Page 16 of Boardroom Ties
Just when you think you’ve found rock bottom, the earth opens up and shows you that there’s a whole ‘nother level waiting below.
I shut the door, race around, and get behind the wheel. Unthinking panic is working my body like I’m a Muppet right now. My clothes are drenched in blood and my hands are, too, so they keep slipping on everything I touch.
Eventually, I get the motor started and the car moving. I’m barely paying attention to where I’m driving, and fuck knows I have zero mental capacity for the rules of the road. Lights are red and oncoming traffic is laying on their horns, but I don’t even glance their direction.
It’s not bravery steering the ship. We’re operating on pure stupidity.
Maybe that explains why we end up where we do. I didn’t know this was my destination until I pull up in front of the ER doors.
And then…
Oh, God.
I can’t.
I can’t do this. We’re back at the Ground Zero of my personal life. The toxic well from which the trauma sprung. This is where it all went wrong.
This is where Giana died.
Mount Sinai Hospitalis marked on the brick facade in simple white letters. A few ambulances idle around, with various patients limping to and fro. I sit in the car for a second and try to breathe through the absolute terror that’s once again clawing at my throat.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Matvei gasps sarcastically from the back. I hear a nasty squelch as he tries to sit up.
I snap myself out of it and leap out of the driver’s seat. By the time I make it around to his door, he’s flickering in and out of consciousness.
Fuck. If he’s out, I’ll never be able to get him inside. I look up and see an orderly pushing an empty wheelchair back toward the front doors after depositing its former occupant in a waiting car. I can’t find the words to ask for what I need, so instead, I lunge over and snatch it from him.
The man lurches backward in surprise, shouting at me, but I ignore him and drag the contraption over to my vehicle.
I extract Matvei from the vehicle—don’t ask me how; things are blurring together in strange ways and time no longer seems to move at its usual pace from one second to the next—and get him slumped into the wheelchair.
“Oh, God,” I croak when I see just how much blood there is. His pants and jacket are absolutely soaked with it, and when I look in my car, I see an inch-deep puddle of the stuff in the footwell.
He looks pale, even by his standards. Humans aren’t supposed to be that shade of ivory white.
“This is bad,” I say again and again under my breath as I grab the handles of the wheelchair and start to canter toward the doors. “This is so, so fucking bad.”
I hear a gurgle and I realize Matvei is trying to tell me something. I screech to a halt and bend down so his mouth is right by my ear. “What?” I ask. “What did you say?”
He swallows thickly, clears his throat, and says in a thin rasp, “Par for the course.”
Par for the course,he said. How cute! How quippy! How funny? Howabsofuckinglutely ridiculous?!
Joking at a time like this—is he crazy?
If he wasn’t already dying, I’d kill him myself.
It’s been an hour. I’m sitting in a chair that Satan himself surely had a hand in designing, based on the damage it’s doing to my tailbone. I keep having this insane urge to laugh, then to cry, and I end up doing this bizarre hybrid of the two instead. I keep a hand plastered over my mouth, because if anyone hears me making these noises, I’ll be admitted directly to the psych ward.
It doesn’t help that my brain, motormouth that it is, refuses to shut up. Even here and now, while Matvei is somewhere on the other side of those double doors with a team of strangers rooting around in his ribs like he’s a Thanksgiving turkey, my stupid, stupid brain is weighing options.
He’s a killer. That much is obvious. I watched him turn three grown men into ground beef in under thirty seconds. He’sexactly what I came to Khaza looking for. If he pulls through, maybe I could still…
But no.
No, that’s a bad idea. I can’t drag him into the Raymond thing. Not after this. He took a knife for me before he even knew my last name, and now, I’m going to keep asking for more?
No. Bad Cassandra. Terrible Cassandra. Read the room, girl. Don’t you know when enough is enough?
