Zach was talking to someone. “Can she have something for pain?”
“The doctor is going to want her fully conscious first so he can evaluate her.”
“Then you’d better get him in here. I don’t want her to suffer.”
“I’ll page him.”
Again, she tried to open her eyes, her head throbbing. “Zach?”
“I’m here.” He stroked her hair. “I’m not going anywhere.”
At this news, she felt a dark cloud lift off her. He’d come back to her.
But how had she landed in the hospital? “What . . . happened?”
“What do you remember?”
It was so hard to think. “The hotel . . . You left. You left me.”
“Yeah. I went back to D.C. Do you remember going home to Denver?”
Going home?
Yes, she’d gone home to Denver. She’d flown on a private airplane. Zach had done that for her. And he’d done something else, too.
“Southern sweet tea. You did that. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Can you remember anything after you arrived in Denver?”
There’d been reporters outside her house. She’d given a statement, gone to work, written about what had happened in Mexico. Joaquin had brought beignets. But that was just the first day. She’d gone to work the second day, and no one had wanted to be interviewed. She’d gotten tax documents and faxed them to the forensic accountant, then gotten her stuff together to go home. And then . . .
She opened her eyes, saw Zach’s face, his gray eyes clouded with concern. “I remember leaving the newsroom but . . . nothing else.”
“You don’t remember anything after that? Leaving the building? My calling you on your cell phone? The wind?”
She tried to think, tried to remember, pain making her confused. Zach calling her on her cell phone . . . the wind . . . Fear welled up inside her, nameless but overwhelming. “I can’t . . . remember. Please tell me. What happened?”
“Your car exploded. Someone—likely the Zetas—rigged it with explosives.”
Her car had exploded?
She had no memory of that at all, and for a moment she thought he’d made it up. But the look on his face told her he wasn’t joking. “A car bomb? Am I . . .”
And the fear was back.
She wiggled her toes, raised a hand, saw it had all its fingers, then felt her face.
“You’ve got a few cuts from flying glass, but you’re okay—thank God.” He ran a knuckle over her cheek. “The wind apparently blew some papers out of your hands, and while you were chasing them, a gust blew your car door shut, detonating the bomb.”
Natalie listened, almost too stunned to speak, while Zach recounted the past several hours, from the moment he’d gotten the phone call tipping him off to the moment he’d arrived at the hospital. She’d almost been killed. If it hadn’t been for Colorado’s wind storms, she would be dead right now.
She found herself holding tightly to Zach’s hand. “I-I thought I saw Señor Scar Face—that’s what I call the Zeta who tortured you. I thought I saw him out of the corner of my eye yesterday. But when I looked, he wasn’t there. I called Julian. He and Marc cleared my home and put a watch on my house last night. I thought I had imagined seeing him, but he must have truly been there.”
“Seems like it.”
And then it hit her.
“If I’m not safe from Cárdenas and his men here, where—”