesso says.
“We’ll stay here, wait until you know what’s happening,” Reece says from the doorway, where he and Liam are hanging around, looking concerned.
The gurney is lifted out the door and down the stairs to the drive, and it is so strange to see Damen, a man I think of as larger than life, looking oddly small swaddled in a pale blue hospital blanket.
“Come on.” Alesso jogs out to the BMW, which is on the drive and not in the garage. Markos is at my heels, so it seems he’s coming too. It’s only right; they are like his brothers. It hits me then, hard. I’ve got a family of sorts. Or I have if I can get to the bot
tom of this tangled web of emotions between myself and Damen and make this work.
If Damen and I stay together, we’ll have a wider network of close people around us that will be to all intents and purposes, a family. I’ll belong, but I’ll always wonder, did Damen give me what I wanted because it cemented his place in the organization? I don’t truly think he did now that I’ve calmed down from my temper snit, but there’s that nagging doubt. That voice which tells me I’m not good enough for him to want me truly for me. It’s been honed by decades of emotional neglect at the hands of both my parents, but I’m a big girl now. An adult, and I need to stop letting the past spoil my present.
“I feel terrible,” I say to Alesso as he looks left and right before pulling out onto the road from Damen’s drive. The ambulance is still in the driveway, but Alesso set off as soon as I was in the passenger seat, and Markos was in the back with the doors shut.
“You should,” he says, and I take it because he’s right. Then he glances at me and smiles. “Not for Damen keeling over, though, not your fault. But for not believing him and thinking he’d go whispering sweet nothings in your ear simply to get in with Stamatis. If there’s one thing you ought to know about Damen, it’s that he doesn’t do shit like that.”
I nod, and then because I’m trying to grow the hell up, I woman up and admit my fears. “It’s more about me than him. I always feel I’m not good enough. Not loveable enough. Not pretty enough, or slim enough, classy enough.”
“Yeah, I can see how you’d think that,” he says. “With the way your parents could be, but Damen isn’t them, and you hurt him just now. It probably took him a fucking lot to say anything to you about how he feels, and you threw it in his face and accused him of only doing it to get a place in the organization.”
“You must hate me,” I mutter.
“No.” He glances my way before focusing on the road again. “Quite the contrary. You’ve given Damen something he’s never had before, and if the pair of you could stop bickering for five minutes, you’d be good for one another.”
There’s a snort from the back, and I turn to look at Markos. I raise my eyebrows. “What?”
“You and Damen aren’t ever going to stop bickering, you’re very … explosive together.”
“I’ll never forgive myself if he doesn’t pull through,” I say.
“Don’t say shit like that; he’s going to pull through.” Alesso’s words brook no argument, so I shut up and stare out the window as the city speeds by.
All the way to the hospital, I make all kinds of deals with God. I promise to be a better person. To do more charity work. Stop flying off the handle. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Anything, if he’ll just bring Damen through this.
At the hospital, we wait for four hours in a sterile room, with a TV blaring news I’m not interested in. Markos works at his worry beads, and after a while, the incessant clacking becomes kind of soothing. Alesso stares morosely at his phone, and I nibble my usually manicured to perfection nails down to the quick.
The door opens and I jump, my heart missing a beat, but it’s only Stella, not one of the doctors. She has a coffee tray in her hands, and it has four coffees in there. She passes one each to Alesso and Markos.
“Black,” she says with a smile. “How you guys like it.”
Then she passes me a mocha, and the smell is delicious. My stomach rumbles, and I realize I’ve not eaten in forever. I can’t face food, but this will help. She sips at her own coffee and sits down.
“How did you get here?” Alesso demands.
“Liam and Reece brought me. They said they’d wait until I’d seen you guys, and then they’d take me home before they get their flights.”
“I said that I’d take you home,” Alesso mutters.
“Yes, I know, but you need to be here for your friend. And this way I will be safe, and Mother and Father have got a brand spanking new security system, thanks to three very scary Spetsnaz soldiers who turned up today out of the blue and installed a state of the art alarm and cameras.”
“Remind me to thank Andrius,” I say. The man terrifies me, but he has good in him. He’s taking care of Stella at a time when he knows Alesso and I aren’t in the right frame of mind to do so. He might no longer be here, and is probably in the air heading back to Corfu by now, but he’s still coordinating things with his men here on the ground.
“I want to teach you to shoot,” Alesso says to Stella, and nothing could have surprised me more. Her too, obviously, as her eyebrows reach her hairline.
“What? Why? My parents don’t have guns.”
“No,” he says. “But you will.”
“I’ll need to get a permit, and it might go against me in the future when I go for jobs, maybe. I don’t know much about it.” She nibbles on her lip, and Alesso’s gaze drops from her eyes to her mouth, tracking the movement.
