Murder_ A Sinful Secrets Romance - Ella James Page 0,215

out again.

If he can feel pain, he’s still here. That’s what I tell myself. If he can feel pain, he can feel pleasure. So I spend some time each day massaging joints the PT thinks are sore, rubbing his feet, stroking his hair. I kiss his cheeks and face, his hands, even his arms. I put my own scented lip gloss on his lips and kiss them softly.

If only life were like a fairy tale. I know I would have the magic kiss that woke him up.

Nic only lived four days after the gunshot. On that fourth day, he got a blood clot. Before he died, on the third day, when he was seeming more stable, he confessed to hitting me, to leaving me there in the snow rather than taking me with him in his car. It’s true, he didn’t have cell phone service, and after he left, he called as quickly as he could. But I find I don’t care about those details. In my mind, he left me there because he didn’t give a shit whether I lived or died. I doubt that I would feel this way had he not done what he did in the woods that day.

Had he not tried to kill me. Had he not tried to kill Bear. Had he not deceived my best friend, wasted years of her life and now broken her heart and strained our friendship. Things are getting better slowly, and I know time will heal the awkwardness between Jamie and I right now. Our friendship is too strong, too old, to be severed—even by my murder of her lover.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate him for what he did to her. It doesn’t mean I don’t secretly, shamefully wish sometimes that Bear had killed him and not me.

Barrett threw a martial arts star at his back, aiming for a certain spot between two vertebrae. But Bear’s left handed, and his left hand doesn’t work, so the star got buried in Nic’s shoulder. When Nic was on the ground, he somehow pulled it out and that’s how he got Barrett in the throat.

I have the star—it’s cleaned up, hiding in an old pot in my garage—and that thing is razor-sharp. So it’s not surprising that it did so much damage to poor Barrett.

How he went from almost bleeding out and suffering a broken ankle to being in this coma… That’s the part that no one really understands. He went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. That’s why they had to shock him. I’m told that happens sometimes when people get really low on blood. It’s not good, but it’s not rare, either.

Then they got him to the hospital, and they couldn’t tell whether he was stable enough to put him under general anesthesia, so they went ahead and cauterized his artery with him awake. Sometime around then, Barrett’s blood pressure shot up, then he passed back out. No one could find evidence of a stroke—they still can’t; images of his brain look perfect—but in retrospect, they think something must have happened around then.

At the time, however, he seemed okay, so they put him under. They operated on his ankle, adding screws to keep it stable, and then they fixed his trachea and closed the torn up tissue around it.

When I got to him in the ICU, he had a temporary trach—so, a tube punched into his trachea a little further down from where the damage was. He was covered with hot blankets, because losing blood makes the body temperature drop. His ankle was elevated, in a cast, and his beautiful face looked gray.

A few times those first two days, his eyelids fluttered. Both times, I leaned in close to him and whispered to him, kissed his cheek, and told him how much I loved him. They still had him on painkillers, and after the fourth day, everyone had realized something was wrong. Maybe his old brain injury had flared up somehow. Maybe something with the painkillers. So they cut back on those. They took him for imaging of his brain, and Cleo, Kellan, Dove, and I all sat together, terrified. (Michael had to go back overseas). But everything looked fine.

And still does.

The trach is gone, and he can breathe. As of last week, every single medicine they had him on, the anti-seizure meds, a sedative, a sleeping pill… All, gone. And still, he sleeps.

I’ve heard the nurses talking about moving him out of this hospital. Somewhere designed