I moved my good leg, swinging it over the edge. The floor below swam, but I could handle that. The lead on the other side of my body, not so much. “Fuck.”
“Give it time.” Alexei’s tone lacked its usual edge. “You have not been awake long.”
“How long?”
“Long enough to be as intensely irritating as the old one warned me you would be.”
Rubi.I felt another pang in my chest, missing my best friend. “Is he okay?”
“No one is okay.” Alexei slayed me with brutal honesty. “And I think they are worried that I am not nice enough to look after you.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Reasons.”
“Vague.”
“Efficient, given that it was not long ago you were asking me if I thought Decoy was the love child of Cam and Logan Halliwell.”
“That’s a fair question.”
“You would ask Saint this?”
“Of course.”
Alexei basically murdered me with his eyes. I was annoying him, I could tell. But I didn’t care. This was me. If he was going to stand there like an angry ghost all night, I was happy to entertain us both.
“I did not see Logan.”
“Hmm?”
“Locke’s brother.” Alexei’s gaze darted to the IV bag above my head. “He was with you, yes? At the scene? I believe he brought you in, but I was not here then.”
That parried with the version of events I had in my head. I didn’t remember everything from the crash, but I remembered Logan. His eyes. His face. The weight of his hand on my head. “You’ll like him. He’s hot like Decoy, all reserved and shit, but bossy like Cam.”
At the mention of Cam, emotions I was too dense to process clouded Alexei’s grey eyes.
I rooted a fist on the thin mattress and sat up a little more, wincing this time, the mannequin sensation less prominent. “You said he was okay.”
This much I remembered.
And Alexei nodded. “I have not seen with my own eyes, but physically, he will be fine. And what is happening up here—” He tapped his temple. “—is not new. What happened to you is a...” It took Alexei an uncharacteristic moment to search for the word. “Trigger,” he said eventually. “But he knows how to unpick that. In time, as long as you are okay, zolotoy mal’chik, so will he be.”
By Alexei’s standards, it wasn’t much of a riddle, but it still took me some time to unpack what he was saying and match it with the fractured memories already floating around my brain. I had no head injuries bar the taped split to my eyebrow, but I still felt like I’d been on a four-day bender.
There’s something else.I forced my thoughts back before the crash. To where I’d been, with Cam, and the anti-climax that had left us available to throw ourselves in front of a lorry. “Are you pissed off about the Bear thing?”
It had taken me long enough to speak that Alexei had gone back to poking at another phone. He glanced up with nothing in his gaze. “No.”
“What about Saint?”
“What about him?”
“The same question. He’s too fucking clever to not know Cam was hiding something.”
“And?”
“Fucking hell.” Sitting up was starting to hurt. “Why is everything so hard with you?”