INICIAR SESIÓNChapter 95Dreyven I turned around slowly, my hand still on the doorframe."I don't understand what you're saying." My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. "You need to rest, Aurelia.""I don't need rest." She was still crying, but her voice had gone hard underneath it, hard enough to hold steady even with the tears running down her face. "I need to understand what's happening to my own body. And you should be here for that too, since it was one of your riders that put me in this bed in the first place."I stood in that doorway a long moment, my jaw tight, my chest still aching from what she'd said before. Some part of me wanted to argue that it wasn't his fault, that it wasn't really an accident at all, that she'd walked into that path herself. I didn't say any of it. This wasn't the moment for that fight, and some instinct in me knew it. Whatever had actually happened out there in that lot, she was the one lying in a hospital bed right now, and I was the one still able to
Chapter 94DreyvenI walked inside and saw her laying there peacefully. Pipes and wire surrounded her like if one is pulled out, she wouldn't survive.The thought broke something in me as I stared at her.Why did she come to the race, I couldn't help but wonder.Someone like her isn't careless that she wouldn't look before crossing. So how did she get hit.I couldn't put how I was feeling, just wanted to call my brothers. I needed to hear their voices.The doctor and the nurse came in after me immediately, politely asking me to step out from the room.I didn't argue, I had no strength left for it. So I nodded and walked out, but not after staring at her one last time........This was the fourth night I'd fallen asleep in that hospital, and every single time, I woke up with a stiff neck and the same sick feeling sitting low in my stomach, the kind that doesn't go away just because you open your eyes.I'd been staying in the family room down the hall since the night I brought her in, g
Chapter 93DreyvenI was still laughing at something one of my guys said about my last lap when I heard the tires screaming.That sound goes straight past your ears and hits you somewhere lower, somewhere your body understands before your brain even catches up.That sound always a company's a great disaster. I'd heard tires do that a hundred times on that same stretch of road. I'd never once heard it followed by a scream.I turned around fast. A bike swerved hard to one side. Something hit the ground and rolled. Someone shouted for anybody to call an ambulance.Then I saw her face, and everything in me just stopped.For one long second I couldn't move at all. My legs wouldn't listen to me. My arms wouldn't listen to me. I stood there holding my helmet like an idiot while people ran past me toward her, every single one of them faster to move than I was.I don't have a clean answer for why my body froze like that. I've gone over it again and again since it happened, and the closest I c
Chapter 92AureliaThe first thing I noticed was the smell.Antiseptic, and the specific hum of hospital lighting that never quite goes fully quiet even in the middle of the night. For one disorienting second I wasn't twenty-eight years old waking up from an accident I'd planned myself. I was twenty-three again, strapped to a different bed in a different room, listening to a monitor count out a heartbeat that hadn't only been mine to lose.I remembered the ceiling tiles from that room too, a water stain shaped like nothing in particular that I'd stared at for hours because it was easier than looking at anyone's face. I remembered a hand on my shoulder, and a silence afterward that had lasted longer than any silence had any right to last.I pushed the memory down before it could finish forming. I didn't have room for it right now, not on top of everything else my body seemed to be trying to tell me all at once.A monitor beeped somewhere to my left, steady and unbothered, and an IV
Chapter 91AureliaA week.Seven days since the gallery, seven days of waiting for Sienna to call me back with some kind of plan.Every time I picked up the phone to ask her how it was going, I got the same answer wrapped in slightly different words. Still working on it. Almost there. Give me a few more days.I'd called her again this morning, technically to check in, though we both knew it was really to push."It's not that simple, Lia," she'd said, sounding worn thin in a way I didn't often hear from her. "You don't just move into a someone's house. There has to be a reason nobody questions. I'm working every angle I've got, but reasons like that don't just appear because you want them to appear faster.""Then find one faster.""I'm trying." A pause, then, quieter. "You know I'm trying."I did know that. That was almost the worst part of it, knowing she was doing everything she could and still hating how slow everything felt from where I was standing.I hadn't seen a single one of
Chapter 90AureliaThe cab ride home took eleven minutes, and I spent every one of them looking out the window instead of at my own reflection in the glass, because I already knew what I'd find there if I looked. Something cracked. Something that didn't look nearly as steady as I needed it to look.I got inside, dropped my bag by the door, and stood in the middle of my own living room for a long moment, waiting for the tears to come the way they always threatened to on nights like this.They didn't come. I wouldn't let them.Crying was for people who still believed the version of themselves that had walked into that apartment five years ago and expected an apology out of it. I wasn't her anymore. I refused to be her, not over a speech, not over a painting.But I hated them. God, I hated them tonight more than I think I'd hated them for years.I hated that it had only taken him a handful of words to get under my skin like that, standing there in front of people, turning our worst day







