Chapter 207 Bones
ADRIANA
I woke up starving and needing the bathroom with the urgency of someone who had not used one in an indeterminate number of hours.
The room was bright in the way of late morning and I had no idea how long I had been out. I tried to swing my legs off the bed and the leg reminded me immediately and viciously of its current condition, so I sat there gripping the edge of the mattress and trying to think through my options.
“Hello?” I called out, probably louder than necessary. “Is anyone out there?”
The door opened so fast the guard must have been right outside it.
“My Queen, do you—”
“Get me a maid right now and get my husband. In that order. I need help getting to the bathroom before something embarrassing happens.”
He left at a pace that confirmed he had understood the urgency.
The maid came and helped me up and I made it to the bathroom and felt the profound relief of someone whose bladder has been making threats it fully intended to keep. I stood at the sink and ran water over my hands and looked at my leg in the mirror and decided immediately that it was a mistake. It was wrapped but the shape of it was wrong and the color of my skin above the wrapping was a color I didn’t want to look at for too long.
I was standing there doing breathing exercises about it when the vomit arrived without any warning whatsoever, and I had approximately half a second to turn toward the toilet before my body evacuated everything it had been storing.
The maid heard me and came running.
I sat on the bathroom floor afterward because sitting felt better than standing and the floor was cold and the cold was useful.
“What is this?” Elijah’s voice from the doorway, then his hands on my arms, then him on the floor beside me. “The guard came to get me and said—what happened? Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.” I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth. “I got up, I went to the bathroom, I looked at my leg, I threw up. My body is doing something. I don’t know what.”
“You don’t know what.” He was looking at me with the expression that meant he was cataloguing everything he was seeing and not saying most of it. “Let me get you off this floor.”
He picked me up and carried me back to the bed and I let him because my leg hurt and the bathroom floor had done its job and I was ready to be somewhere horizontal again.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “Really hungry. Can you get someone to make something?”
“The maid is still here, I’ll tell her.” He sat beside me. “How’s your leg? Honestly.”
I wiggled my foot experimentally and a white bolt of pain shot up through my calf. “It’s there,” I said. “Very much there. But better than when it was sticking out of my skin, so I’m calling that progress.”
“You don’t have to call it progress.” he said softly. “You can just say it hurts.”
“It hurts.” I looked at him. “We have a lot to talk about.”
“We do.”
“I’m sorry I left without telling you.” I held his gaze. “I needed to finish it and I knew you would try to come with me and I couldn’t risk you, but I also knew you’d be—”
“Terrified?” he said. “Furious? Yes to both.”
“Both of those things. I’m sorry.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he sighed and I knew he’d already thought about this. “I’m glad you’re alive. I’m glad you’re here. The rest of it I’ll get over.”
“The rest of it meaning your fury?” I batted my eyelashes and he gave me a pointed look but an almost smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
“My significant, entirely justified fury. Yes.”
“Okay.” I reached for his hand. “I’ll accept that.”
The maid knocked and came in with water and I drank it while Elijah told her what to make for breakfast. A few minutes later the door opened wider and four faces appeared in the gap, the twins, Lorain, and behind them, moving with the tentative quality of someone who has been told not to overwhelm but cannot quite help themselves, Leo.
I held my arms out.
They came in and piled onto the sides of the bed carefully, all of them trying to make contact without touching the leg, and Leo stayed at the edge and looked at me with an expression I recognized — the face of someone who has been through something and is checking whether the most important thing in their world is still intact.
“Come here,” I said.
He sat beside me and I put my arm around him and he leaned into it the way he had when he was small, before fifteen made him self-conscious about such things, and I held him and felt the twins watching with the attentiveness of children who understand more than adults generally give them credit for.
“Dad said you snapped your leg in half,” Lorain said like she was talking about the weather.
I looked at Elijah.
“You did,” he said, entirely unrepentant. “I’m raising them to deal with reality.”
I shook my head. “You’re raising them to have nightmares.”
“I hurt my leg,” I told the twins. “It’s getting better. And I’m very hungry and when the food comes you are all going to sit here and eat with me and nobody is going to mention bones.”
Elijah started to say something about taking them to the training fields.
“Elijah.” I used the weight in his name deliberately. “Don’t go. I need you here.”
He didn’t hesitate. He came back and sat beside me and the twins scrambled to find their spots and Leo stayed where he was and I looked at this collection of people who were mine and felt something that had nothing to do with the pain in my leg and everything to do with being alive to look at them.
The food arrived and we ate together and nobody mentioned bones sticking out of my body. Thank God.