It didn’t take as long as I anticipated to recount the details of what had happened, the words slipping out of me in a flood. Watching the pain fill his face—that was the hard part.
I sank back against the pillows when I was done. Telling the whole, gruesome truth had lifted a great weight from my shoulders, but it had exhausted me, too. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and go to sleep with my arms wrapped around Loki.
“Riley…” Holbrook began.
“Story time over?” Chrismer asked, gliding back into the room with all her usual grace.
“Get out. I’m still trying to piece this all together,” Holbrook snapped without looking at her, his gaze focused on some distant point above my head.
“I already told you what happened,” I piped up. “Don’t you believe me?”
“I do. But…”
“But what?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest, ignoring the nauseating tug of the IV in my hand.
“You said yourself that you were drugged, and you’ve got a pretty bad concussion,” he said, avoiding my gaze as if looking me in the eye meant he’d have to face the truth of what his partner had done. I understood his reluctance, but I didn’t have the energy to worry about his tender feelings.
“So?”
“So maybe, you’re a little confused about what happened. Perhaps you fell and hit your head, and all this is—”
“Is what? Some kind of delusion I dreamed up from a fall down the stairs?”
“Don’t want to believe that the FBI isn’t filled with little angels like you, is that it?” Chrismer asked, inexplicably coming to my rescue, her voice dripping with as much derision as I felt. I couldn’t stand the woman, but for a brief moment I had to agree with her, even though it galled me to do so.
“I want to believe you, I do believe you. It’s just…” he trailed off, rubbing a hand over his face as he sighed.
When he looked back up at me his eyes were brimming with sadness and regret, and the loss of something else that had been there before. A small piece of his innocence had been torn away by the betrayal of his partner. Johnson was a total douche, and, apparently also a psycho, but he’d been Holbrook’s partner for years; they’d had each other’s backs through who knows what, and now he was as much an enemy as Samson was. I felt sorry for Holbrook, but that didn’t erase how much his disbelief hurt.
“Believe whatever you want,” I muttered, sinking deeper into the pillows. All the bantering back and forth was rapidly burning through what little energy and patience I had left. I wished everyone would leave and let me go to sleep.
Except Alyssa. I wouldn’t mind if she stayed. I wonder if she’d give me a sponge bath if I asked nice enough, I thought, floating somewhere in a haze of pain, drugs, and daydreams. At some point my eyes had slipped closed and I hadn’t even noticed.
“I do believe you,” Holbrook said so softly I almost didn’t catch his words. His hand was warm and full of anxious energy when he wrapped it around my own where it rested on top of the scratchy blanket.
He gently squeezed my fingers and started to pull away with a regretful sigh. Before his fingers slipped away completely, I caught them in mine and squeezed back. Opening my eyes, I flashed him as much of a smile as I could manage, though if his frown was anything to go by, I think it came out as more of a grimace than a smile.
Emotional explosion averted, for the moment at least, Holbrook rounded on Chrismer and demanded, “Why didn’t you take her to a hospital?”
“Call me crazy, but I didn’t think that taking her to a place where their first instinct would be to call the cops was the best thing to do, considering it was your partner who did this. Just be grateful I didn’t leave your girlfriend to die in the street.”
“She’s not my—”
“I’m not his—” we said in tandem, though I felt a small stab of sadness that he wasn’t claiming me as his girlfriend.
Get a grip. What are you, fourteen? I growled at myself, quickly squashing the nugget of regret.
Over his shoulder, I saw Alyssa lurch to a stop in the doorway, her beautiful face having paled several shades. Noticing the direction of my gaze Holbrook turned in the chair, his shoulders growing stiff at the sight of Alyssa holding a small cup of orange juice, the plastic crinkling under the tightness of her grip.
“This ought to be good,” Chrismer said in a stage whisper, though the rest of us ignored her running commentary—much to her dismay if her indignant huff was any indication.
Something unspoken passed between Holbrook and Alyssa in the brief moment that their eyes connected: Alyssa’s cheeks flushing while Holbrook’s jaw clenched, his teeth grinding audibly. There was obviously some kind of history there, and although I wanted to be jealous of whatever they had shared, my instinctual fondness for Alyssa kept the green-eyed monster at bay.