Branded (Ignite #2)

“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you’re alive,” he whispers, resting his palm on top of my head as he shuffles along with the group carrying me.

Reaching up, I pull the oxygen mask away from my face as I suddenly stop moving and Brad leans over the opposite side of me, tightening straps and pulling blankets tighter around me.

“DJ,” I whisper, wincing at the pain in my throat. “Where’s DJ?”

I’m lifted away from Dax and pushed into the back of an ambulance, but I didn’t miss the look of sadness and worry on his face when I asked him where DJ was.

Once I’m inside the ambulance and locked into place, I twist my head to the side to look down beyond my feet where Dax is still standing by the ambulance doors.

“He thought…we saw…it didn’t look good, princess. They brought two body bags out of the house and, well…he pretty much lost it,” Dax tells me as Brad and another paramedic jump up into the ambulance with me and start hooking me up to all sorts of equipment.

Oh, God, DJ. It would have killed him to see something like that.

I don’t let myself think about the fact that one of those bags would have been filled with the remains of my father, the man I hated for most of my life, but who tried as best he could in the end to make up for everything.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to find him and get his ass to the hospital as soon as I can, okay?” Dax reassures me.

I nod and close my eyes as Brad presses the oxygen mask back to my face.

I just need DJ. I need the sound of his voice and the feel of his arms around me to make everything okay. My heart won’t hurt with the memory of the look on my father’s face when he told me I deserve to be happy because DJ will erase all of that pain with just his smile.

I just need DJ.

“You can’t leave,” Collin argues with me as I rip the heart monitor stickers from my chest and pull the surgical tape holding the IV in place off of my arm.

“I can’t stay here. You idiots already let me sleep through the night,” I complain, wincing as I gently pull the IV needle out of my skin.

“Look, I’m going to find him. I’ve been to almost every fucking bar in the whole damn city and anywhere else I thought he might go. When I find him, I’ll bring him right to you. After I kick his ass for turning his damn cell phone off.”

Jumping down from my hospital bed, I grab the pair of jeans, tennis shoes and t-shirt that Collin brought from my house in the middle of the night and head towards the bathroom.

“I’ll find him myself. You’ve already spent enough time away from Finnley and she’s going to be released in a couple of hours,” I remind him.

When I arrived at the hospital last night, I had Brad go to Finnley’s room, find Collin and explain to him what happened. I didn’t have the strength to go through it all over again. He came right down to the ER pushing a sobbing Finnley in a wheelchair in front of him. We hugged and cried while the doctors checked my lungs and looked over my body for burns. They commented on the marks on my hips and Finnley stared at the burns in shock. I knew she could tell I didn’t sustain them during the fire, they were too round, too perfect and nothing like the scars she has on her body from her own experience with a house fire.

I promised her I would talk to her about them later, and it is a promise I plan to keep. It’s time for me to start being honest with the people in my life, ALL of the people in my life.

I finish dressing in the bathroom and come out to find Collin still standing by the bed with an irritated look on his face and his arms crossed. Tossing my hospital gown on the bed, I turn to face him and mirror his pose.

“I don’t like this. The doctors wanted you to stay here another night,” he complains.

“And I don’t like the fact that I’ve been sleeping all through the night and no one has been able to find DJ,” I fire back.

“You weren’t sleeping, you were heavily medicated after a TRAUMATIC EVENT,” he argues, raising his voice at the end. “DJ stole Dax’s car, believe me, Dax is pissed off enough that he’ll probably find him before anyone.”

Dax got a ride to the hospital behind the ambulance and questioned me about what happened before they shot me full of painkillers and I passed out.

I really wish I had been high on morphine when I had to relive all of those details without DJ by my side.

I made him tell me what happened with DJ even though he didn’t want to. He said it was the most painful thing he’d ever witnessed and he didn’t want me to think about it, but I had to. I put him through this shit by sneaking out of the house with Jackson instead of waiting for him to end his call. I hurt him when I went off on my own and he found out that Jackson had been the one threatening us all along. I broke him when he got to the scene of the fire and had to watch the firemen carrying two body bags out of the house, believing one was me since he had no idea my father was in the house, as well. I put myself in DJ’s shoes, thinking about what I would have done if the roles were reversed and I thought he was dead. Just thinking about it makes me want to die. I have to find him. I have to fix him. It’s my turn to pick up his pieces and hope to God he forgives me for what I put him through.

I lean up on my tiptoes and kiss Collin’s cheek, thanking him for running to my place to grab some clothes and for leaving Finnley for most of the night to search for DJ. He opens his mouth to argue with me again about staying, but he can see that he’s fighting a losing battle. Nothing can stop me from going to DJ right now. My blood work came back fine, and even though I breathed in a lot of smoke, my lungs are clear. They only wanted to keep me another night for observation because of the blow I took to the head when Jackson hit me in the car. My head still throbs from the goose eggs on either side of my skull, I feel like I have the worst case of strep throat ever and I swear there are knives scraping around in there whenever I swallow, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.