Spectacularly Broken (19 page)

“Nothing yet,” I told her with regret when she lifted her gaze from the floor to give me a questioning look. She dropped her shoulders in response and slumped into the chair next to Cai.

I’d gotten the three of us into Margaret’s car and to the hospital through liberal use of good old entitlement. I’d simply demanded it, invoking my “uncle’s” name to great effect. Turned out I still had the attitude down pat, even without the name. But the wait, even in their company, was painful.

Margaret was talking on her phone again. From the sound of it, she was now in communication with someone back at the manor, and Kelly was not only in major trouble but also completely hysterical. I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for her.

“Do we know if he’s conscious?” Cai sounded reluctant to ask, as though merely giving voice to the possibility might cause it to shatter.

“He’s not.” I stared at my hands and tried not to think about the fact that Finn had not regained consciousness once since about fifteen seconds after he’d hit the rock. His body had come to rest on the grass, and he had looked at me, blinking, eyes unfocused. He had brought his hand up to his head as though trying to check how badly he was injured, but it had been sluggish and uncoordinated. Then, bizarrely, he had made an attempt to get up. Halfway through, his body had finally caught up to the fact that he’d just been brained with a rock, and that had been all she wrote.

“He’s on a ventilator too.” I shared yet another development that worried me.

“Crap,” Cai said succinctly and brought his feet up so he could hug his knees on the chair.

“Yeah, pretty much.” I turned to Lexa. The fact that she still hadn’t said a word since the incident worried me. “Apart from being worried, are you feeling okay? Did Damien hurt you?”

She replied with nothing but a bland smile. Ah, hell.

Heeled footsteps echoed as Margaret once again strode toward us. She was finally putting her phone away.

“I should get you three back to the manor,” she said, but it sounded as though she was speaking to herself and not us.

I gave her my input anyway. “I’m staying. You’ll have to drag me out of here.”

“Finnegan.” She put her concerned face on, which was far less impressive than the one my dad occasionally pulled out. “I realize you’re worried about your cousin, but there isn’t anything any of us can do right now. He is being cared for by a fantastic team of doctors. You need some rest.”

“No,” I said stubbornly.

“It does him no good if you pass out from exhaustion.”

“It also does him no good if I lie in bed wide awake because I’m too busy worrying to sleep,” I pointed out. “I’d rather wait here.”

“But—”

“Trust me, you do
not
want me around other people right now,” I said sharply. “Especially Kelly or Damien.”

“Damien is packing his things as we speak,” she said, as though that was supposed to make me feel better.

“Well, good for him. I’m still not going back to the manor.” This was the point when I realized just how keyed up I was for a fight. My worry about Finn had no real outlet. I was drowning in the emotion and apparently intent on dragging everyone else down with me. “I need to know he’ll be okay. I want to hear it from the neurosurgeon. Period. I’m not moving from this spot before that happens.”

Margaret turned her gaze to Cai, who didn’t even give her a chance to speak.

“I’m staying with Haze,” he said coolly, then took my hand and turned his head away. Just having him next to me, supporting me, made me feel better.

Lexa crossed her arms and glared at the floor.

Margaret’s exasperated huff was only for show, and we all knew it. She couldn’t exactly drag us back to the manor by force. Instead she switched her attention back to her phone and dialed once more as she walked away.

I let out the breath I’d been holding without realizing it and slumped against Cai. He put his arm around me.

“He’ll be fine,” he muttered against my temple. “He’ll be okay.”

I had no idea what time it was, but a glance toward the row of windows behind us made it clear that night had fallen while we’d been waiting. Shifting, I settled more comfortably against Cai and closed my eyes in an attempt to relax.

The next few hours were a blur of napping and waking, hearing voices and footsteps and wondering if I’d dreamed them. At one point I glanced sleepily up at Cai, who was carding his fingers through my hair.

“They’ve got him in surgery now,” he told me.

A frightening jolt of anxiety pulled me out of my half-asleep state.

“What exactly does that mean?” I asked hoarsely. “What are they doing to him?”

“Margaret said they need to remove two bone fragments.”

His words made my stomach lurch. “Bone fragments?”

