Toy Soldiers (Helford #1)

(9) Welcome

I was on bed rest for the next two weeks to avoid opening up the stitching on the bottom of my feet from my dash through flames and broken glass, like dancing on a bed of burning coals. Rian was in and out, between his job watching over the DuPont estate—as had been anticipated, security had been increased sevenfold after the attack on the ballroom—and watching over me, constantly asking me if I needed something more, looking into my room nervously like he expected me to disappear into thin air. I knew it wasn’t the fire—hell, I knew it wasn’t even my hospital visit. I knew that it was the words I said to him. I knew that he was looking at me like that because he heard me loud and clear when I told him that I didn’t want to feel.

And although the words were true, I don’t think he took them in the correct way—I didn’t mean for it to sound as though I would rather be dead than living, because I was too young to decide that, and I played God with too many lives to accept such an easy fate for myself. But he was simply insistent in his own mind that I had an ulterior motive.

I could have pointed out that it was tiredness, PTSD, adrenaline, a moment of pure weakness, but that would be admitting out loud that I had meant what I had said, and there would be no way to talk myself out of it.

So I just let him think what he wanted, and I just thought a lot about the DuPont family.

I couldn’t help but to think of them when I was lying alone in bed for days on end with nothing better to do than to watch French television and convert oxygen into carbon dioxide. I wondered if Jonathon had forgotten me the same as I thought about if Alexander recovered, and if he had fallen back into the same pattern that he had lived for the past several years, one of crimes and betrayals. I tried to push the last time that I had seen them from my mind, but I couldn’t help it, not when something like that stuck out so distinctly in my mind. Not when it replayed itself in my dreams, and I could still feel the burn of the flames as they crashed down around me.

Throughout my years, I had been in many life-or-death situations, so what happened in that ballroom was not the first time that I eluded Death. It was just the first time that I had been desperate to rescue someone else from it.

So yes, I thought about Jonathon a lot while I lay with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company. But I wasn’t alone all of the time.

Sometimes Marci appeared.

She walked into my room now, looking at me cautiously but smiling the same as always, laughter dancing in her eyes over something or other. “What’s up, buttercup?” she sang as she sashayed into the room, humming to herself. “Word around the water fountain is tomorrow you’re getting your plump bootie out of this bed and heading off to school.”

“The water fountain hardly ever lies,” I commented dryly, taking a long sip of my coffee. The bags under my eyes were heavy—too often lately had I been plagued with the night of my parent’s death. The coffee helped me escape the dreams, if only for a little while. I looked at Marci, knowing that she noticed, but she didn’t say a word. “It’s a shame I’m going to have to go with an unwrapped, scarred hand. It kind of creeps me out sometimes, so I hate to think how it’s going to do for my popularity.”

“Why are you so obsessed with that hand of yours?” Marci demanded. “It’s a hand. It holds stuff. You use it to move things. It’s not your face or your hair or something that’s meant to look pretty.”

Marci and I understood each other only to a point, and then the understanding dropped off like the edge of a cliff down a long ravine. Now was one of those times; Marci didn’t get the same jobs as I did when it came to missions. She never played the seductress—she played the cute girl down the street who would never hurt a fly even though when she got a hold of throwing knives she was absolutely terrifying. She didn’t know that hands for me were one of the weapons I had at my disposal on missions like this.