He scoops me up and carries me to the bathroom, setting me down on the thick rug in front of the toilet.
“Please go,” I whisper, grabbing the seat, willing myself not to be sick until he does. “Please—” I heave. And I heave again and again. I lose time and place all over again, but when I come back to the present, Kayden is holding my hair, his arm around my waist.
“I told you . . . to go,” I pant out, taking the towel he offers me and wiping my mouth.
“And I told you,” he says, sitting against the door and cradling me in his lap, “I’m not ever letting you go.”
“It’s okay to let me go when I’m throwing up.”
“No,” he says, tightening his arms around me. “It’s not ever okay to let you go.”
I sink into him, suddenly okay with that. He strokes my hair and my back, and I shut my eyes. “He did horrible things to me, but I wasn’t weak. I made my father proud. I did what I had to survive, but . . . it was horrible.”
“I’ve never known anyone braver, Ella,” he says, and in that moment I flash back to the kitchen the moment after I had shot the last of my father’s two attackers. I drop the gun and look down at my father, and he looks at me, blood running from his mouth. “My brave little girl,” he whispers, before shutting his eyes and never opening them again.
I sob, and Kayden does what he promised. He doesn’t let go, and I finally fall asleep.
nineteen
I wake in bed, still dressed in my sweats, and Kayden is holding me. Memories flow back to me. Him carrying me to bed. Him holding me while I slept off the adrenaline and shock over remembering Neuville. Me waking up in the middle of the night to find Kayden wide-awake, watching over me. We talked for hours then, trying to make sense of the random memories coming at me, with no completion or logical order.
“You’re awake,” Kayden says, nuzzling my neck.
Smiling, something I’d not thought possible before our middle of the night talk, I face him. His jaw is shadowed, his light brown hair mussed up, and the pale blue T-shirt he still wears remains a striking match for his eyes. “You’re even beautiful when you wake up,” I say, sighing. “While I’m a puffy-eyed mess from all the tears.”
He kisses my forehead. “You make puffy gorgeous, sweetheart.”
I laugh. “You get an A for suaveness, because if you’d said I wasn’t puffy, I’d never have believed a compliment from you again.”
His cell phone vibrates on the nightstand and he rolls over to grab it, settling on his back to eye his messages. “Nathan checking on you again,” he says, keying in a reply.
“You freaked him out when you called him and told him I wouldn’t wake up.”
He sits up against the headboard. “Because I was freaked out. You scared the hell out of me, woman.”
I sit up and pull my legs to my chest. “Well, considering all the things I remembered last night, I’m pretty incredulous that I still can’t remember where the necklace is.”
“You remembered what the note said from inside the necklace,” he reminds me. “That’s a start.”
“Do you have any idea what Pierre Remy—Marc—0000 means?”
“Pierre Remy is a restaurant, but it has many locations in France. I assume Marc is a person, and 0000 some sort of code. We have to be cautious about asking too many questions, so we don’t spook ‘Marc’ and send him and the necklace underground. I trust Sasha, and she’s good at using games to get answers.”
“But I thought she left France because of Neuville?”
“Against my orders, Sasha tried to seduce Neuville in order to retrieve something he took from someone. She’s lucky she didn’t end up like Enzo. But that was years ago, and she won’t be there as Sasha, anyway.”
My brow furrows. “You know, I initially didn’t think I could read the note because it was in another language, but ‘Pierre Remy—Marc—0000’ is pretty easy to make out. So maybe there’s more to the note.”
“Or maybe you were just blocking it out,” he suggests. “You obviously didn’t want to remember Neuville.”
A memory from the club tries to surface and I shove it aside. “But I said I couldn’t read the note because it was in another language. Since I speak French, wouldn’t I be able to read it?”
“Speaking a language and reading it are two different things.” He sits up and grabs a pad of paper and a pencil next to the bed, scribbling something down and handing it to me. “Let’s see if you read French.”
I study the sentence. “The sky is blue and the sun is yellow.” I hand him the paper back. “I can definitely read French. Something feels off about this restaurant theory. Could Pierre Remy be Italian? Does it translate to here?”
“It could be, but you were in France and the restaurant has no franchises here. And there’s every indication that Niccolo had no idea you were connected to the necklace, but that Neuville did and set the entire David situation up himself.”