I didn’t care. Fire ants were chewing their way through my flesh. I twisted, moaning as my ribs protested. The numbness had vanished, and I yearned for the return. “Why…why does it hurt now? It…stopped hurting. It had finally stopped.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Your body is warming up, and blood is moving like it should. It’s going to hurt, and then it’ll be better.”
It wasn’t going to be better. There was no way it could be when every long-forgotten cut began to sting, and every bruise started to throb incessantly. I couldn’t hold still, even as the King tried to keep me immobile. I became a twisting mess of aching, moaning flesh. Everything hurt, inside and out. Each breath was like breathing fire. Tears crowded my eyes.
“Not much longer,” Caden murmured over the top of my head. He said that more than once. Repeating it over and over. And then it became too much.
“Can’t you do something?” Ivy demanded, her voice pitched with worry. “Glamour her?”
“I can’t do that to her. Not now. Not after—”
“Please,” I begged, each breath coming in short, painful pants. “Please do something.”
“I know he’s done it to you multiple times. I can tell. I hate this. It’s killing me.”
“It sounds like it’s actually killing her,” Ren snapped. “So, why don’t you get over yourself and help her out?”
“You don’t understand,” Caden growled. “She’s on the brink of not coming back. I can see it in her eyes. She didn’t recognize either of you. She didn’t know me at first. Why do you think that’s the case?”
“Please,” I whispered. “Make it stop. Please.”
“I can’t.” His voice gentled as his hand curled around the back of my head. “One more feeding. One more glamouring, and that could be it. I will not do that to you.”
“I’ll drive faster,” Ren muttered.
“Please.” My voice cracked. “Stop it.”
“I’m sorry,” Caden said as I shuddered. “I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry.”
My skin felt like it blistered and then burst. My muscles felt stretched until they snapped. Every bone felt brittle and sharp-edged. There was no escaping this—
Sudden clarity flowed through me, pushing away the fog, and I remembered all that had been done. All of it. And I couldn’t deal with it.
I kicked my head back as a hoarse scream tore from my throat. Voices poured from the front of the car. Agony contorted my body, further inflaming the bruises and raw skin. My voice gave out, and finally, it was too much. I slipped into blissful nothingness, and the last thing I heard was Caden shouting my name.
* * * *
A stranger stared down at me, a female wearing a pale blue shirt. Others were moving around, tugging at the straps of the dress I wore as the fae’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear her over the rushing sound in my ears.
“Stop,” I rasped, swatting at the hands. “Stop.”
“I’m a healer. I work for the King.” She caught my hand, carefully lowering it to the table. “We need to get this dress off and assess your injuries.”
Her words made sense but also didn’t. The material slipped down my shoulders—
The female jerked back, her eyes going wide. There were several gasps, and then the healer snapped into action, firing off orders at a rapid pace. “Get the IV in and use the morphine. Start her with four milligrams and then get some fluids in her. Get Ringer solution on board. Check to see what kind of antibiotics we have, and get one of the mortals ready to make a possible run.”
It happened so fast. The dress was removed, replaced by a warm, soft blanket. I felt the needle go into the vein in the top of my hand, but it was nothing compared to everything else.
“You’re going to feel a rush of warmth in a few moments. Maybe taste something weird in the back of your throat, but don’t worry. It’s just some medicine to take the pain away,” the woman said. “We’re going to look at these injuries, okay?”
I didn’t know who she was—who these people were. What had happened to Caden? Heart thumping, I started to sit up, and then a buzzing wave swept through me, somehow beating back the fire, cooling it down by degrees with each passing moment. Suddenly, I wasn’t struggling. I wasn’t….
People moved around me, and the woman was talking again, but I wasn’t following. My head lolled to the side, and my gaze connected with eyes the color of liquid amber.
Caden stood off to the side, his normally golden skin paler than I’d ever seen. All others gave him a wide berth, and he did not move, but I thought his lips did.
I thought he mouthed, I’m here.
* * * *
There were two things I became aware of.
The steady sound of beeping was the first thing I heard when I, well, stopped floating around out there in the fuzzy ether. The second thing was that I didn’t hurt all that much, and that was the most important part. I felt…a little sore and achy, but that was such a marked improvement that I wanted to cry.
I didn’t.
Instead, I tried to open my eyes. This time, it didn’t take an act of Congress to do so. Still took a while because my lids felt crusty and swollen, but I did it, and the smooth, white ceiling I stared at wasn’t the dark interior of a car or the stone ceiling of the chamber.
Another massive improvement.
I was alive, and I wasn’t in the tomb, chained to a stone slab, waiting to die.
God.
I swallowed, wincing at what felt like razor blades in my throat. I’m alive. I kept repeating that in my head because it didn’t seem real or even possible, but I was lying on a comfortable mattress, and the room was filled with soft, filtered sunlight. Memories of how I had gotten here were like sifting through a photo album of faded, distorted pictures. But I remembered Caden and Ivy and Ren, and the pain as my skin had warmed up…. Yeah, I wasn’t going to forget that pain anytime soon.
