An Italian

I was sitting up on the hospital bed, thinking about how many times I have been in a hospital in the two weeks I had returned.

This had to end. This had to end really quickly.

“Why did you run off with Tucker?” Kan said, turning around from the window he had been looking out from.

“I was running AWAY from Blaine,” I said quietly. 

Kan had insisted I stay in the hospital for twenty-four hours because he had to be sure I was fine in the case I had any internal injuries that had been overlooked.

But if we were going to just fight. We had better just go home. 

“The guards said you got into an argument. Why did you drive off without security, Ariel?” Kan said, his face twisted in pain, “Why did you drive off with HIM?”

“If I had not been driving that car, I would have been dead,” I said, staring at him. “You see that man in the E. R now, that would have been me.” 

“What?”

“The car that hit us slammed into the side of the car I usually sat in, not the driver’s,” I said, and Kan finally moved to sit beside me.

“How did you find me?” I asked, taking his hand in mine. 

I expected him to pull away, but he didn’t. He squeezed my hand.

And as I looked down at it, all I could think of was Blaine’s bloodied hand in mine.

“It was father.” he said quietly.

“What?”

“Mr Grigor.”

“You call him father now?” I asked, staring at him in surprise. 

Had they become such chummies already after that time, they took my son out without my permission or even knowledge.

“He is my father-in-law,” Kan said, smiling shyly, and now he looked young and would not have been out of place in a hot boy band. 

His face fell again, and he stroked my fingers, staring down. 

“I will change all our guards and staff. They are all incompetent idiots who are way too lenient with the Tuckers.”

His voice was full of such hate it frightened me a little. But I understood him. 

This was a family that was responsible for many deaths in his family and he had lost his grandparents, his father, and then his twin to this. 

Although the Tuckers could say the same.

“There is no reason they should even let Tucker approach you.”

“Blaine always approaches me in public,” I said quietly. “Any struggle between him and your guards would make the front page and re-awaken the whole rivalry issue again. Your guards know this.”

“Then I would hire the ones who don’t.” He looked up at me, and I sighed. 

It was like I was back to dealing with teenage boys again. Did people never really grow up then?

“Tell me.”

He shook his head, as if to shake off all his angry thoughts and remember what he was saying earlier. 

“They said you were driving fast. They saw the crash, but then the truck blocked the road and their view, and in the few minutes they arrived at the scene, your car had disappeared.

I looked away, trying to visualize it. 

The truck ramming into us, the force turning the car around now that we were unconscious and had lost control of it. 

“I think my car was towed away,” I said, looking back at him. 

That was the only way disappearing so quickly made sense. The car must have been hitched quickly and pulled into a waiting closed truck and taken to that abandoned building.

Kan nodded. “We might never have found you because we did not even know where to start looking from. There were no security cameras around the accident scene.” 

I looked at him, waiting.

He reached out, and I blinked as his hand came toward my throat, and then I felt his fingers gently lift the pendant from my skin.

“Father said he fixed a tracker on this.” Kan stared at it, shaking his head in wonder. “He said you always took it around and no one would think to throw it away because it’s obviously an ash pendant.” 

I just stared at Kan as I wondered when my father had done this. As if reading my thoughts, Kan said, “he did it while you were unconscious after the minister mansion incident.”

I fingered the pendant that was shaped like a half ring, a small blue-jeweled vial that contained my son’s ashes.

“You never told me this,” I said. 

If I had any idea, maybe I would not have panicked so much. Maybe that would have given Blaine a little more hope to hold out. 

Thinking of Blaine, now was the best time to tell Kan the truth.

“I had no idea he did it till I called to tell him what happened,” Kan was responding to my question when I squeezed his hand and said,

“Kan.”

My serious tone made him freeze and look up at me. 

“I saw Blaine yesterday at the suit shop I was supposed to be shopping for my father in,” I said, and Kan did not look surprised, instead he looked relieved.

I realized our guards had talked, and he thought I was being sneaky and keeping a secret.

He nodded.

“There was another man there too,” I said. “I think Blaine knew him from the look they gave each other.” 

Both of them had looked at each other the way Kan and Blaine did, like they were competing for something.

Kan was frowning now, perhaps wondering why this was important information.

“While I was waking up, I heard that man's voice giving instructions on what to do with my car.”

“What?”

“He is an Italian, and I don’t hear that accent enough here so I remembered his voice clearly. Especially since I have been wondering about how we met. He was hitting on me at the suit store till Blaine showed up.”

Kan’s eyes widened. “He was hitting on you? Where were the guards?”

I frowned in irritation. “They are just guards, not my husband. And this man was really well-dressed, so he did not look like trouble.”