rolled back the sheets and pulled them from the bed. “Are you strong enough to sit on this chair if I help you up? I need to change the sheets.”
I moved my feet and, despite the pain in my side, was able to move them off the side of the bed. The woman held my arm and helped me stand. I gasped a little as the pain sliced through my stab wound. When it faded, I let her help me to the chair. It was the chair Arthur had sat in when he came to see me. At least I thought he had been to see me. Maybe I had imagined that too.
“I’m Betsy.” The woman gave me a devastatingly beautiful smile. “Betsy Adley.” My eyebrows must have risen as she spoke her last name, because she winked and said, “Arthur’s cousin.”
“Oh.” I shook her offered hand. “Cheska.”
“Oh, I know who you are.” I wasn’t sure what that meant or how to read the tone of her words. My head was pounding and I could barely focus. “Here,” Betsy said. I looked up to see two tablets and a glass of water in her hand. “Your medicine from the doctor. For the pain.” I numbly took them from her, swallowing them down and praying they kicked in quickly.
Betsy stripped the bed and re-dressed it. She kept glancing my way as she did. When she was done, she helped me back to the bed, plumping pillows to place at my back so I could sit upright. I felt as if I was in some kind of awful dream. High waves of emotions kept hitting me like boulders. Sadness, anger, then numbness … numbness … I treasured the numbness. I reached out as hard as I could, and I held on to that numbness. Then I thought of Arthur. I glanced down at my hand and thought I could feel his palm against mine. His phantom touch.
My gaze drifted to the door.
“He’s not here,” she said. I looked at her. “Everyone’s out.” Betsy handed me a tray that I hadn’t noticed on a small coffee table near a grand fireplace. Tomato soup and buttered bread. “I was letting it cool a bit.” She laid the tray on my lap. “Try and eat a little. You must be starving.”
But my stomach rolled as my mind forced me back to my friends in the spa, to the video of my dad and Hugo. My body jerked and I gasped for breath. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I couldn’t breathe!
The bed dipped, and Betsy met my eyes. “Breathe.” Betsy took a deep breath, and I followed her action. My racing pulse started to slow and the vice that held my lungs in a grip began to loosen. I breathed in and out, mirroring Betsy until the panic subsided and left only rawness in my chest. “Eat, Cheska. You need your strength.”
I stared down at the tomato soup, and all I saw was blood. The crimson blood of Freya, the blood of Arabella … Dad and Hugo slumped on chairs. “I can’t get them all out of my head,” I whispered, my eyes glazing and my mind taking me back to that place again. But the deeper I fell into the memories, the more I felt something within me building. Walls. Walls that were stacking on each other at breakneck speed, trying to block the memories out, trying to prevent me from splintering apart.
“I know,” Betsy said with understanding. “I’ve been in a similar position myself.” She shrugged. “I mean being there when someone you loved was killed. Right in front of you.”
“You have?” I asked, at the same time as feeling was as though I were being anaesthetised. Every breath in my lungs and every pump of blood through my heart took away the sting of the emotions that had been wrecking me, devouring me, slowly killing me.
Shock. It had to be shock. I didn’t care. I just didn’t want to feel anything right now.
“My step-mum,” Betsy said, bringing my focus back to her. She got up and poured me another glass of water from the decanter on the bedside table. I drained the glass again. “Killed a while back by an Adley enemy.”
“In front of you?”
“Right in front of me.” Betsy barely flinched as she said that. She pushed back my hair, then gathered it in her hand and tied it back into a bun to keep it from my face. “It’s all