kidnapped us from Garin’s car, injected something in our bodies so that we’d black out, shoved us into a plane and flew us to Margarita Island.
“I know. We were kidnapped and—”
“We got into a car accident.”
“We…what?”
He pulled his chair closer, sending me his scent again. I didn’t know what he was saying, I didn’t know what he meant, but I knew there was nothing familiar about this smell. It wasn’t the one I’d memorized in the cell. It was too clean.
Everything in here was too clean.
“Listen to me.” His hand landed on my leg, and I winced. “A truck ran a red light and hit our car. It was on the passenger side, right in the middle of the hood. You hit the airbag and ricocheted off, slamming against the door. Your head hit the window. The glass shattered, and a piece of it punctured your lung. The blow to your head caused some damage, and you’ve been in a medically induced coma for the last eight days. The doctors just took out your breathing tube this morning and lowered your medication, so you’d wake up.”
It didn’t feel like he was talking about me. It felt like he was telling me a story about someone I didn’t know. How could all of these things have happened, and I had no recollection of any of them?
Was he lying to me?
I felt the medication in my body, I saw it pumping through the tube that led to my wrist. With each drip, drip, drip of the IV, I thought about everything he had said—head trauma, a breathing tube, days’ worth of medication…a coma.
A breathing tube would explain the plastic taste that had been in my mouth.
But what about everything else?
“I don’t…understand,” I said.
“I probably had a few too many drinks at the bar. I shouldn’t have been driving us. My reflexes might have been off, and I didn’t slam on the brakes in time. That truck hit us and—fuck, there was nothing I could do to stop it.”
I needed him to tell me I wasn’t crazy. I needed him to tell me that everything I saw, I felt, I experienced was real.
“Garin, I know we were kidnapped by two guys named Breath and Beard and…” I didn’t have to finish. The answer was all over his face.
“I haven’t left your side since you were admitted to the hospital, Kyle. I rode in the ambulance, and I slept in this chair.”
But he was in the cell with me. We’d both been held captive. We’d both been tortured. I had admitted to Breath and Garin that Anthony had killed Paulie.
And it had all been…a dream?
A dream my mind had created while I was in a coma. None of it was real—not the emotions I’d experienced in there, the words we’d exchanged…the sex. The only thing that was real was the kiss we had shared before we’d gotten in the car and the way he was looking at me now.
“I’m not sure what to say.”
“Why don’t you tell me about those guys you dreamed about? Beard and Breath—were those their names?” He sounded amused.
It made me feel ridiculous.
The man I stared at was nothing more than a friend from my past who I hadn’t seen in twelve years. He was basically a stranger now. The cell hadn’t brought us closer. It hadn’t reintroduced us; it hadn’t made our feelings grow. He hadn’t heard me say I love you. Telling him my dream wouldn’t change anything. It would only make me feel crazier. But there was one thing that seemed consistent during my dream and in this hospital room. I felt it in his grip and in the way his eyes wouldn’t let me go.
“You protected me,” I said. “You did everything you could to keep me safe.”
I didn’t deserve his protection in prison. I certainly didn’t deserve it out here.
The secret was still buried inside me. It prisoned me in my dreams, and it fueled me with guilt now that I was awake.
Had Garin known the truth, I wondered if I’d still be alive.
“I didn’t protect you, Kyle. That’s why you’re in here.”
Twenty-Eight
Kyle
I was chewing on a dinner roll. It wasn’t hard or moldy like the rolls I’d eaten in the dream. This one was soft and buttery; it almost melted on my tongue. Then, Anthony walked in. The second my eyes connected with my brother’s, I put the roll back on the tray. It was the first thing I’d eaten in almost nine days,