“Evangeline.”
I opened my eyes to find Gabriel kneeling beside me, a pistol in one hand, his other hand on my wound, pressing on it.
“Look at me, Evangeline. Keep looking at me.”
“I’m…”#p#分页标题#e#
Syn faded in and out from behind him before I felt my head raised and then lowered again onto something soft. His lap.
“No, Eva! Do not close your eyes! Look at me. Fuck!”
“I’m sorry…”
“Don’t you dare fucking die! Don’t you dare!”
“Get a medic here, damn it!”
I couldn’t tell who was speaking anymore, Syn or Gabriel, or was that Jamison? I opened my eyes once more to see Alvarez lying face down less than fifty feet from me. I knew he was dead. Was I dead? Was I dying?
“Eva!”
I tried to open my eyes again. They kept repeating my name, telling me to look at them, but I couldn’t open them. I just… I had to… sleep.
Chapter Nineteen
“You waking up, honey?”
I blinked, trying to adjust to the bright overhead lights. Someone squeezed my hand and I turned my head in that direction, blinking again, trying to focus on the blurry, but familiar face smiling down at me.
“Dad?”
His smile widened and a tear slid down his cheek.
“It’s me, honey. You’re in the hospital back home.”
“What happened?” I asked, remembering. “Gabriel and Syn…”
“Who?”
“Gabriel and Syn. They helped me.”
“If you’re talking about that son of a bitch Alvarez, he’s dead. And Arthur’s in jail where he’ll rot.”
I shook my head. “No… I mean…”
“You were extremely lucky the bullet that hit you just missed your heart. You’re probably feeling pretty sore, but you’re going to be fine. Jamison, Arthur’s right hand man, was working undercover for the DEA. He tipped off the authorities to your location when Alvarez decided to hand you over to that son of a bitch. Sounded like gunfire had already broken out when they got there and you were shot early on. Alvarez was killed and Arthur arrested.”
“Jamison works for the DEA?”
“They’d been on to Arthur for some time, but until now, they had nothing to nail him with.”
“But Syn and Gabriel, they helped me. They were the ones who saved me in the first place, saved all of us. If it hadn’t been for them…”
My dad shook his head. “Those names don’t ring a bell, honey, and I’ve read the reports backwards and forwards. You’ve been through a lot, maybe it’s the trauma…”
No, it wasn’t the trauma.
The door opened and an older nurse walked in. “Now, Senator, aren’t you supposed to be sitting down in that chair?”
My dad’s face lit up when he smiled at her. It had been much too long since I’d seen that look. “Now, now, Addy. No need to get feisty,” he said, lowering himself down.
It was then I remembered he’d had a heart attack. “Dad, oh my God, how are you?”
He smiled. “Well, we’re sharing a room,” he said, pointing to the other hospital bed.
I chuckled.
“He snores, honey. I’ll try to get you out of here fast,” Addy said, casting a flirtatious glance toward my dad. “Now let’s have a look at you.”
Chapter Twenty
For one full year after that day, I moved back into the house I’d grown up in. I had interview after interview with detectives and prosecutors and Arthur was finally behind bars for good. That was the first big hurdle and I found I had no feelings left for him at all. He was to be punished and it was good. How many lives he had destroyed we would never truly know, but at least it was a sort of closure for his victims, closure for me.#p#分页标题#e#
I tried to learn more about the fate of the women who had been at the camp with me, and Lara especially, but all they would tell me was that they were unharmed, which had to be enough.
Weeks and then months went by as I tried to find out what had happened to Gabriel and Syn. The fact that Jamison was a good guy blew my mind. But I didn’t dwell on the fact — I was grateful to be alive, and home, even though I missed the brothers. The notion that they didn’t want to be found weighed heavily upon me. I knew their activities weren’t entirely on the up and up, but they had to know I didn’t care about that. I owed them an apology and a thank you, at the very least. They had risked their lives to save mine. But that wasn’t the only reason why I searched for them now.
Addy came around often with the excuse of checking up on my dad or myself. It was fun to watch them flirt and I was happy to see my dad look at a woman like that again. It had been so long since my mom had died that I’d forgotten he could still feel those kind of emotions. It was nice. Now that he was doing so well, it was time for me to pick up where I had left off a year ago.