I also remembered the fae healer. Before I started floating away on a cloud of nothing matters, I had heard her talking to others—to him. Concern about infection and scarring, the latter almost making me laugh because I was already scarred. What was a handful—or a couple of hundred—more in the grand scheme of things? Blood had been taken. Words like dehydration and malnutrition were thrown around, as was concern about other things—things I didn’t really want to think about.
Looking back, I thought that it was quite inappropriate that they had allowed him in the room. Then again, he was their King, and they probably allowed him to do just about anything.
My arms felt heavy, glossy with some kind of ointment, and there was a bandage covering the bite mark on my left arm. Oddly, I felt clean as if someone had bathed me, but based on the itchiness of my scalp, I knew my hair hadn’t been washed.
God, I would kill for a shower, one where my skin wasn’t being scrubbed raw, and someone—
Closing my eyes, I cut off that train of thought as I sucked in a sharp breath. No good could come from thinking about that right now, not when there were so many things that would surely haunt me.
The shuffling sound of someone shifting in a chair drew me from my thoughts. I turned my head to the left, my breath catching as the left side of my cheek throbbed.
Ouch.
All right, pain meds only worked to a point. Good to know.
Opening my eyes, a shock rippled through me. Caden was stretched out in a chair next to the bed, his bare feet resting on the footboard, crossed at the ankles. His eyes were closed, his cheek pressed against his fist, his hair hiding half of his face. He was dressed as I recalled. Black shirt and dark denim jeans. He appeared to be sleeping.
How long had he been in here?
How long had I been out?
Better yet, why was he even here at all?
I didn’t know the answers to those questions, and I didn’t want to wake him. Instead, I lay there and I… I stared at him, soaking in the sight.
Caden was…he was as beautiful as I rem
embered, a visage of otherworldly perfection that bordered on being unreal. I wished for the hundredth time that he wasn’t so nice to look at. Good thing his royal jerkiness attitude dampened some of that attraction.
Yeah, right. Who was I kidding?
I still loved him. I was still in love with him, and even though he was promised to someone else—could already be with someone else—and had failed to mention that on top of all of the other stuff, my feelings for him were still there.
I loved him.
I just didn’t like him.
Strange how one could feel those two conflicting emotions, but love was odd like that.
The moment those thoughts finished, awe flickered through me. I was surprised that after everything I’d gone through, I could still…I could still think about normal things—stuff that was important but also wasn’t compared to being tortured and starved. That I could think about the night we’d spent together, the things he’d done to me, and what I’d done to him, and feel my insides warm. That felt beautifully normal because I…
I honestly never expected to see him again. I hadn’t expected to see sunlight either or breathe in fresh air. In the end, I hadn’t thought I’d survive.
That was a lot to process.
As I lay there, watching the steady rise and fall of Caden’s chest, I realized that it was also a lot to process the fact that there were huge gaps in time where I couldn’t remember what had happened while Aric held me, even though I could still feel the…the fear and the hours of nothing but pain. I remembered what he did to me with the dagger I’d killed him with, and I recalled his fists, but a lot was missing that still carried feelings of panic and humiliation.
I sighed, glancing around the room. I wasn’t in the infirmary but one of the spacious hotel rooms. I had no idea how I had gotten up here.
Caden stirred, his thick lashes lifting. His gaze found mine. Slowly, he lowered his hand and straightened. He didn’t speak, not for several long moments, and then he said, “How long have you been awake?”
“Not—” I cleared my throat, working on getting the painful hoarseness out. “Not very…long.”
“So, in other words, you haven’t been watching me sleep for that long?”
“I wasn’t watching.” My cheeks heated at the blatant lie.
“Uh-huh.” A small grin played at his lips as he pulled his feet off the foot of the bed and placed them on the floor, leaning forward. “How do you feel?”
I thought about the way he’d held me in the car, trying to calm me as I screamed. “A lot better.”
“You look better.”
“I bet I look a mess.”
“No,” he said softly. “You look beautiful.”
I rolled my eyes—well, one eye. “I don’t need…a mirror to know that’s not remotely true.”
“You don’t need a mirror at all.”
Having no idea how to respond to that, though liking the tiny flutter in my chest, I decided it was time to change the subject. “How long have I been out of it?”
“Today is Thursday. We brought you in Monday night. So, about two days,” he said. “You’ve woken up a couple of times.”
Two days? God. “I don’t remember that—the waking up.”
“The healer has kept you on some pretty good pain medication. You were a little…out of it, but able to walk to the bathroom.”
Well, that explained why it didn’t feel like my bladder was about to burst. Wait. “Did you help me to the…bathroom?”
Seriously, if he confirmed it, God hating me would be official.
“No.” He shook his head. “Ivy and Faye helped. They also changed the bandages on your arm and your legs.”
“My legs?” The corners of my lips turned down, tugging at the flesh of my lower lip in a way that told me it was still healing.
“There were some cuts there that were deeper but did not require stitches.” He tucked a strand of hair back from his face.
“Oh.” I shifted my gaze to my hands, finally looking at them. Both bore signs of fading bruises. I blinked slowly. “You…you’ve seen what it…what it all looks like?”
Caden seemed to know what I was asking because he tipped forward even farther. “I’ve seen most of it, Brighton. I’ve seen enough.”
