“What happened to you?” I strain my brain trying to remember, but the details are fuzzy and incomplete.
“Explosion.” She sighs. “I was dumb and did a stupid thing, there were explosives in my car that detonated.”
“Were you in the car?”
“No, but I was near it. Close enough to fracture a rib and puncture a lung.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah,” she laughs shakily.
“How did I get away from Andrei?”
“That’s a long story.” She sighs. “Do you feel up to it?”
I nod. I hate not knowing what happened. It’s like all the memories are there, just someone has grayed them out, blurred the faces. I’m censoring my own thoughts from myself.
Daria starts by admitting they didn’t even know I was gone until at least a day after Andrei abducted me. She looks guilty as she says it, so I try not to be upset with her. But that’s like my ultimate fear in life. To go missing or die and have nobody notice.
Until finally the mail carrier realizes the junk mail is piling up—because no one sends me anything of value by mail—and hunky firefighters break down my front door to find my half-eaten body.
Because as a lonely, old woman, I would have the kind of cats who would eat my weakened body once I can no longer fend for myself.
Asshole cats.
Daria continues the story, telling me how she searched my car and my house, until realizing that I was missing. She glosses over the part where she goes a little crazy and blows up half of Andrei’s stuff before the guys shoot her car up and everything explodes. When she gets to Ronan visiting her in the hospital, I have a vague recollection of pee. Or else I have to pee, I’m not sure which one.
She’s a good storyteller, and I don’t have many questions for her at all. Not much surprises me until she gets to the part about Reed rescuing me. My heart beats faster, adrenaline rushing through my veins, waking my limbs, and alerting my brain.
“Reed was there?”
“He was working with my father.”
“With your father? Why? How?”
“Let me finish, and I’ll answer all your questions,” she says, sounding tired suddenly. At a time where excitement courses through me, she’s deflating rapidly. Making me wonder what comes next that could be so wearisome.
She tells me about Ronan coming in at the last minute to save the day. Helping to extract us to safety, all the while fending off what remained of Viktor’s men. How she and her father came to war over his negligence of those who Daria loves. And it’s then that I see the immense sadness on her face. What I assume is the loss of her family now that she and her father have come to odds.
As the story continues, I learn we all made it out of the compound safely, in part thanks to Ronan and his men, who were able to get more of the rubble down on the opposite side of the hall from us. Which was the only way they could get me out, and more importantly how Mack was able to fit his large bulk through.
They rushed Mack and me to the hospital. He was fine. Me, not so much.
That was three days ago, and I’m just now waking up. Apparently, time passes by quickly when you’re unconscious.
Daria pushes some hair back from my cheek that has somehow stuck there in the remaining dirt and grime that’s yet to be cleaned off me. I glance around the room again, and it hits me that Daria is the only one here.
“Wait, where is Reed?” I ask.
She sighs heavily. “That’s the thing, Q. I don’t know.”
Epilogue
Roxie
“We doing this or what fancy pants?”
“Please refrain from calling me that.”
