Locke.
I took a breath, testing the numbness I felt from the waist down. Yup. Still there. I currently didn’t have a dick. The rest of me, though, apart from a few scrapes and bruises, I felt fucking fine.
Better than fine.I’m hungry.
“Iknow.” Alexei scowled. “You have told me a hundred times.”
“Told you what?”
“That you are hungry.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I can assure you, Nash. You did—youhave. Over and over.” Alexei turned his glare to his phone. “But worry not. Rubi is working on it.”
Rubi.
Because he was outside with Mateo, Saint, and River. Alexei could see them from the window of the hospital room, but I couldn’t. I was stuck in this bed, my left leg a monster of pins, screws, and fibreglass, while I tried to figure out if I needed a piss or not.
“You don’t,” Alexei supplied. “You have a catheter.”
“A what?”
“Do not ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”
“Your bedside manner is shite.”
“Is it?” Alexei pocketed one phone and produced another. “So you don’t want this? Or this?”
The secondthiswas a white AirPods case. “You brought my phone?”
“No. I broughtaphone that you can access your favourite coping mechanism on. Perhaps it will stop you talking.”
“Rude.” I took the phone and typed in the passcode Alexei recited:1417. Static filled my brain as I tried to figure it out, and for once I came good. “Cam and Saint’s birthdays? This isyourphone?”
Alexei didn’t answer. Just watched me poke around a handset that contained nothing outside of its factory settings bar a fat folder of downloaded music.
I opened it and scanned the artists. Some were in Cyrillic, leading me to believe that thiswasAlexei’s phone. Others had Saint written all over them—Pixies, Mother Love Bone, Johnny Marr. And some were all Cam—punk, rock, and the death metal that belonged to his old-school MC childhood.
Definitely the accountant’s phone. But aside from the Russian stuff, it was hard to discern which music was uniquely his.
I passed the phone back. “Play me something.”
Alexei dead-eyed me. Then tilted his head, listening.
A heartbeat later, he was gone, and a nurse bustled through the door, sweet, kind, and old enough to be my nan. She had good drugs, but I didn’t need them. I wasfine. “Can I go home?”
She patted my arm. “You need to talk to the surgeon about that. He’ll be back in the morning.”
Goddamn. I absorbed her lecture on keeping as mobile as I could with no dick and one leg that felt like it belonged to a mannequin, remembering my manners. Then she left and I lay back with a heavy sigh. Honestly, fuck this.
“You should sit up.”
Like a bad dream, Alexei was back.
I sat up. “Can I get off this bed?”
“I do not know. Can you?”