Where the Wind Whispers (Seasons of Betrayal Book 3)
Read Where the Wind Whispers (Seasons of Betrayal Book 3) Online
Authors: Bethany-Kris,London Miller
To Kaz—welcome back, it's almost like you've returned from the dead.
There was fear.
And then there was
terror
.
The two might have seemed similar, but they couldn’t have been more different.
Fear was the extra beats of a racing heart, the anxiety simmering below the surface, and the trembling hands hidden from view.
The terror was all-consuming. Debilitating. It wasn’t just a fast heartbeat, but the belief a heart would stop altogether. It wasn’t just anxiety thrumming through the nerves, but the inability to even speak through the emotion.
Terror was vomit in the throat.
White-knuckles.
Dry mouth.
Aching sobs.
Fear and terror were not the same.
Violet Gallucci had never considered the differences between the two until terror was staring her straight in the face and laughing.
First, it came as a phone call. A simple call that silenced the men milling around her house who her husband had left behind to watch her. Then it came as a hand grabbing her wrist hard enough to leave bruises as she was shoved into a car with a gruff, “We gotta go.”
Go where?
Why?
Violet’s questions, asked quietly from the backseat of someone’s SUV, had gone unanswered. She listened as more phone calls were made, and sharp, angry Russian was spewed between men.
She heard his name said.
A few times.
Kazimir
.
Terror was being shuffled from one car to another without an explanation. It was someone’s coat being thrown over her head as she was pushed into another backseat with a quiet, “Keep her face hidden.”
She didn’t bother to ask questions after that, knowing good and damn well they wouldn’t be answered anyway.
Terror was streets whipping by in a blur and worried eyes watching her in a rearview mirror after she’d yanked the coat off her head. It was streetlights that seemed too bright in the middle of the night with the snow falling down in heavy flakes. It was pulling into the emergency parking lot and seeing cars already waiting.
A fleet of them.
Men leaning against the driver’s doors.
Gazes trained on their car as it slowed to a stop.
Like they knew …
Like they were already waiting.
But she didn’t
know
.
But above all else, more than all that had come before, terror was seeing Ruslan Markovic sitting on the floor of a trauma triage room, bloodstained and silent.
Violet just … stared.
At the blood on the man’s hands and his clothes. At the bloody shoe prints smeared across the tiled floor that spoke of rushed chaos. At the handprint on the curtain where someone had flung it open.
And the wheel marks …
Violet’s gaze followed those to where a janitor was just starting to clean them, the heady scent of bleach filling the hallway.
Someone said something—a question, she was sure—but she didn’t really
hear
it. She couldn’t hear anything over the rushing in her ears or the tightening of her lungs with every breath that seemed to be a little more painful than the last.
Ruslan finally looked up, but he stared past her to someone else. Bloody fingers lifted high to his throat, slashing back and forth without even saying a word.
It took a while, more questions and silence, before sound began to bleed through Violet’s overworked senses.
Throat.
Cut.
Bled out.
Touch and go.
But worst of all was the
I don’t know
’s.
She’d heard the question that came before that answer, but she really didn’t want to.
Is Kaz alive?
“I don’t know.”
“Dim those goddamn lights.”
Violet’s words weren’t heeded, and the people around her were talking far too loud. The beeping monitors, hissing oxygen, and the respirator pump surely didn’t help.
Words like
pneumonia, coma,
and
infection
were being thrown around among medical jargon like she was supposed to fucking understand.
Oh, Violet understood.
She understood that Kaz was dying.
“Dim those fucking lights,” Violet snapped louder the second time.
Finally, the nurses, doctor, and Ruslan realized she was talking. For a long while, they stopped what they were doing, all their movements and conversation, to just stare at her as if she’d grown a second head.
Maybe—somewhere in the back of her numb senses—she understood why they were looking at her like she was crazy.
What would it matter to the man in the bed if the lights were as bright as day or dimmed to a bearable level? What would he care if they talked in hushed tones instead of loud voices that would wake the dead?
Why would he care, as he was unconscious and immobilized?
Still keeping one eye on Violet, a nurse close to the door where the switches were located reached over and dimmed the lights.
Violet’s attention went back to Kaz.