Hunger shines there for a moment, base and animalistic, and it makes me shiver for my friend. Why did I ever think he was the safe one?
Alesso blinks, and all the raging inferno I saw for a second is banked. “You won’t need a permit. Trust me. No one will know, and you’ll hopefully never have to use it, but if you do, it means you’ve got the upper hand, because no one will ever think you’d be packing.”
“Because I’m a good, middle-class girl,” she says with a hint of impatience.
“Exactly.” Alesso doesn’t take the bait, and he doesn’t back down. “I’ll take you to the shooting range next weekend.”
She nods solemnly, but her eyes are bright, and her cheeks are flushed. Alesso has just found a way to keep on seeing my best friend, and I don’t know how I feel about it. Part of me can’t think of anyone who would keep her safer than Alesso, but another part of me wants Stella to be free of the stain of the mafia life that I’ve dragged her into.
“Okay, next weekend.” She stands, and Alesso does too.
“You can’t go wandering around on your own. We don’t know if it’s safe yet.”
“I’m not.” She waves her phone at him and I can see a sent text on the screen. She gathers her things, brushing her long brown hair out of her eyes and behind one ear as she puts the phone away before taking her coffee cup to the waste basket in the corner of the room and disposing of it.
She comes over to me, pulls me up, and hugs me tight. “I want to stay, for you, and…” she lowers her voice to barely a whisper “…for Alesso. But I’d get in the way and only be another body that needs protection, so I’m going to go home, but please call me as soon as there is any news.”
“I promise,” I tell her.
The door to the room opens, and my heart once more does a jump and a skip, but it’s Liam, come to collect Stella.
“We’ll make sure she gets home safe and sound,” he says to Alesso and Markos as if we little ladies aren’t even in the room. I bite back a sigh at the old-fashioned ideas these men sometimes have. In one way, it drives me crazy; in another, it’s kind of sweet … in a days gone by sort of a way.
I hug my friend again and watch as she walks out of the door. I don’t know when I’ll see her again, but maybe if Damen is doing okay in a few weeks, I can go with her and Alesso to the gun range. I ought to be able to shoot too. I want to be able to protect myself, and Damen, if ever the need arose.
As Stella and Liam are leaving, a doctor finally appears, and I brace myself for the news.
“He’s in a high dependency room, but he’s much more stable,” the Doctor tells us. “We ran bloods and matched the antibiotics to the strain of bacteria he’s infected with. He’s receiving intravenous antibiotics, fluids, and pain meds, and he’s awake and lucid. Once we get these strong meds into patients they generally start to recover quickly, but he’ll need to be in here for at least another three days for monitoring. We are hoping to move him to an ordinary room tomorrow. Once he gets back home, he’ll need to take it a bit easy, but within a couple of weeks, he should have made a full recovery.”
I do
n’t realize I’ve sagged until a strong arm wraps around my waist, helping hold me up.
“Thanks for the news, Doctor,” Alesso says, as Markos keeps me upright. “Can we go and see him?”
“Of course, but five minutes only. He needs his rest.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Damen
The door to my room opens, and the pretty young nurse pops her head around the door. “You have a few visitors,” she says.
At one time, she might have caught my interest. Now? I can see she’s attractive, but all my interest is reserved for the smoking hot girl with the auburn hair who enters the room with the regal bearing of a damn queen.
She’s paler than usual, tired looking. What a few weeks she’s had.
Alesso and Markos follow her. My brothers in arms.
“God, Damen.” Maya walks to the bed and shocks the hell out of me when she kneels, puts her head on my arm, and sobs openly.
What the hell do I say? ‘Sorry I collapsed and scared you half to death. Sorry, we argued, again.’
She looks up at me, eyes red. “You scared me. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. You’re right, I should have trusted you. I do. I just get insecure, and my neediness comes out, and you know my temper isn’t the best, and then I just start to speak, and before I know it, I’ve said something—”
“Maya,” I interrupt before she can carry on with the world’s longest sentence. “It’s okay. I’m sorry too.”
“You didn’t do anything,” she says.
“Yeah, I did.” God my throat is dry, and my voice sounds like shit. I take a deep breath and wince. My head hurts, my chest hurts, my throat hurts. Hell, even my skin hurts. “I should have told you what I knew. I should have trusted you too, with what I was thinking and feeling. We both need to learn to trust.”
“As moving as this is,” Alesso interrupts. “How about we let him rest, Maya?”
Much as I don’t want her to go, don’t want her out of my sight, I do need to rest. All I want to do is close my eyes and let the world slip away for a while. I’m a strong, fit man, and I feel as weak as a newborn. It’s a scary feeling, and not one I want to experience again.