“That splintered off his skull and were pushed deeper, yeah.” Cai gripped my chin, forcing me to look at him. “They aren’t so worried about the pressure on his brain anymore. That’s good, baby. It means the inside of his head isn’t bleeding.”

“Right.” I tried hard to convince myself to see it as a positive thing. “Right. Fuck. I’m just so worried.”

“I know you are. I know.” Cai was so impressively patient with me, handling my anxiety as if he’d done it for years. His fingers rubbed, very gently, behind my ear. Then he traced my jawline, studying me with his dark eyes. “Maybe after they’re done and he’s back in ICU, they’ll let you see him.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” I closed my eyes and focused on Cai’s touch, on the way his fingertips left a warm trail across my skin as he continued to explore my face and throat with light brushes and caresses. The pad of his thumb traced my lips, my cheekbone.

Eventually he pressed a soft kiss to my lips. I blinked my eyes open and looked into his concerned face, flooded with gratitude for his presence, for the fact that he cared so much.

I love you.

I nearly said it out loud. Part of me had known it for a while; another part was urging me to run away screaming. Most of me reveled in the feeling, in the intense, prickling warmth that had resulted from finally admitting it to myself. I loved Cai. I’d fallen for him in two weeks flat, hard and irrevocably. The thought was as unnerving as it was exhilarating.

I burrowed against him for comfort and warmth, curled into a ball on that uncomfortable plastic chair. There was no one else in the small waiting area, no families waiting for news on someone in ICU. If there had been, I wouldn’t have cared if they saw me like this. I needed calm, and for that I needed Cai.

* * * *

I had no idea how long I’d been sleeping when Lexa woke me with a hand on my shoulder. She pulled it back as soon as I opened my eyes, but she gave me a very small smile.

“He’s out of surgery,” she told me. “It went fine. He’s fine.”

“Conscious?” I asked hopefully. She shrugged, looking doubtful.

He wasn’t, as I could clearly see for myself after we’d been ushered into the ICU and were staring at Finn through a thick glass window separating visitors from patients. He was nearly as pale as his bedsheets. His head had been bandaged to hell and back, and he was still on a ventilator and hooked up to several other machines. Monitors displayed jumpy lines for his vitals, and it all looked uncomfortably like every hospital nightmare I’d ever had.

“Isn’t it a bad sign he hasn’t woken up?” I asked no one in particular.

“He’s sedated,” a passing nurse—or RN or whatever they were called—informed me kindly. “He will be for a while longer.”

“Oh,” I replied and stared some more. I supposed there was some sense in not rousing Finn immediately after a team of surgeons had spent several hours futzing around in his head. That kind of thing likely demanded some damn strict R&R afterward.

“You want to get breakfast?” Cai asked me, slinging his arm around my waist. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

I felt like it too. Now that Finn had made it through the worst of it, the anxiety was fading, leaving exhaustion and weariness to drag me down. My stomach was in knots.

“Yeah, okay,” I mumbled and let him pull me along to the cafeteria, where he grabbed us both sandwiches and drinks. They looked surprisingly good for hospital food, but a five-star meal would have tasted like ash in my mouth right then.

I was worried. So worried. Even though Finn seemed to have made it through the worst of it, nobody could be sure he didn’t have any brain damage until he woke up. And I felt responsible because Finn wouldn’t have been stuck in purple group if I hadn’t convinced him to play this stupid switching game, and Damien wouldn’t have hated him so much. I knew it wasn’t technically my fault, but that didn’t change the fact that I’d set this whole thing in motion.

And God knew Finn had been through enough bad stuff to last him a lifetime.

The thoughts were still floating around in my head when we came back to the ICU waiting area, distracting me from what I realized far too late was an utterly stunned expression on Margaret’s face.

“Explain this,” she demanded, voice ripe with aggravation. “
Explain this
!”

I had no idea what she was talking about. But then a throat cleared behind me, and I turned in shock.

“Lysander,” my father said sharply. “Would you mind telling me what the hell is going on?”