Gray skin.
Cold hands.
His eyes were closed—taped shut, actually. A tube attached to the respirator machine that was keeping him breathing had been shoved down his throat. Bandages, stained pink and needing to be changed soon—for the third time since she’d been allowed in his ICU room—wrapped his throat, hiding the damage beneath and the staples from the surgery.
He might need another
, one doctor had said.
Another surgery, depending on how the night went.
More time in an OR.
Violet didn’t know how to deal with any of this, how to manage the torrent of terror and grief sliding down her throat with every swallow. A while ago, hours ago, she’d turned off somehow, and her heart went sort of numb.
That was the best way she knew how to explain it.
The conversation to her left continued, medical jargon being simplified when Ruslan barked at the doctor to give him something he could fucking use.
“We did what needed immediate attention,” the doctor said, sounding tired. “The bleeding and the damage in that area—that’s what we stopped. The nerves, his vocal cords …”
“That’s the second, then?” Rus asked.
Violet blinked over her shoulder, taking in Kaz’s brother who seemed smaller than she knew he really was. Like the world had just come along and sat itself down on his shoulders, and he wasn’t ready for the weight.
God.
She knew that feeling.
That and more.
“We’ll go back in and see if there was damage we missed,” the doctor continued. “But tonight, stabilization was more important. He came in coded; we had to worry about that first.”
Rus didn’t seem like he wanted to venture further on the topic of Kaz coming in coded, instead saying, “And the other … stuff. What of it?”
“Pneumonia from the cold. Coma from the blood loss. Infection from the wound. It’s all made this hurricane of circumstance for him—we have to take it one thing at a time, minute by minute.”
Not even day by day
, Violet thought to herself.
No.
Minute by minute.
The doctor went on to explain how the infection was likely caused by the dirty snow Kaz had been lying in when he was found, but battling that was hard to do when his white blood cell count was so fucking low, and they were still working on replenishing what he’d lost.
Medication could only do so much.
His body had to do the rest.
“But we will give him time to do that,” the doctor added, passing Kaz’s prone form a pensive look. “The blood loss might have caused the coma, but we can keep him in it for as long as his body needs. Almost like a way to let his body focus on what needs care now and not all the other things that aren’t as important. And his brain—”
Violet’s head snapped up at that statement, and she cut off the doctor with a sharp, “What about his brain?”
The doctor didn’t answer.
Ruslan did. However, he never looked at her when he said, “He came in coded—they already said that, Violet. Loss of oxygen for even a minute can cause …”
Violet tuned Rus out, not wanting to hear the rest of his sentence. Didn’t they have enough to deal with where Kaz was concerned without having to add in the sorts of variables that meant even if he did survive, it might only be for a life that wasn’t really worth living?
No, she wasn’t going to entertain that at all.
For the first time since Violet had been allowed into Kaz’s room, she reached down to his side and tangled her fingers with his, feeling their cold slackness offer her nothing in response to her touch.
Maybe that killed her the most.
That he was so cold.
That he didn’t respond.
That he didn’t even know she was there.
Violet snatched the white grocery bag the guard—one of the many men that Ruslan had watching the ward and room Kaz was staying in—and didn’t even bother to thank the man for doing what she’d asked of him. It was hard to do anything, or get anything done, without someone else looking over her shoulder and overhearing every single thing she said.
This was not the sort of thing she wanted talked about, and she didn’t want to discuss it, either.
Two days into Kaz’s hospital stay and there wasn’t much change. It was still just as touch and go as it had been that first agonizing night. He still had machines doing all the work for him, heated blankets warming him because he couldn’t keep his body temperature stabilized, and his monitors indicated little to no activity.
It was terrifying and confusing.
When Ruslan had gone down to grab the takeout he’d asked someone to get them for dinner, Violet used that time to her advantage. While she was sure her brother-in-law wouldn’t have anything negative to say about what she needed, it still wasn’t something she felt the need to share.
Not yet, at least.
Disappearing into the private bathroom attached to Kaz’s room, Violet shut and locked the door behind her. She dug through the bag, tore open the cardboard boxes, and unwrapped pink and white plastic with blank window panes waiting to give a definitive
yes
or
no
.