Chapter 30 – Stinging Stomachs and Strange Surroundings (Not proofread, sorry, so ignore any mistakes).
Waking up wasn’t the norm. My side was stinging, the area around me was white and when I opened my eyes, a strange looking man with a clipboard was looking straight at me, frowning.
My original thought was that I’d died and gone to heaven, which in all honesty would’ve been a bit of a shock if you take my last few months into account.
“Your breath stinks,” I muttered, shoving my head to the side with a squint. I heard a snort from my left and an indignant sniff above me.
“You’re appearing better, Miss Latrone,” the man said. I frowned, rolling my head back to look at him. Because he had straightened, his face was further away and I definitely preferred it that way.
“Latrone?” I murmured, confused. The same person that snorted coughed. I glanced to my left to see Hunter there, raising an eyebrow expectantly. Great, there’s one chance I get to change my name into something that could be amazing and I get stuck with ‘Latrone’, it sounded like a type of toilet.
“Can you give me and my girlfriend a moment, please?” Hunter asked the man, which I’d gathered was a doctor.
The man left with a nod and when I sat up, pain shot through me like an arrow.
“Jesus!” I yelped, letting myself droop again.
The room smelt as sterile as it looked when I took a quick glance around again. It was all pretty much how you would expect a hospital to look. White, white and a little bit grey here and there just to mix it up.
“How are you doing?” Hunter asked, perching on the side of the bed, only to shoot up again when I winced.
“Fan-bloody-tastic. Where’s everyone else?” I asked, watching him walk around the bed to peer out of the window, past the curtain.
“Right there,” he said, pointing outside. I rolled my eyes, slumping back against the pillows. I should’ve been expecting that.
“You’re kidding, right?” Hunter shook his head as a form of answer and then walked over to the door to check around.
“Nope, now we need to change you and get you into a wheelchair,” he said, disappearing through the door, leaving me with my mouth hanging open.
I managed to maneuver myself into a position so that I could check my side and it really wasn’t pretty. If I was being brutally honest, it made me feel sick. My skin was strewed around deep black stitching. From what I could remember, it hurt like a bitch and the guy that did it was a dickhead. He came charging in with a few other men and started barking orders. Lee was out almost immediately, leaving only Alfie and Dylan to help. I could vaguely remember Hunter coming in and getting me but after that my mind drew a blank.
“Stop right there,” I ordered when Hunter strolled back in with a wheel chair and large shirt. Hunter stopped, raising one eyebrow and crossing his arms expectantly.
“Can we hurry this up? We have somewhere to be, Princess,” he drawled. I shook my head, pushing myself up despite the pain. We really needed to steal some morphine or something on the way out.
“No, we don’t. I’m healing, you ass. What’s going on?” Hunter sighed, leaning on the back of the wheel chair. Before he spoke, I eyed it uneasily.
“We can’t stay here, as you’ve probably realized, we have a little problem on the horizon. So get your clothes off, put this on and get in the wheelchair,” he said. His face dropped when I raised my eyebrows, giving him a look that said telling me what to do that way wasn’t going to get him anywhere.
“Well, you’ve pretty much just blown your chances there, haven’t you?” Hunter grunted, taking something out of his pocket and waving it around.
“I’ve got the morphine, so chop chop,” he said, clapping. In my stubborn nature, morphine or no morphine, his tone annoyed me so much that I dropped onto the bed, hissing through my teeth when my side contracted.
“You can go stick your morphine up your ass,” I replied. Hunter grunted, sitting on the chair with a slump.
“I’ll stick it up your ass in a minute, whatever will knock you out,” he retorted. I pursed my lips and gave him the best glare that I could muster.
“Such loving words,” I muttered. Hunter leaned forwards, resting his forearms on his knees, giving me a look.
“We need to go, we’ve got two gangs on our backs now,” he said. I rolled my eyes, holding my hand out.
“Give me the shirt and turn around.”
“Turn around?” he echoed. I nodded.
“Turn around.”
With a grumble, he did as he was told and started sorting out the wheelchair. The clothes were painful to get on and in the end Hunter had to help me anyway, but I managed to put them all on and drop into the wheelchair with a lazy thump.
“Come on then, Princess, let’s get going,” he cooed, pushing it out of the door, using my feet as the door opener.
“Oi,” I hissed, attempting to shoot him a glare over my shoulder.
“Sorry.”
He was pretty good at navigating around the corridors to the front door. I signed the checking out forms with minimal problems and we got out to the car park.
“I’m sorry for what happened, by the way,” he whispered. I squinted in the sun, pushing myself up with his help.
“Don’t even,” I started but he cut me off, gently running his hands down my arms.
“You scared the shit out of me, don’t get me wrong, but it’s me that got you into this mess so for now on, whatever I tell you, you do, okay? I can’t have you getting hurt again,” he said, his voice soft. I shook my head, returning his speech with a teasing glare.
“No, because like I said back at the flat, if I’d of gone with you, I wouldn’t have turned into a human kebab,” I retorted. He shot me a look, gently turning me by my shoulders to a large campervan looking vehicle in the corner of the car park.
“Next time, I’m hitting your head on the doorframe so that you don’t remember the fact that you were right,” he mumbled, kissing the back of my head. I stopped, turned and used the my arm on the opposite side of the stitching to pull him down for a kiss. He went eagerly, cupping my hip to hold me in place.
We were jolted apart with the loud sound of a horn honking.
