Winter (Four Seasons #1) (40 page)

But I can only
hide for so long. My body wants me back, wants me to move, to
confront the pain so I can heal. And no matter how hard I try to
ignore it, it becomes more persistent each day. And then, one day,
I don’t have a choice anymore.

I wake
up.

“
Avery? Look,
she’s waking up. Somebody get a nurse.”

A throbbing
ache punches through my head as I open my eyes. Everything is white
for a second as my eyes struggle to focus, remembering how to
process colors and shapes. And then Morgan is sitting on the edge
of my bed, brushing her hand slowly up and down my arm. Her lip is
wobbling like crazy as tears race down her face.

“
Morgan?” My
throat feels like someone took a sandblaster to it. I wheeze
painfully, and she reaches forward and helps me sip some water out
of a white, ridged, plastic cup. I choke on most of it, but the
water feels good running down my skin, pooling at the hollow of my
throat.

“
Oh my God,
Ave. I never thought you’d come back. I never thought—” her voice
catches and she can’t speak anymore. Her face crumples into a half
smile half grimace and she leans forward and buries her face into
my hair, hugging me tight. The pressure of her skin against mine
hurts like crazy.

“
Morgan?
Morgan,” I rasp, “I can’t breathe.”

She lets go
immediately. “Oh, sorry. I just… I can’t…” she starts crying and
shaking her head, holding her hands up to hide her face. I reach up
and brush my fingers against the back of her hand, and the effort
of the movement nearly kills me. She pulls in a deep breath. “I’m
sorry.” She sniffs, wiping her face with the sleeve of her black
shirt. “Your uncle’s here.” Her voice is still wobbly. “He ran to
get the nurse. He’s gonna be right back, Ave. We’ve all been so
worried.”

I finally take
a look around and notice my surroundings. Light pours in through a
huge window, revealing mountains beyond. To my left, an IV bag
drips at regular intervals, while a heart monitor maps out the
fragile perseverance of my heart. Everything smells of bleach, and
the sheets on the bed I’m laying in are starched within an inch of
their lives. I’m in hospital, in Wyoming by the looks of
things.

“
What…what
happened?” I manage.

A torn look
flashes across Morgan’s face. “I’m not supposed to tell you
anything until you remember, but fuck that. Are you sure you want
to know?” The last thing I recall is a sinking, falling feeling,
and unbearable pain pulling me into a forever darkness. I nod my
head.

“
I need to
hear it.”

“
You were
drugged by that insane police woman, and Luke found you. He
attacked her, and both he and you got shot in the process. You fell
into the pool but Luke managed to knock that bitch out and jumped
in to save you. He gave you CPR for forty minutes until the
ambulance could get to you through the snow. He nearly bled out and
died, Ave.”

Tears blind me
halfway through Morgan’s brief description of what I’d believed
were going to be the last minutes of my life. So I’d fallen into
the pool. That explains why it had felt like my mouth was filling
with water; because it actually had been.

Luke had been
shot trying to save me. He nearly died defending me, giving me CPR
while his own life blood seeped out of him. I suddenly feel
sick.

“
Where was he
shot?” I whisper.

Morgan’s smile
fades a little. “In the chest. The bullet punctured his lung and
shattered. Three different pieces of shrapnel lodged inside his
chest cavity. He had two operations, one to remove the shrapnel and
then another when he coded later on. They didn’t know what was
wrong until they went back in and realized they’d missed a piece
and it was pressing down on his aorta. He nearly died all over
again, but he pulled through. You’re so alike, Ave. You’re both
fighters.”

My first
reaction is to try and sit up. It hurts like hell, though, and the
room spins.

“
Whoa, girl,
where d’you think you’re going?”

“
I need to see
him, Morgan. I need to see with my own two eyes that he’s okay.
What room is he in?”

She shakes her
head, pressing her palm against my shoulder, forcing me back into
the bed. “He’s not in any of the rooms, Ave. He was checked out of
hospital three weeks ago. He’s still recovering, but he’s up and
walking around just fine now.”

