by Autumn Grey
“I failed. I failed twice Monsieur St. Germain.”
I clenched my jaw as anger and fear poured through me. “Yes. You and Gilles’s men. How could one woman slip under your noses undetected?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him with a furious look. “Keep an eye on her,” I told him pointing at Selene as I bolted upstairs toward Adrien’s room. I knocked lightly on his door. “Adrien, it’s me, Papa,” I said, trying not to smash the thing down. “Adrien?”
The room was quiet on the other side of the door. I gripped the doorknob, twisting it. “Adrien!” I shouted, feeling panic, worse than finding Selene downstairs, twist in my chest.
“Papa?” a tiny voice called from inside, followed by feet shuffling then the sound of the door being unlocked. The door cracked open and two large, green eyes filled with fear peeked through the doorway.
“Dieu, merci!” I snatched him up from the floor and held him close, panting in relief. “Thank God you’re okay.” I had to prepare him for what happened. How would I do this without breaking his little heart? “Something happened to Selene. I need you to be brave for me, all right?”
His eyes grew ever larger than before and his lips trembled. I could see panic and tears shining bright in his eyes. “Where is she?”
“The ambulance is taking her to the hospital,” I said, leaving the room and hurrying downstairs. I felt his hands tightened around me, but he didn’t say a word after that.
By the time we arrived in the living room, Selene had already been transferred to a stretcher with an oxygen mask fixed around her nose. She looked even paler than before.
“How is she?” I asked, walking along the stretcher as they pulled it out the door and headed toward the helicopter. Adrien whimpered in my arms, tightening his hold. I gripped him even tighter.
One of the medical men flicked his eyes to me before turning away and in that second, I saw the uncertainty in his eyes. “She seems to have received quite a blow on her head and lost a lot of blood.” He pointed to the lump on her forehead covered with a bandage. “Her blood pressure is unusually high and she is unresponsive to the tests we did.” He flung the ambulance doors wide. “We will know more as soon as the hospital performs more tests. We will fly your wife to Marseilles. You and your son can sit with her inside the helicopter.”
I nodded, but didn’t attempt to correct their assumption that Selene was my wife. After the stretcher was loaded inside the helicopter, Adrien and I settled on the seat next to Selene.
“Papa? Selene . . . is Selene going to die?”
As a parent you are expected to do anything to protect your child no matter what. But was lying to him really protecting him? What if something really happened to her? “I don’t know, Son.”
We arrived at the hospital in Marseilles, and soon Selene was being rushed through the hospital doors.
“MONSIEUR ST. GERMAIN?”
I shifted Adrien in my arms and turned to face a tall man with a stethoscope and a chart in his hand. “How is she?”
“Are you Madame Michael’s relative?”
“I’m her husband,” I replied, hating that I had to lie but it was necessary, otherwise he wouldn’t disclose any information to me about her condition. “How is she? Can I see her?”
“I’m the doctor in charge of her case. My name is Jean Blanchett.” He stuck his hand out and I shook it.
“Remington St. Germain.”
His eyes widened slightly, and I knew he had an idea of who I was. The St. Germain’s were a large family, spread throughout the Provence region.
The doctor scanned his chart and cleared his throat. Of course, he wasn’t stupid. He knew Selene wasn’t my wife. Most people in the area knew that I hadn’t remarried since Collette’s death. But I was willing to do anything to get the information. Even wield the St. Germain name, if it came to that. I was desperate and the guilt of not protecting Selene was like a hand around my neck, choking me.
“She has no other relatives here in France. I’m the only person she knows and she was with me when this happened,” I said.
He nodded and raised his head. “She is in the ICU. She suffered quite a blow to her head and is unconscious. And after performing some tests, we will need to keep her here at least a few nights to monitor her closely. Right now we need to know what happened. We also need her medical background information for our files. We found traces of some sort of poison in her blood. Do you know what she ate or drank during the past hour or so?”
Poison? Had the psychotic woman also poisoned her?
I provided the doctor with as much information as I could on what happened tonight and that the police were aware of this case. I also told him about her miscarriage and her condition after that loss. Then I stood there, trying not to look like a fool, while he shot question after question.
“I put my son to bed right after dinner, so if she was poisoned, it must have happened while I was away from her.”
“We suspect at least some of it was removed from her system when she vomited. We are looking into that before we start a therapy to detoxify whatever she ingested.”
A public address system cackled loudly, paging him. He excused himself and hurried away, promising to let me know more as soon as he could.
I had to call her family immediately to get the information the doctor needed. I was relieved when the doctor didn’t call me out on the lie. What kind of husband doesn’t know if his wife is allergic to certain medications?
After calling Èric and asking him to check Selene’s phone for her family’s telephone numbers, I disconnected the call and sat in one of the plastic chairs in the waiting room while Adrien slept in my arms. He had cried himself to sleep, and my heart broke with his every sob. It felt like hours, just sitting there powerless to do anything. Eventually, feeling as if I would go insane, I tracked the doctor down.
“Can we see her?” I asked.
With Adrien snoring softly in my arms, I followed the doctor. Two armed policemen were positioned outside Selene’s door. After nodding to them in greeting, I entered the room. Before the doctor left, he warned me that she was still too weak and we could only stay a few minutes.
Selene lay on a bed, covered in a white sheet. Her face was still pale and her head was covered in a white bandage. Her chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. A monitor was attached to a machine that stood beside her bed, displaying her vitals and beeping every few seconds. There were wires sticking out from under her hospital gown, linking her body directly to the machine.
Adrien stirred awake in my arms and blinked, looking around before finally realizing where we were. His eyes grew wide as they settled on Selene lying on the bed, with a white bandage covering half of her head.
“She’s sleeping,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Will she die, Papa?” he asked again, but this time his voice was almost a whisper.
“She has a good doctor taking care of her. And I know that angels are watching over her, too.”
Adrien shifted in my arms, burying his head on my shoulder and exhaling a shuddering breath.
We left the room ten minutes later and I called Èric back to get the numbers. Making the call to her family was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I was responsible for her, and yet she was lying in a hospital bed.
Marley answered the phone. Selene had spoken so highly of her sister, I felt as if I knew her. My mind was still trying to accept the fact that Selene might have lied to me about other things as well. Was she hiding something? I couldn’t dispute the fact that she had gone through a lot in her life, had lost so much. But, who was Selene, really?
Shoving the myriad of questions aside, I introduced myself to Marley, and she laughed and told me she had heard of me. Then her tone turned serious and asked why I was calling. I gave her a short version of what happened without including the details about the threats or the woman who was trying to hurt both my family and Selene.
“The doctor in
charge of her case needs her medical background information. Could you please fax it to my home number or scan and email it to me tonight?”
She hesitated at first, bombarding me with questions, trying to make sure I wasn’t a malicious person trying to find out more about her sister to hurt her.
Good girl.
“Do you or your family have time to fly to France?” I asked her as soon as I told her where to send the information we needed. “I think it would be great if she wakes up with her family here.”
We made arrangements for Marley to get on the next available flight. I told her I would make provisions for the ticket and would call her with the details as soon as everything was ready.
In the background, the PA blared to life, followed by an announcement paging Doctor Blanchett for room 201. Selene’s room. I quickly wrapped up the conversation, and then rearranged Adrien in my arms as I strode in the direction of her room.
Beeping noises filled the air and four medical staff stood around the bed. One of them was punching buttons on the monitor while a different male nurse was pulling the sheets off her body, and yet another held up defibrillator paddles.
Everything was happening so fast and soon someone was pushing us out of the door. My last glimpse of Selene was her body arching up as a nurse slammed the paddles on her chest.
“What the hell is happening?” I shouted, as I fought the person who was busy taking us away from her.
“That’s what we are trying to find out. Look, we suspect there might be some swelling inside her head. We were ready for something like this.”
“Fuck no! No, no, no!” I whirled around to face him and grabbed the front of his coat with one had. “Don’t let anything happen to her. Promise me!”
“We will do everything we can.”