Chapter Twenty-One

The water surface spread out before me, deceptively calm, almost like glass. Every once in a while the slight breeze sent a series of ripples to spread through the entire pool, and I watched them with rapt attention until they vanished and the water was still once more. The process repeated in irregular intervals, lasting no more than a few seconds each time. And I just kept staring.

I felt disconnected. Numb. And I hadn’t even needed drugs to get there.

It had been four days.

Four days since my father had dragged me home. Four days since I had listened to his tirade about wasting his money and other people’s time, about squandering the chance he’d given me, about the consequences I had brought upon myself.

Four days since Cai had stared at me blankly with those dark eyes of his, and I had seen him shutting down, slipping away from me completely the moment he realized what I’d done. Who I was.

Four days of burning shame and guilt because I’d managed to hurt the one person in the world who had least deserved it, who had trusted me, who had depended on me.

Four days of sitting by the water looking for nonexistent starfish.

“Lysander?”

It had been four days. My father hadn’t been home for even one of them, going back to wrap up whatever production he had walked away from because he’d thought I was hurt, as soon as he had dropped me off in Sheri’s care. He had taken the car keys, my phone, my credit cards.

I didn’t give a damn.

I heard his steps behind me now, descending the tiled stairs that led poolside. He stopped a few feet away from me. I saw his shoes from the corner of my eye, but I didn’t turn to face him. Couldn’t.

Too busy looking for starfish.

“Sheri says you’ve been spending a lot of time out here.”

I had, hadn’t I? I hadn’t done drugs, hadn’t had sex, hadn’t even talked to Logan or Grayson or Sawyer or anyone at all, really. He should have been happy about that.

“Lysander?”

He didn’t sound happy.

“Lysander, will you please look at me?”

Can’t. Need to look for starfish.

The water rippled, glittered in the sunlight, and I could almost see one.

“Lysander.”

I’d known this would happen. I’d known I would have to be Lysander again. But I wasn’t, not really. Haze had left, and Lysander hadn’t come back, and I was just an empty shell now.

“Lysander.”

It was probably best that way. After all, what had Lysander ever done that was worthwhile?

Nothing, that’s what.

Which meant that it wasn’t a loss to anyone that Lysander was gone. Especially not to Cai. Cai, who’d been right from the beginning.

Shallow, spoiled little rich kid.

“Lysander, dammit, will you
look at me
.”

Can’t. Too busy looking for starfish.

And forgiveness.

* * * *

“It’s drugs, isn’t it? He took something.” My father’s face appeared before me, face lined, blue eyes weary. Cool hands grasped the sides of my face. “He must have.”

“Not drugs, no.” Another voice, this one calm and gentle and very deep. On my fractured mind, it had the effect of a warm blanket. My skin still felt icy, however, so I hunched a little more and wrapped my arms around myself more tightly.

I wished I could have borrowed Lexa’s sweater.

“Not drugs? Are you sure, Dr. Marquette?”

“Yes. The blood tests came back clean. There’s nothing in his system.”

I wondered if Lexa felt like this all the time, so cold, so vulnerable. If she wasn’t really there either. No wonder she didn’t talk. Talking felt like an insurmountable obstacle right now. I wouldn’t have known how to, even if I had anything worthwhile to say.

“So then what the hell is it? This can’t be normal.”

The blue eyes before me closed briefly. I didn’t want to look at them anyway. I longed to see large brown eyes, arrogant and kind and vulnerable all at once.

“I think it’s an acute stress reaction.”

Cai. Oh God, Cai.

“I don’t understand.”

I’m sorry, so sorry. Please forgive me.

“Shock. Psychological shock, to be precise. I believe that’s what it is. He is reacting to a stressful or traumatic event. Silence, withdrawal, detachment, those are all common symptoms.”

The painful thought tore through the numbness that cocooned me. I squeezed my eyes shut, my fingers clutching the edge of the chair I was sitting on so hard it hurt.

“That doesn’t make any sense. He hasn’t been through anything traumatic.”

Chair?

“Are you sure?”

I blinked. Slowly I realized I had no idea how I’d gotten here. What day it was.

“I…I suppose not. His cousin was hurt, but Lysander wasn’t involved with that. They barely even know each other.”