around her face, and the next thing she knew, his fingers were wiggling a little, waking her up.
“Hey.” Kris spoke on a groan.
She straightened, confused.
Tommy was sitting opposite her. Mark, Ava, and Darius were gone.
“Hey,” Frankie and Tommy said together.
Kris looked between them without moving his head, his gaze groggy from the painkillers. “Good night so far?”
“Piss off,” Tommy murmured with a tiny smile.
Frankie held his hand a little too hard. “Don’t try to be cute.”
“You look awful,” he said to her.
She arched a brow. “Guess who needs a mirror?”
He started to smile, then winced with a pained hiss. His attention slid to his brother. “You okay?”
Tommy was pale. “Better than you.”
Kris closed his eyes, lines gathering on his brow. “I hate that you’ve been through something like this. I’m sorry if this has made you relive it.”
Swallowing, Tommy didn’t answer.
“We can bond,” Kris said. “Now I know how it feels.”
Tommy ran a hand over his mouth. “I never wanted you to know how it felt.”
Frankie looked down at where she held Kris’s hand, a lump tightening her throat.
“Frankie.” Kris’s voice was little more than a rough scrape. “Are you angry with me?”
“No.” She fought back a wave of emotion. “I mean, I’ll beat the hell out of you later for scaring me like that. But I’m not angry.”
“Sounds fair.” He was quiet for a while. “My face feels twice its usual size. I don’t think I can be seen for a while.”
Frankie and Tommy both nodded.
“And did you hear my ribs are fractured?”
More nods.
Kris’s blue gaze found hers. “You won’t be able to hug me.”
He’d meant it as a joke, but for some reason, it seemed like the most devastating news she’d ever received. Her eyes filled and she gasped to hold back a sob.
“Oh, hey,” he murmured, blinking slowly. “Just for a few weeks.”
She sniffled. “That’s ages.”
“Naaaah,” he said, the vowel drawn out on a sigh. His eyelids sagged shut. “You should both go home.”
She clutched his hand tighter. “Only when you can come with me.”
“I’m not leaving,” Tommy muttered.
He groaned in groggy protest. “You’re both just going to watch me sleep?”
“Yes,” they answered, and started doing exactly that when his next breath took him under.
17
Frankie hardly left his side.
Kris would wake and feel her hand in his, or hear her talking on the phone by the window, or open his eyes to find her sleeping in the armchair she’d dragged to his bedside. She ate hospital café food, showered in his patient bathroom, and climbed up the walls in agitation. Every time he told her to go, that he’d be fine, she gave him the same answer.
“I’m not leaving you. I’m never leaving you.”
Despite knowing why she kept saying it, it was pretty damn nice to hear.
He hurt a lot; slept a lot. At one point he woke to Hanna exclaiming, “I beat you! Holy cow, I actually beat you!”
“It’s snap, Johansson. Not hand-to-hand combat.”
“Not the way you play,” his guard had argued.
After three days, he was discharged under the condition of bed rest. Frankie’s team secreted him out of the hospital via a staff-only route late that night, and eased him into a waiting car that drove as smoothly as water on glass to the palace entrance. To his shame, he was carried up the flights of stairs to his suite, but he forgot all about it as soon as he was lying in his soft, palatial-sized bed.
Frankie kissed him gently, and curled up close to him.
“I love you,” she murmured.
“I never doubted it,” he said. “Never.”
It was midmorning the following day when he awoke to find his family passing time in his bedroom. Mark and Philip were going through paperwork, Tommy was reading, Ava was drawing with Darius, and Frankie was pacing like a cat in a cage.
Philip didn’t waste any time once he noticed Kris was awake.
“We need to discuss our strategy,” he said, and everyone stilled to listen. “Kristof’s broken arm and fractured ribs will take roughly six weeks to heal, though the doctors believe he’ll be able to tolerate small appearances in as little as four weeks. His face, of course, won’t be suitable for public viewing for at least a fortnight and we have our Kicking It program launch announcement in two days.”
“Has his face ever been suitable for public viewing?” Frankie asked.
Philip looked confused when Kris’s brothers both snickered, as if wanting to say, but you all have the same face.
“Our issue is keeping news of the attack contained,” the