Chapter 44-1

I had always hated hospitals, but that fear became even more exacerbated when we discovered my mother's breast cancer and we had to spend countless sleepless nights awaiting different results every time a new treatment became available to her. That very fear was quite possibly the reason that when I awoke in a stiff hospital bed hooked up to monitors with an IV stuck in my wrist and taped to my skin, the heart monitors started going off the charts and my erratic breathing became even more labored. Someone stirred in the chair sitting next to me and I was fully expecting it to be on elf my parents, but was happily surprised to find Kieran sitting up from what looked like a good nap while waiting for me to wake up. "What's going on, did I pass out?" He rubbed the sleep out of his green eyes and strode over to where I was sitting and placed his hands in mine, careful not to jar my IV cord administering an unknown liquid into my veins. "I don't have all of the details right now since the doctors are still talking to your parents right now, but they did a scan of some kind to make sure you didn't have any internal bleeding. You had a seizure because of head trauma in the entrance to the hospital as soon as we got here but they've been monitoring you for over twenty-four hours now and were just waiting on you to wake up on your own to determine if you had any lasting brain damage. I just called the nurse so I'm sure they'll be in here any minute." Fear gripped ahold of my heart in a vise grip the second he said the word 'seizure'. I had always been so used to taking care of my mother and never having any severe medical problems of my own to deal with, save for the incisions that Nathan had inflicted on me with the knife the first time he put me in the hospital. "You stayed?" I asked Kieran, feeling the tears begin to well in my eyes. His facial features softened and he gazed into my eyes for a bit before finally responding after what felt like hours, the intensity in his stare begging me to never look away. "Of course I stayed, I haven't left your side since you were admitted." It was only then that I noticed the signs of fatigue evident on his body. His puffy under eyes accentuated the red tinge circled around the gorgeous circle of green of his irises and it was obvious he hadn't had an adequate shave in at least two days, the stubble on his cheeks rising to the surface. "So...did he..." I trailed off, not knowing how to ask if the spineless excuse for a human being who'd tortured me for the better part of a year and a half had gotten away with everything he'd done, not only to me but to the people that I cared about up in New York and the other girls that he did unspeakable things to. Kieran seemed to understand who I was talking about and his eyes developed a steely anger to them that I hadn't seen since that night in the abandoned building, which only felt like a few hours ago to me, not over a day ago which it had apparently been. "He's still in the hospital because of the bullet wound but he's in a different hospital than us, which is probably for the best. I wouldn't want to go to jail for sneaking into his room and killing him in his sleep." However sadistic that remark might have been, it still made me crack a bit of a smile because it showed me how protective he was of me, and although to some that might be suffocating and brutish, to me it made me feel even safer in his presence. "He is handcuffed to his bed, I heard, so I guess that's a plus. Apparently he's been questioned by the cops a couple of times and they found some audio from the building that he'd set up himself as well as what I'd recorded when I got there." His demeanor changed completely then, and I was about to ask him what was wrong as he continued. "I don't want to overload you with all of this but you deserve to know. The reason the cops found audio that he set up himself is because it was a camera set up in another room that was already recording and that was why they only found the audio. They found enough drugs to knock out a horse in a separate room in the back of the building that had a bed in it and some chains on the floor. The cops think he was going to drug you and keep you held there for a while, there was food and water in bulk in the room, and he was going to record the whole thing." At his last words, the anger was rolling off of him in waves and he began to visibly shake with the pain of keeping his rage pulled in. I wanted to comfort him, to tell him that everything would be okay, but how could I do that when I didn't even feel that myself? I felt a wave of numbness wash over me, and I was more than grateful for the fact that my parents had put a tracking app on my phone without my knowledge. If they hadn't, and I hadn't been able to get away from Nathan by myself, then would I still have been held captive by him in that disgusting abandoned building? My mind wouldn't stop conjuring up images of what he planned to do with me, the defiling acts that I came up with making my heart rate monitor go off the charts and I felt the bile almost come up completely. The nurses chose that moment to burst through my door and shooed Kieran away from my bedside no matter how strong my pleas to allow him to stay beside me. "Wait, wait! He's fine, let him stay, let him stay!" My voice reached a fever pitch and I could feel the light headedness setting in. I so badly wanted to remain conscious but the nurses seemed like that was the last thing they wanted.