I closed my eyes. A prickly heat crept over me, a flush of shame that I knew I should have no ownership of. What I looked like now shouldn’t matter. For the most part, it didn’t because I was alive, and that mattered. But where my body had been a faint sketch of what had happened to me before, I knew without even seeing it that it was now a roadmap of all the horrors. I’d already known that some of what I’d seen would scar, and I guessed I just hadn’t been all that concerned about it while in the tomb, given that I had more important things to worry about.
I still did.
But knowing that Caden had seen what was left of me still cut as deep as that edge of the dagger.
“It’ll get better.” His voice was quiet, so much so that I had to look at him. “You will heal. All of this will fade. Remember that.”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
His gaze searched mine. “Do you think you can drink something? I think food is off the table until the healer sees you.”
I nodded, thinking that water would be lovely. Caden rose from the chair, walking into the adjoining living area. He returned quickly, a small glass in hand. I started to sit up but stopped when pain flared along my ribs. I took a deeper breath as I reached down.
“Your ribs are bandaged. Some of them were broken.” He set the drink aside. “Let me help you.”
Tension poured into me as Caden neared. It’s okay. It’s okay. I kept repeating that as I stared at his chest while he carefully slid an arm under my shoulders, lifting me as he shoved extra pillows behind me. It’s okay. It’s okay.
“This okay?” he asked.
I nodded.
Caden slipped away, picking up the glass. I looked up as he turned to me, offering the drink. I reached for it, and without warning, terror exploded inside my chest. The logical, functioning part of my brain knew that the reaction was unnecessary, but it was a reflex I could no longer control. I jerked back my hand, closing it in a fist against my chest.
“Are you okay?” Concern filled his tone. “Is it your ribs?”
I opened my mouth but couldn’t find the words. A logical part of my brain knew that Caden wasn’t Aric. He wasn’t going to hurt me, but I…
Tremors coursed through me as I stared at the glass, incredibly thirsty, but my throat choked with dread.
“What’s wrong? Tell me, Brighton. I can go find the healer.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him reach for me.
“Don’t!” I jerked sideways, flinching. Understanding dawned, quickly followed by a pained expression that settled into his striking features. I averted my gaze, feeling the swampy heat of embarrassment. “I’m okay. I just… I need a minute.”
Caden fell silent, and I took a minute to calm my racing heart. Then I took more than a minute to reassure myself that no blow was coming.
It’s okay.
Drawing in a deep breath, I held onto it as I lifted my hand and reached for the water. I flinched as my fingers brushed the cool glass and when nothing happened, I curled my fingers around it. Caden immediately pulled back, returning to his chair.
I couldn’t look at him as I stared down at the drink, finally exhaling. Tears pricked the backs of my eyes as I felt heat invade my neck. Lifting the glass, I caught a slight fruity scent. “What…what is in it?”
“A type of elderberry found in the Otherworld,” he answered, his voice rough like sandpaper. “It helps with inflammation and is good for an upset stomach. Many of my kind claim it can help with anxiety, too. It’s perfectly safe for humans.”
Anxiety?
I was going to need some man-made pharmaceuticals for that. “Upset stomach?” I took a tiny sip and almost moaned at the blissful coolness and the light taste of berry that eased th
e scratchiness of my throat.
“You were sick one of the times you woke up. You were already in the bathroom, and Ivy was with you.”
“Oh,” I murmured, taking a longer drink. When I swallowed again, it was easier. “Sorry, um, about how I freaked out. I’m just… I don’t know.”
“Don’t apologize. There’s absolutely nothing you need to apologize for.”
Peeking over at him, I found him watching me. I took another drink, wishing it would remove the flush staining my skin. When I was finished, I wanted more but figured I should probably see how my stomach handled it.
“How did you all find me?” I kept the glass between my hands because it felt normal to do so.
“I’d been looking for you. All of us were.”
Surprise rose, and then so did guilt.
“You didn’t think we were looking for you? I can’t blame you for that. Not after what happened before…before you disappeared, and with how long Aric had you. But we were. Every day, we were. Every night. I knew in my bones that he had you, but we couldn’t find him or Neal.” Caden’s voice hardened. “We captured and questioned every Winter fae we came across. Either they knew nothing, or they refused to talk. We never gave up. I never gave up hope that we’d find you, but…”
“But you didn’t expect to find me alive,” I finished for him.
Caden tilted his head away from me, his lips pressed into a firm line. “The more time that passed, the more I knew the chances were unlikely or that if you were still alive…” He tipped his head back, his throat working on a swallow. “I feel I need to be honest. After a certain point, I was no longer sure what would be worse. That you were alive and with him, or that you were gone.”
My grip tightened on the glass.
“You being…you being gone would be far worse. It would be like losing the sun.”
Chapter 15
I opened my mouth, but I had no words. That was incredibly—well, it was just an incredible thing to say.
“I haven’t thought of anything else but finding you. I don’t think any of us has,” Caden continued, facing me once more. “But I know that no matter what we felt or feared, it’s nothing compared to what you’ve gone through.”
The Summer King Bundle: 3 Stories by Jennifer L. Armentrout Page 32