‘Your guardian angel was looking after you—and the car’s air bags. There are no breakages, no internal injuries, only bruising and some lacerations. You’ll be fine.’
He seemed about to rush off, but she made her hand snatch at him.
‘My baby!’ She forced the words from her throat, and this time they came out. ‘Is my baby safe? I’m twelve weeks pregnant!’
The smile vanished from the doctor’s face.
‘Baby?’ he said.
The doctor had given her painkillers to make her more comfortable, and they were keeping her in for observation as a precaution. But they would not say anything about Luca. Finally it was a nurse who told her, succumbing to her desperate pleading.
And when she did, the nightmare was complete.
‘His legs took the full force of the impact. They were badly crushed. Surgery has stabilised him, but he will need much more.’ The nurse paused, looking down at Ariana, her face strained. ‘The surgeons will do everything they can, but...’ she took a difficult breath ‘...it may be that they cannot save his legs.’
Horror drenched through Ariana—and a guilt so brutal she could not breathe.
She shut her eyes, as if that might stop the nightmare.
But nothing could do that.
Luca lay half propped up by his nurse against the pillows in his hospital bed. He’d been transferred to a hospital that specialised in orthopaedics. His rehabilitation had started, and soon the physiotherapist would be there to help him up...get him walking again on these strange, alien limbs.
But to what purpose?
He stared across the room. He had been here for weeks now, and it was as familiar to him as his own apartment. But he would be out of here as soon as he was able.
And then what?
He felt himself tense. As if he was guarding himself from the threat that was seeping into the room like a dark miasma.
He knew the name of it. Knew its power. Knew what gave it its power.
And it was not just the crutches leaning against the wall by his bed...
In his head, the words incised there by the letter left for him tolled with heavy blows.
He closed his eyes as if he could shut them out. Shut out both the words and who had written them. But nothing could. Nor ever would.
A soft knock on the door made him open his eyes again, unwillingly. A young nurse put her head cautiously around the door, not quite looking at him, and Luca knew why. Whatever appeal he had once held for her sex was impossible to detect any longer. His eyes were sunken, cheeks gaunt, face haggard.
As for the rest of him...
His mouth twisted.
‘I know your physio is due, Signor Farnese,’ the nurse began, sounding diffident, ‘but you have a visitor who is very insistent on seeing you. She has come some distance, she says, and very much hopes you will agree to see her, however briefly.’
He froze. An emotion he would give no name to stabbed in his guts. Every muscle that still worked tensed like drawn wire. Slowly, he gave a curt, brief nod.
He steeled himself, his face a deliberate mask, as he fixed his gaze on the open doorway.
But the woman who walked through it hesitantly, uncertainly, was not the woman he’d thought it must be.
Shock went through him.
It was Mia.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN