Falling.
Holy shitballs, what the hell had just happened?
She pushed back the thought. Held the kid a little tighter. He clutched a handful of tiny silver pennies. His weapons of choice, the things he’d thrown at the so-dead-now woman, were just coins. Kira had no idea who he was, who the crazy-haired tan queen was either, but here she was anyway. Blake was going to lose her shit. Blend in, Kira. She couldn’t have drawn more attention if she’d flashed her clam in the foyer. Kira sought out Az. He was huddled in the corner of the elevator. Emerald-greens lifted. And he didn’t need to touch her for her to tell what he was feeling. Shell-shocked. Scared.
Ditto, Kira thought. One arm still wrapped around the sniffling kid, she touched her fingers to her neck. Bruises were a given. She kept her eyes on the elevator’s number display and didn’t look away till Leona ordered them out of the elevator and into the underground car park.
Blake - 15
Blake pushed herself onto her elbows intending to sit up, but Cym was having none of it. Her hands still trembled but nothing like before. And her heart wasn’t trying to break her ribs any longer.
‘I would not recommend standing just yet.’ He leaned in close, tilting his head and shoulders to the right. It seemed an awkward angle that puzzled her until she spotted the camera in the corner of the room. Cym was attempting to shield her. ‘You have been unconscious for some time. I convinced them it was due to hypoglycaemia. Your undernourished state lent credence to my diagnosis, but the fault is entirely mine. Your cardiac arrhythmia was quite alarming. Clearly, I exceeded a reasonable level of one of the stimulants and felt that sedation was –’
‘How long have I been out?’ Blake sank back onto the pillow, staring up at the beige ceiling of the med ward. She did not recall being moved from her apartment. She recalled nothing at all from the moment the black fog had descended on her to the present. Now here she was, in a place she despised more than any other.
‘About two hours.’ Cym dropped his gaze to the floor. He ran a slender fingertip against his lips. ‘Some developments have occurred in that time.’
‘What is it, Cym? Have they found Kira?’ Now Blake did rise, waving back the Syranian when he tried to assist her. Cym had never mastered the marble-hard expressions the others were so adept at. His thoughts were not so easily hidden. ‘Tell me.’
But he did not need to.
The double doors to the eight-bed medical ward slid open, and a body on a gurney was wheeled in by two scrub-clad men with masks covering their mouths. Monitoring equipment clung to the end of the gurney, a brunette nurse frowning at it as she assisted the men. Blake recognised her as one who had tended Kira during her time here, but the woman’s name escaped her. The group passed by Blake and Cym, but no one so much as glanced their way. Blake grasped Cym’s arm, using the leverage to dangle her legs over the side of the bed.
‘Oh shit,’ she whispered.
Perry lay on the gurney. She stared at the disconcerting colour of the man’s skin. His olive hue had adopted a greenish tinge at his cheeks, with a deeper brown around his closed eyes. The sight did little to steady the low-level trembling working through her limbs. Blake eased herself off the bed, bare feet meeting the coolness of the tiled floor. Black tiles. An odd choice for a medical ward, she’d always thought. But then the Syranians, for whom it was designed, were hardly average patients.
‘Take it slowly, Blake.’ Cym reached for her, but she cautioned him back with a raised, and visibly shaking, hand.
‘I’m fine,’ she hissed. She glanced back at the doors. Closed again. No sign of Rossiter. This had most definitely not been the plan, bringing Perry here, but she decided against asking about the bodyguard. Play dumb until she knew more. Perry was alive. Relief and panic mingled within her. That he was breathing was positive, for obvious reasons, but he was also a direct link to Kira – and the airport he’d taken her to.
The men wheeled the gurney into the first compartment on the far side of the room, and on the nurse’s count relocated him onto the waiting bed.
‘What happened to him, Cym?’ Blake rubbed at the puncture marks in the crook of her elbow. The monotonous beep of the monitoring equipment sent chills crawling across the back of Blake’s neck. The sound and the room were all-too familiar. When she’d walked out of here three years ago, after Kira had been transferred out of intensive care and up to the ground-level medical facility for recovery, Blake had made it a personal mission never to attend this place again.
Cym’s generous lips pressed into a tight line. ‘I have not been privy to any information regarding the human.’
‘Well, I would like some information.’ Blake spotted her boots—the worn purple steel caps Kira had given her a few Christmases ago—beneath the bed and leaned down to collect them. ‘He looks as if he should be in the hospital. Who gave the order for him to
