“Dos.”
“Can you tell me their condition?”
When she sighed, I wondered if I was going to get a lecture about HIPAA rights.
“There is a gentleman in the room next door. He is in worse condition than you are, but not by much. The other man is not expected to make it.”
I was as stunned by her statement as I was by the lack of accent that had been more pronounced in what she’d said to that point.
“Are you American?” I asked.
“I lived there for a while.”
I thought about asking where, but did I really care? No. “The guy next door, is his last name Clarkson?”
She rifled through pieces of paper attached to a clipboard. “Sí.”
I rested my head on the pillow and closed my eyes, torn between wanting to conjure Sloane’s likeness and forcing it away. As if I had a choice.
I opened my eyes when I heard the door again.
“There he is,” said Razor Sharp, one of the four founding partners of K19 Security Solutions, the private security and intelligence firm I contracted with but hoped to work for full-time. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Better than I expected, given I didn’t think I’d be alive.”
He smiled and shook my hand, holding on longer than necessary, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I welcomed any kind of human contact.
“How’s Halo?” Knox Clarkson, the man in the room next door, had been my best friend since his family moved to Newton, Massachusetts, when we were both in high school. I was the one responsible for the nickname that became his code name when, after a backyard game of football, my friend broke his neck and had to wear the so-named contraption for several weeks.
I’d been given my nickname around the same time. It wound up being prophetic when I was named the number one offensive tackle in the country while playing Division I football for the University of Virginia.
“I haven’t been in to see him yet, but from what I understand, you’ll both be discharged within a few days.”
“What about Onyx?”
Razor ran his hand through his spiky ink-blac
k hair. “That news isn’t as good.”
Should I confess the nurse had just told me our friend and colleague wasn’t expected to live?
“As soon as he stabilizes, we’ll make arrangements to transport him to a hospital in the States.”
“Is that a possibility?”
“He made it through surgery but hasn’t come out of the coma he’s been in since he was brought here.” Razor looked at something on his phone and stood. “I’ll be back a little later.”
If whatever he read was something about Onyx, I didn’t want to know. My mother would say I was a classic Libra—I dodged confrontation and bad news like a champ. I didn’t believe in astrological bullshit, but I would be the first to admit that avoidance was my coping mechanism of choice.
“I’m going to tell as many people as I can that I love them,” Halo said to me a few days later when we buckled into our seats on the private plane that would take us home.
“Me too.”
“Even my extended family. My aunts and uncles will all think I’m nuts, but I don’t give a shit.”
“Huge wake-up call,” I muttered.
“Can I ask you something?”