“Hurry it up, lovebirds, we’re waiting!” Lee crooned, hanging out of the window. I smirked, slowly making my way over to flick his forehead.
“So glad to see you awake,” I said sarcastically, struggling to get up into the van.
It was nicer on the inside than it looked on the out and wasn’t as stuffy as I’d imagined. They’d all obviously crashed in there overnight as what would’ve been the oven was made into a bed and there was a sofa behind the front seats which had a quilt cover on it and there were several sleeping bags on the floor. It wasn’t really much of a surprise that everyone could fit in there. A small counter was at the back by the doors that had everyone’s bags piled up and several tins of soup.
“You’ve been in here all night?” I asked, lowering onto the floor next to Kenzi. It was surprisingly comfortable when the pillows gave way behind my back, soothing the cut.
“I see a stab to the stomach hasn’t affected the brain,” Alfie said with a wink. If I could’ve thrown something at him, I would’ve.
“Don’t be mean,” I whined and Dylan chuckled, slumping on the floor opposite me. Hunter had gotten into the back of the van, joining me, Kenzi, Dylan and Seb while the two brothers took up the front seats, spinning to speak to us.
“How’re you doing?” he asked. I pursed my lips into a smile and nodded.
“I’m alright, what about you, Rocky?” he chuckled, showing me his hand, which was red and the knuckles were a bit swollen.
“I’ve had my moment in the spotlight, I think I might leave it to them now,” he admitted. I smiled, resting my head against the back of the van.
We stayed in silence as Lee started the car and moved us away from the hospital and down a few roads. I couldn’t see as there were no windows in the back but I couldn’t hear any other cars so I guessed that it was quite a way from the main roads.
“How much morphine are you on?” Lee asked, twisting in his seat when he cut the engine.
“I have no idea, ask the doctor,” I said, shoving my thumb in Hunter’s direction.
“More than you were,” Hunter said. Lee’s shoulders slumped and I frowned in confusion.
“Lee was holding the record for the worst injury,” Alfie explained, giving Lee a smug look.
“On a more positive note, I’m pretty sure that you made your boyfriend shit himself,” Lee said, grinning. Hunter, unlike me, could lob something at him so fired the morphine at his face.
Lee scrunched his nose up and grabbed the bottle, examining it.
“Yeah, she’s on more than I was,” he complained, leaning against the seats.
Hunter laid the situation out on the table for us. He explained that we were in fact going to be joining forces with Alex to whoop Caesar’s ass. Well, so he reckoned, anyway. We were meeting with Alex when we were sure that Caesar had lost our trail, which wasn’t likely considering that I had spent the last night and a half in a hospital. It was the very definition of easy to locate.
Hunter was distracted from our battle plan with a very familiar, very scary personal ringtone. The theme tune from Jaws blasted out and Hunter and I shared a worried look, he was looking almost traumatized. When we left for Italy, my mother insisted that she give Hunter her number and that she should take his incase I didn’t pick mine up. The charge had run out so living in a van wasn’t really helping the situation.
“You get it,” Hunter said, handing it to me. I shook my head, giving him an incredulous look.
“Are you trying to make me suicidal?!” He gave in, pressing ‘answer’ on his screen. Everyone else, who weren’t in on the joke, shared a look of confusion.
“Hey, Ms. D,” Hunter said as politely as he could. A snigger erupted from Lee and Alfie who had ducked down to attempt to stifle their laughter.
“Yeah, everything’s fine. Nope, she’s been catching the sun,” he paused, wincing when she said something. “Nope, no sunburn. She’s… as healthy as she could be, don’t worry about that,” he said.
Kenzi shared a knowing look with me, grinning at Hunter’s pained face.
“I haven’t let her drink. No tattoos, no piercings, no party pictures. Honestly, Ms. D, she’s perfectly fine. I wouldn’t let her do anything so stupid,” he said, glancing at my ankle. I looked down, admiring the golden crossbow and arrow. My mum didn’t know about my belly button, nor did she know about my tattoo. The only piercings she knew about were my ears and she wasn’t proud of those, I had them when I was with my dad, who wasn’t overly fussed.
“Sure, you can speak to her,” he said with a grin, holding the phone against my ear.
“Alright, Mum?” I asked into the receiver, listening to her bustle around as she spoke to me.
“Who is it?” Alfie pried. I shot him a glare, chewing my lip as I listened to her bustle about. She wasn’t answering me so I guessed that she’d gone away for a moment and would be back in a bit, which was a habit of hers, though normally she’d told me.
“None of your business, you little shit,” I hissed, answering Alfie. Unfortunately, that was near enough exactly as the same time Mum said “Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”
“Excuse me!” Mum exclaimed. My eyes widened and Hunter shot me a look that showed me he knew exactly what I just did.
“I said, signals out of business, the tower was hit,” I offered, trying to sound confident but secretly giving myself a face palm for my mistake. Mum started ranting and I didn’t manage to calm her down so Hunter did the worst possible thing that we could’ve done and hung up the phone.
I stared at Hunter; mouth wide for the second time that day.
“Shut it, you’ll catch flies,” he said with a wink. I flipped him off, sinking back against the van wall as Lee’s phone rang.
“Guys, it’s Alex,” he called over, passing the phone back to Hunter. I rolled my lip into my mouth and tried to study Hunter to see what he was thinking. As per usual, his face was expressionless and trying to figure out what was going on was impossible. All I knew is that what happened at home was going to be nothing compared to what was going to happen in Italy.
A/N: hope it was alright, please vote and comment :') I'd really appreciate it :')