Edith rolls her eyes. “No one in Burlington is going to arrest a Winter. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Katya’s voice is deadly calm as she holds me to her. “You see that bruise? You see all that blood?” She points to my blue blouse that’s stained and smells like iron. “That’s your ticket to court.”
Edith turns pale. For the first time, there’s uncertainty in her eyes.
CHAPTER 18
Aiden
“How many stitches?”
My heart lodges somewhere in my throat as I stand in the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center, adrenaline still crashing through me. Since Katya called me to let me know what happened, I’ve been losing my mind.
“Just two,” Dr. Pranav Shukla says, his voice calm in that maddeningly reasonable way. He’s a friend—knows me well enough to see the way my fists keep clenching, how badly I want to punch something. “And you need to relax before you go into cardiac shock. Don’t make me give you mouth-to-mouth, because neither of us wants that on our conscience.”
I ignore his sarcasm. “Is she okay?”
He exhales, running a hand down his face. “She is. The police are with her and her lawyer. Who…by the way, is she single?”
I gape at him. “My mother assaulted my wife, and you’re hitting on her lawyer?”
“She saidsoon-to-be ex-wife, for the record.” He shrugs, then grins. “I’m just saying, I’ve seen worse. Last week, I had a guy whose mother-in-law drove over his foot.Twice.”
Before I can respond with the fury I’m swallowing down, Katya appears, looking like a storm in heels.
“K, how is she?” My voice cracks. I hate how helpless I feel.
“She’ll live, no thanks to your mother,” Katya snaps. “What the fuck, Aiden? She shoved Mia into a parking meter. There was blood. Everywhere.”
“Blood?” My knees go wobbly. “But you said?—”
“She’s okay,” Pranav cuts in. “Got a cut in the back of the head. Head wounds bleed. A lot. But all she needed was two stitches. It’s a superficial cut.”
Katya glares at him like she’d rather stitchhimup.
He raises his hands in surrender. “I’ll just…be elsewhere.” Then, with a sudden shift to charm, he turns to Katya. “You’re Katya, right?”
“Why?” she asks, suspicious.
He slides his card into her hand. “Dinner?”
She looks down at the card, sighs. “At least you’re a doctor. My last first date was with a guy who lived in his brother’s basement andfreelanced in crypto.”
“I don’t have a brother. I don’t even know what a crypto is.” He bows, and then heads back into the bowels of the emergency room.
“Can I see her?” I ask, trying not to sound desperate.
Katya gives me a withering look. “Shouldn’t you be home? The cops are probably going to be at your mom’s place soon. I hope they arrest her bony ass.”
How do I tell her home is wherever Mia is without having her knee me in the nuts? Since I don’t have a way of doing that, I say the other thing that’s clawing to get out. “I don’t give a flying fuck what they do with my mother.” I release a long, frustrated breath and add, “Actually, scratch that—I would take a small, deeply satisfying measure of pleasure in seeing her cuffed and carted off.”
“Right!” She suppresses a smile.
“They’re not going to arrest her, Katya, you know that, right?” I want to manage her expectations.
Her head moves in a slow, solemn nod. “Yeah, I know. She’s a Winter, and this is Burlington.”
“Where is Mia?” I ask softly.
