Tainted Kiss (Tainted Knights 1)

I had really good friends.

Not like Sage. She never would have done any of this for me.

I felt like pure shit. My head was starting to throb, my stomach continued to roil and cramp. I was pretty sure I was going to vomit again …

“That’s a nice shade on you, Ang,” Kin said drily.

I opened my eyes and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand as I looked at Angie.

“Oh, no,” I cried in a voice that was high. The front of Angie’s shirt was covered in foul smelling stomach contents. “I’m sorry.”

The blonde only shrugged. “It’s okay. You couldn’t help it.” She put my arm around her shoulders, and Jenna did the same with my other arm. “Get the door, Kin.”

The next few hours passed in a haze. I didn’t remember half of what happened. The three of them took me to the hospital in Jenna’s car, and they stayed with me. The bride’s mother was already waiting there, but so were about two hundred other guests from the wedding, all of them just as sick as I was.

It wasn’t long before a needle was being stuck in my arm, meds and fluids were pumped into me, and I drifted in and out of sleep. I was disoriented, and I heard the nurse say I was running a fever.

I shifted and felt something tugging on the skin of my chest and heard a distinct beep-beep-beep from what I could only assume was a heart monitor. My chest felt tight, like I couldn’t get enough air.

It’s because my heart is broken, I thought at one point before someone was sticking tubes up my nose.

NINETEEN

Kale

I gripped my phone in my hand, silently willing it to ring, for a text to pop up—for any-fucking-thing to happen.

Nothing did.

Not one call from Santana. Not a single text.

I hadn’t talked to her since Saturday night before she had gone to bed. The band hadn’t gone on stage until nine, so we’d talked before the show rather than after. She had a huge shoot Sunday that she had to get up for. Some wedding that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. She was getting triple her usual hourly fees to do it.

Now it had been over thirty-six hours since I had seen the familiar heart emoji pop up on my screen from her. Thirty-six hours since I’d heard her voice and known I was coming home to her soon.

A lot could happen in thirty-six hours.

I could have possibly ruined my life in that time.

I hadn’t even meant to. It should have never happened, but it had, and I could blame no one but myself.

No, I could blame someone. The fucker who had set me up. The one who had thought it was funny to play with my life. I could blame him.

And when I found out who it was, I was going to butcher them.

Scrubbing my free hand over my face, I pulled up the photos on my phone and scrolled through them. There were over a hundred selfies of me with Santana on there, all taken in the two days before I had left on tour. I loved them all because they all had my girl in them, but there were five that had become my favorites.

The one in my apartment where she’d come up behind me and wrapped her arms around me. She had stood on tiptoes and put her head on my shoulder, her beautiful brown eyes shining with happiness as I lifted the phone high enough to snap the selfie.

Then there was the one she had taken as we were about to leave for the beach. I had on an old baseball cap, and she had asked me to hold her. Just for a minute. I had kissed her neck, promising her anything she wanted, and then turned her around so that her back was to me. Santana had pouted those big, luscious lips and the grin that had lifted my lips had come straight from my heart.

There were two from our day at the beach that had become my favorites for different reasons. One had been taken when I was telling her some funny story from my past. I’d had my phone out, shooting us in bursts, and the camera had caught the perfect moment when I’d made her snort. Her eyes had gotten huge for a second, but then she had just shrugged and kept laughing, too lost in the humor of the story to care that I had heard that adorable, little snort she hated so much.

The second from the beach was of Santana making silly faces while my eyes were on her, full of everything I was scared to tell her. I had been such a pussy for not telling her before leaving.

Those four pictures meant a lot to me, but there was one that I’d spent hours looking at every day. The one I had become addicted to. I couldn’t live without this picture.

Santana had fallen asleep on my arm, her hand holding the one I had wrapped around her. I couldn’t not take a picture of us like that. I’d tried to act naturally, to pretend to be asleep, but the sheer happiness I was feeling in that moment couldn’t be held in, and I’d had this smug half-smile on my face.