“
Three weeks?”
That information just won’t compute. Won’t make any sense inside my
head. “How long have I been out for?”

Morgan pulls
up one shoulder, looking a little sheepish. “Not long, chica. Only
seven weeks.”

My mouth hangs
open. I’ve been unconscious for seven weeks? I’m no doctor but even
I know it’s a miracle that I’ve woken up at all after being gone
for so long. I should have noticed that the mountains out the
window aren’t covered in snow anymore. I stare down at my bed
sheet, feeling awful.

“
I missed
Tate’s funeral,” I say quietly.

“
Yeah,” Morgan
agrees. “It’s okay. I’m sure he knows you would have been there if
you could have been.” I squeeze her hand, hating that she’s trying
to comfort me when I should have been there to support
her.

“
I’m sorry,
Morgan. You had to go through that on your own…”

She shushes
me, squeezing my hand back. “It’s okay. My mom actually came with
me. She’s…she’s been surprisingly good actually.” That’s unexpected
news. Maybe bridges are starting to be built there. “The cops
actually arrested the person responsible for the drugs.” Morgan
continues cautiously. “Leslie’s been remanded until her court date
later on in the month. They’re trying to charge her with
manslaughter.”

“
Leslie?
My
roommate
Leslie?”

“
I know. I
didn’t want to tell you. I just didn’t want to have to deal with it
at the time. I’m sorry.”

I had been way
off base about Noah, then. “So she’s a
drug dealer
?”

Morgan nods,
yes. “She wanted to show her parents she was capable of earning her
own way. She wanted to leave college with more money than when she
started, and she figured selling pills was an easy, lucrative way
to do that. She knowingly bought pills that were cut with goodness
knows what.”

“
My God. I had
absolutely no idea.”

Morgan just
shrugs. “You were shot in the leg in case you were wondering. And
the quacks thought you’d suffered major brain damage from lack of
oxygen to the brain. They told your uncle that the kindest thing to
do would be to take you off life support, that you weren’t going to
come back and if you did you were gonna be a vegetable. But Luke
wouldn’t even let them talk about it. He punched a doctor and got
banned from the hospital for a week. He groveled until they
eventually let him back in.”

I trace my
fingertips over the bump in the sheets that is my right thigh,
feeling a twinge of discomfort when I try to flex my toes. Shot in
the leg. That’s what that secondary pain had been. I close my eyes,
taking a deep breath. I feel like I’m on the brink of losing it. “I
need to see him, Morgan. Right now. Where is he?”

“
I’m right
here,” a soft voice answers me. I open my eyes and Luke is standing
in the doorway, his left arm bound against his body in a sling. As
always he’s wearing a black t-shirt and faded out jeans, but there
are dark shadows under his eyes. They tell stories of countless
nights of lost sleep, of anxiety and worry. He looks like the
broken little boy my father had taught to play Blackbird. My heart
breaks a little for the lost, haunted look he wears. “You woke up,”
he states. His voice is flat, expressionless. I nod my
head.

“
Been a while,
I hear.”

Luke doesn’t
say anything. He just stares at me. Morgan clears her throat. “I
think I’m going to go see where Brandon’s got to. A girl wakes up
from a coma, you expect the nurses to come running, right? Sheesh.”
She stands and ducks past Luke, who doesn’t move an inch when she
sidles past him through the doorway.

“
Are you
okay?” I whisper. It’s a dumb question; I can tell just from
looking at him that he’s far from okay. He blinks, and the action
seems to wake him from his trance. He steps into the room and
pauses, looking behind him before he closes the door softly. He
paces towards the bed and stares down at my hands clasped in my
lap.

“
I would have
killed her. I wanted to, but I couldn’t leave you. If I stopped
pressing down on your chest, you would have been gone forever. I
kept going, Ave. I kept going.” His eyes are filled with tears. I
reach out and take his right hand, hanging limply at his side, and
pull it to my cheek. He is so cold. I can smell cigarettes on him,
and I know he’s been smoking.

