And called.
He never answered. Not once.
Finally, after getting fed up with his lack of contact, I’d gone to bed, only to sleep straight through my alarm again the next morning.
***
The saying goes like this: All good things must come to an end.
Mine and Linc’s end came in the form of a picture.
I’d been darting around the emergency room all morning for the second day in a row and hadn’t once picked up my phone because it’d been so freakishly busy.
Maybe if I had, and seen Linc’s text messages or eighteen thousand calls, I would’ve known something was wrong.
Maybe if I had, maybe if I’d done something other than overreact like I always did and thought about the fact that Linc would never do that to me, this might’ve gone differently.
But it didn’t.
Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have.
Maybe I’d have seen the pictures and been just as horrified.
But I didn’t get his calls explaining the pictures, and I did get upset the moment I had a chance to breathe and check my alerts on my phone.
What I saw took my knees out from under me.
I was furious.
I was madder than hell at the situation, and I was even more upset that I’d done this to myself.
I knew that Linc’s fame would someday come back and bite us in the ass.
Knew it, yet I’d done it anyway.
“Are you okay, Conleigh?” Pru asked warily.
I’d only meant to pick my phone up for a quick glance to see if Linc had gotten back to me, and that quick glance had turned into me seeing a Google Alert with Linc’s name plastered all over all thirty of them.
The first one I’d clicked on had been accidental. I’d tried to swipe my phone open and had ended up accidentally clicking the Google Alert. From there, I hadn’t been able to look away from the train wreck in my hand.
I swallowed hard and swiped to the next picture, repeating the process over and over again until I got to the very last alert, this one of him in front of a hospital looking like shit warmed over.
In the picture, he had his phone to his ear with one hand fisted in his hair, and I wanted nothing more than to shove my fist into his throat just so he’d feel the pain that was currently dominating the inside of my chest.
My breathing turned ragged, and I scrolled backward, looking at the photos that were much worse than the last one.
“Oh my God.”
I swallowed as Pru put voice to my words.
Though, I wouldn’t have stopped there.
I felt tears starting to swell in my throat, and I started to hyperventilate.
And, closing my eyes and praying for strength, I closed my phone, turned it on silent, and pushed it into my pocket.
Then, without another word, I went back to work and didn’t once think about Linc again.
Also, that was a lie.
***
I didn’t make it through the day well, but I made it.
“Whoa there, darlin’.” Someone grabbed my wrist when I pushed angrily out of the back doors to the hospital.
I smiled absently at the man but froze when I saw that the man holding my wrist was a man that looked almost exactly like Tyson, but more rough and tumble.
Tantor. His twin brother.
Oh, holy shit.
As if my day couldn’t get any worse.
God. Dammit.
“Sorry,” I extricated my wrist from the man’s grasp, feeling my heart thundering in my chest. “I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.”
Actually, I had been. Only, I never expected someone to be entering the exit only door that only employees were supposed to use.
You know. To fucking exit.
“No worries,” Tantor lied. “Do you mind opening that for me?”
Yes, yes I did.
I wasn’t opening the door to the back entrance of a hospital enabling the man to completely bypass the security guard as well as the metal detectors that he’d be forced to pass through had he gone the front way like he was supposed to.
I winced. “I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s an exit only and this one doesn’t have a badge scanner. You actually have to have a key.”
That was a lie. I had a key, but he didn’t know that.
His eyes narrowed on me, but he allowed me to pull away from him.
“Bye now.”
He grunted something and had stepped back into my path when I heard my name called from somewhere beyond the man.
The simple relief at seeing the man that I loved beyond this man that I knew had done bad things to my family and friends had me breathing a sigh of relief. A sigh of relief that quickly turned to a whimper as I remembered the awful pictures that I’d been trying in vain to purge from my memory since I’d seen them.
He looked awful, and as I paused there, looking over the man who was still for some reason blocking me from moving, I realized that he looked sick.