My eyes burned with tears and my throat felt raw with pain. I finally loosened my hand from the lapel of his coat and watched him as he disappeared back inside her room, feeling helpless. I stared at the white door, my mind blank and my chest aching, then I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. I had to pull myself together for the sake of Adrien, sobbing into my chest.
Had my past interfered with my present, obliterating any chance of happiness in my life? Or with Selene?
I couldn’t remember when I fell in love with Selene. I was fascinated at first, pulled by that curvy body of hers, and curious about certain features that resembled Colette’s. It was as though I’d closed my eyes for a few seconds, and when I opened them, she was there, right in front of me. Her presence larger than life. Her heart pure, unsoiled by the events life had thrown at her.
I knew with all my heart that I loved her, even after the blow Gilles delivered while I was in my son’s bedroom. There was no doubt. She had seen me at my lowest point in my life, yet she hadn’t run. She knew more about me than any other woman ever did, even my own mother. Selene understood me and she wasn’t afraid to tell me off. She came into my life, stole every reservation I had in me, replacing it with pieces of her warmth and loving nature. Sometimes there is no pride in love; you fall hard and fast with no chance of reverting to the person who you were. When Adrien asked me earlier, I had hesitated to answer him, but I wanted Selene to be the first to know. She was in there, fighting for her life, and I could do nothing to help her.
She had to be all right. She just had to. My life couldn’t survive losing her. Everything made sense when she was around me.
I pulled my mobile from my pocket and dialled Gilles’s number. It rang once before he answered the call. After giving him the short version of what happened in the house and the possibility of the woman that had broken into his office might be the same person who’d gained access to the château under his personnel’s watchful eye, I paused long enough to let rage replace the hopelessness consuming me.
“Find who did this to her, Gilles.” My voice was cold, exactly the way I felt inside. “I want you to use every resource you have and turn over every fucking rock, search every damn crack and hole until you find who hurt Selene. I don’t care how much it costs. Find this woman.”
I was filled with unquenchable wrath and I was out for blood. I didn’t give a damn who had hurt Selene. Justice would be mine
To be Continued February 2015
There are so many people that I would like to thank for being with me throughout this journey and even way before that.
My kids. Thank you for being patient with me, and for sensing when I needed space. For eating questionable foods and not complaining, especially when I was on a deadline for this book. I love you so much.
My Alpha Readers, Amy & Nanette. You two read the very first draft of this story in all its messy phase. And you loved it and asked me for more. Thank you for being amazing and my cheerleaders. <3
Brenna Aubrey, for helping me to clarify some French phrases and words. I'm so lucky to have you as my friend.
To Kitty Kats Crazy About Books. Thank you for organizing kickass Teaser Tuesdays promos and release blitz. I owe you a big one.
To Marion at Making Manuscripts. Oh my God, woman. I am in awe. Your feedback and the fact that you took time to read Obliterate the second time around made me love you even more. Just, thank you.
To Autumn Wordsmith Publicity for organizing the blitz and for your feedback on Obliterate. Totally owe you :)
I want to thank Becky, Peggy and the team at Hot Tree Editing for taking this story and making it better. Much, much better. I can't wait to send my next story to you. You are amazing!
And to all the bloggers who helped me spread the word about Havoc and Obliterate, thank you for being part of my publishing journey. <3 To bloggers all over the blogosphere; thank you for taking time to help authors in every way. Seriously, we wouldn't be here without you.
Thank you for all the messages that I received in regards to Havoc. During the past month or two, I met some unbelievably awesome ladies and I'm so grateful for their support. I can't tell you how much your words mean to me. I'm floored you loved the story. Thank you for welcoming Selene, Remington and Adrien into your lives. For welcoming me. :) <3 Selene's life in Havoc isn't easy, and I'm extremely happy that this story made a difference in someone's life. Keep the messages coming. I love hearing from you.
To everyone who bought a copy of Havoc, I can't thank you enough for taking a chance on me.
Autumn Grey is the author of Havoc, Obliterate, Mend (Havoc series). And just like her characters, she is quirky, sometimes funny and definitely flawed. She writes sexy contemporary romances full of drama, steamy kisses and happy ever afters.