“
I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry I ran out on you.” I promised him I wouldn’t. He told
me twice that I would hightail it the second I found out about his
past, and after everything I’d said in return he’d been right. I’d
done exactly that. I’m disgusted with myself as I press the back of
his hand against my forehead. His fingers twitch, wanting to curl
around mine, but they don’t. I think he’s too numb to do anything
but stand there and let me touch him. “Will you forgive me, Luke?
Please say you’ll forgive me?”

A strangled
sound comes out of his throat as he sinks down and sits on the edge
of my bed. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Ave. You still don’t
know what happened back when I was a kid. I should have been honest
with you when we started all of this. That would have been the
right way to do things.” He smiles a sad smile. “Why is it that the
right way is always the most scary way, huh?”

I’m too
overwhelmed to answer. I wait with baited breath to see what he’ll
say next. Whether he’ll tell me that he’s happy I’m okay, but he
really should be getting back to New York. That I screwed
everything up and it’s too late for us. He clears his throat and I
prepare myself for the worst.

“
If anything,
I’m the one who should be sorry.” I can’t keep the surprise from my
face. Luke holds a hand up to stop me before I can start speaking.
“I should have figured it all out. Chloe would never have been able
to get close to you if I’d realized she was involved in this whole
thing.”

“
You couldn’t
have known, Luke. How could you? She’s a cop for crying out loud.
She knew exactly what to do and what not to do to stay under the
radar.”

“
She bragged
about that,” Luke admits. A look of pure bewilderment crosses over
his face. “She told us everything. They worked together, the four
of them, each took it in turns to kill whoever they felt like
killing. Chloe knew the four different signatures would throw us
off. She fed the others information about our investigations. Made
sure we never got too close.”

The one
question that has been bothering me since Chloe pulled the ski mask
off her head and revealed herself back in the basement forces its
way out of my mouth. “I just don’t get it. Why? Why would she want
to kill anyone in the first place?”

“
Her twin
sister died when she was eight. Their parents had strychnine traps
all through the crawl space under their house to deal with a rodent
problem. The two of them crawled under there one day during summer
and Chloe dared Michelle to eat the stuff. She didn’t realize it
would kill her. Anyway, it changed Chloe. She became obsessed with
her sister and the way she’d died, and how it was all her fault.
She wanted to relive it over and over again.”

I shiver, the
horror of the story sinking deep inside my bones. Luke sees my
reaction. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s all over now. She’s going
to prison for the rest of her life. Let’s not talk about that.” He
inches closer up the bed, a determined look forming, and slowly
reaches out to stroke my hair back out of my face. I close my eyes
and lean into his touch. My eyes are stinging again. Sadness weighs
heavily on me, fear racing through me as I pluck up the courage to
ask my next question.

“
Luke, what
happens now?”

His hand
stills. “What do you mean?”

“
Well…” my
voice hitches. “We obviously can’t—”

Luke moves
instantly, closing the gap between us. He scoops his hand beneath
my head, supporting me as he pulls me to him. “Avery, I’m so sorry
for letting you down. For being so selfish. I just have to hold you
one last time.”

My throat
closes up, refusing to let me breathe properly. He can’t do it. I
hurt him too badly when I ran out on him. I want to tell him that I
understand now, that my mother’s vicious words confused me and I
wished I’d stuck around so he could explain. I guess I deserve
this—him leaving me—but that knowledge doesn’t temper the
all-consuming devastation I experience as he lets me go. I finally
crumble when he pulls back, and a loud sob escapes from my
mouth.

Luke doesn’t
even try to hide the tears rolling slowly down his cheeks. “I
understand, Avery. I really do. I get that too much shit has
happened for you to want this—” he gestures between the two of us,
and the motion means so much. It means us; me and him, everything
that we could ever be. Confusion crowds inside my head. He thinks I
don’t want
him
?