“I need you to leave, Gia. You can sleep in Michi’s room. I’ll get him a hotel room for tonight. I need you away from me.”
She nods, and I think she will agree. “I’ll leave after I finish my bath. I just got in. I was planning on soaking for about an hour while I read my book and finish my wine.”
“No.” I can’t handle her defiance. Not even for a second.
“Then, talk. What. Happened?”
“No.”
I grab her arm and pull her up, shoving the towel around her body.
“Out. Now.” I growl.
She smirks, and her eyes gleam with her defiance. Her dark eyes scan my body looking for a clue to what happened. Her mouth falls open when she finds it.
“Oh my god! You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing,” I say, although I know it needs stitches. Adela only let me go after I promised I would go to the hospital. But I can’t go to a hospital today. I’ll put a bandage on and go in the morning.
“Out, Gia,” my voice rings out its final warning. I can’t handle being near her for one more second.
She ignores me as her hands pull the buttons of my shirt apart. Her hands go to my wounds, and she carefully examines it.
“You were shot,” she says calmly. Her eyes slowly moving back up from the wound to my eyes.
I don’t answer her. She didn’t question me anyway. She’s been around enough bullet wounds to know the answer without me explaining.
She sees whatever she is searching for in my eyes, and then she steps out of the tub brushing past me and disappearing out of the bathroom. Finally listening to my command.
It’s what I wanted, but I’m left in the cold, empty bathroom by myself, and I suddenly wish she would have continued to disobey me. At least it would give me something to focus on.
“Sit,” her voice rings through the bathroom as she places a first aid kit on the counter.
I sink onto the edge of the tub. I don’t know why I listen to her. Probably because I have no fight left in me.
She opens the first aid kit and starts digging through it. She sighs and pulls a few items out of it.
“The hydrogen peroxide is expired, and there is nothing to stitch the wound closed. Let me clean it for you, and I think I can use these band-aids and gauze to at least stop the bleeding until Michi can get us some better supplies.”
My eyes stay on her body, only a towel covering her naked body. Her hair is pulled up in a bun on top of her head, but a few curls hang down dripping water down onto her chest. The only part of her hair that got wet when she took a bath.
I don’t say anything, and neither does she, as she kneels next to my body so she can examine the wound on my stomach. She pushes my shirt open, and I let it fall off my body.
She takes out the expired peroxide and some gauze.
“This is going to sting,” she warns. Her big eyes fill with something I wasn’t expecting to see. Kindness.
I don’t move as she pours the liquid onto my wound. It doesn’t sting. Maybe on another day, I would feel the burn, but not today. Today I’m too overwhelmed with my grief to feel something as minute as a tiny sting.
Gia bites her lip as she works. Her careful fingers work quickly as she uses the band-aids like a stitch pulling my wound closed. She then takes the gauze and places it with a larger wrapping to protect the wound.
When she finishes, she sits back examining it, but I know she did a good job. The bleeding has slowed and will eventually stop. She did so well I may not even need stitches to keep the wound closed.
She doesn’t ask me what happened. She doesn’t ask how I ended up with a bullet wound.
And I don’t ask how she knows how to heal a wound so well.
We both come from the same world. We know. We both deal with evil every day. We create it and harness it. I don’t have to explain what happened. But the bullet isn’t what is causing my despair. On any other day, I would be angry. I don’t like having my life, or any of my employees’ lives, threatened. But today, it was just a blip on the never-ending pain I feel.