Destiny Gift (The Everlast Trilogy) - By Juliana Haygert Page 0,25
my job to speak with him again.
On the eighth floor, I dismissed the wooden number shining brightly on the wall and walked down the corridor, looking for Mrs. Gianni’s room. It wasn’t far.
I raked through my mind, trying to recall another episode in my life when I had been this nervous. Besides my brother’s funeral, no memories came.
To steady the trembling of my body, I leaned against the white wall, letting the anesthetic smell filling the corridor fill my lungs. Maybe the drugs would help calm me. They didn’t. I tucked my sweaty hands inside the pockets of my hoodie—another ineffective attempt to calm my senses.
Expecting to see Victor, each door that opened, each new footstep that drew closer, each new voice that crossed the corridor caused my breath to catch. I knew he would have to pass through this place sooner or later. I had to have patience.
Not much time had passed after my arrival, when I saw an old lady with white hair and bluish-green eyes being brought in by a nurse in a wheelchair. I had never seen or spoken to his grandmother in my visions, but he had showed me pictures of his family, and those eyes were enough proof that this woman was his grandmother.
I was shaking again. Holy hell, there she was. She was real. Like Victor was real. Everything I knew about him was real. I still couldn’t believe it.
I heard a heavy sigh and turned toward it. It was Victor. He was leaving the elevator down the hall and coming toward his grandma’s room. He had seen me and didn’t seem happy about it.
He wore faded jeans, a T-shirt, and a thin jacket. Too casual. I shook my head. The fact that my dream Victor and this real Victor were exactly the same physically, while their clothing styles and posture were the opposite of each other still boggled my mind.
He came to a stop before me. “You again.” There was disdain in his tone. I cringed.
“How are you?” I managed to ask and immediately felt silly. I had planted myself here in this hallway for over an hour waiting for him, and when he finally arrived, I didn’t know what to say. Though I really did want to know how he was. The last time I had seen him in the flesh, he’d been jerking on the floor of the hospital’s garage, in pain. “What was that … ah … before …?” I trailed off, hoping he would understand what I was referring to.
He shrugged, his sea-green eyes still staring at me with suspicion. “I don’t know. By the way, how do you know my name?”
I twirled a lock of my hair around my index finger as I considered my answer. I wanted to answer him. I wanted to be honest, but he would never believe me.
As if my answer would pop out of the walls, I scanned the hallway.
At the end of the corridor, a nurse left a room and entered another.
“The nurse,” I almost shouted, hoping he wouldn’t notice my sudden lie. I avoided his inquisitive eyes. “I heard a nurse calling you earlier that day.”
His deadpan expression hid his thoughts and didn’t let me know if he was buying it or not.
“What did you do to me last night?” he asked, crossing his arms. God, I hated how his voice and his posture were so guarded and mistrustful. I wasn’t used to it.
“What do you mean?”
“When you touched me, the shock and the pain went away. How did you do that?”
“I don’t know.” This time I wasn’t lying. I really didn’t know. He frowned, clearly still suspicious. “Seriously, I have no idea.”
His shoulders stiffened. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
My eyes widened as I retreated a few steps, trying to avoid his toxic tone.
Yes, he looked like my Victor—the same voice, the same hair, the same face, the same mouth that had offered me smiles that had rendered me breathless many, many times. I wanted to touch him, to embrace him, to tell him everything was going to be okay. Maybe if I touched him, he would remember me and he would want to touch me too.
I came closer to him, looking deeply into those wary green eyes, my fingers itching to stroke his skin, to feel it smoldering under my caress. But I didn’t. He was like my Victor, but he wasn’t my Victor. The Victor from my visions would never speak to me like