"How badly injured are you?"
"I don't know. The docs patched me up. I'm not supposed to get shot again if I can help it. I pretty much" She gave him a rueful and guilty look.
"Should I bother asking you how you found us? And whether or not I need to drag Bobby to the car and get out of here yet again?"
"I have a tracker on Bobby," she said. "Only I have access to it."
"Do you now."
"Yeah. I do. It's on the back of his neck, where he has that little thicket of hair."
Angelo knew the thicket well. He liked to grab it during sex. He'd not felt it there, but in the chaos and misery, there had not been any rough, passionate trysts. He bent down and ran his fingers through Bobby's hair. Sure enough, there was a small thickened spot where the wench had managed to weave a small tracking chip, no bigger than a grain of rice, into his hair. It would have been removed with a thorough combing, but Bobby clearly hadn't been combing his messy dark mop.
"We need to talk about personal grooming," he mused, crushing it against the hardwood floor. "Any others I need to worry about?"
"Probably. I'm not telling you where they are."
"Girl…" Angelo growled. "You do know how ill-advised it was for you to come here. Not telling me where you have surveillance stashed is an even worse idea."
"I have an extra hole in my body right now," Gemma said. "I was buried alive for a while. I was drugged out of my body. And mind. And probably soul. So you're not as scary as you once were. Do you have anything to drink? I'm super thirsty."
Angelo stared at her. The gall of the girl was quite astonishing. She'd wandered in the window like a stray cat and now she was giving him orders.
"I'll get you some water," Angelo said. "But first, tell me you're alone. Tell me there are no more surprises out that window."
"I'm as alone as it is possible to be," she said. "I just need some water. It was a really long walk. You picked a remote place this time. I couldn't get the Uber guy to get anywhere close."
Angelo swore under his breath and went to get not only water but a medkit. She was hurt. God knows what had happened to her since the gunfight, and her death, and burial. The girl he'd written off as being nothing but an irritating red herring had become the potential center of everything.
* * *
"Here," he said, handing her the glass of water. "When you've drunk that, lift your shirt up."
"Why?" She frowned at him suspiciously over the brim of the glass as she drank it down.
"Because I want to see the wound."
"God, you're really a freak."
"Not for any sexual reason. I want to make sure you're not bleeding out."
"You want to make sure I actually got shot," she said, a smirk on her face. "You're not sure what's real and what's not."
"That's a question for the ages. Lift your shirt."
"All this time and you never showed any interest in me; now you can't stop begging me to take my top off."
"My god, girl!" Angelo snapped. "Could you be any more disobedient?"
"Probably."
She did lift up her shirt up, though, and once she had, there could be no denying that she was wounded. There was a thick bandage on her back and side, soaked with red essence.
Angelo began picking at the edge, causing an immediate reaction.
"Hey, don't take it off; I don't have any other bandages."
"I have others," Angelo said. "This needs changing. Bandages like these need to be changed daily, and judging by the state of you, it hasn't been changed in days."
"Well, I've been on the run, trying to get to you without getting caught. It hasn't been easy."
That statement alone begged at least a dozen questions, as if her transformation from dead to alive weren't enough to raise queries. But first things had to come first. She needed medical care.
"Never thought you'd be patching me up," she said as Angelo cleaned the wound out with saline and disinfectant spray.
"I'd say I never thought I'd patch you up, but that would be a lie. You're a chaotic little mess. Hold still."
"Sorry, the gunshot wound stings a little, that's all."
"I know. Just try to stay still."
She did as she was told, for once. That was almost more surprising than her having risen from the dead. Angelo kept his questions until he'd rebandaged her wounds. She was probably going to need antibiotics. He'd have to get his personal physician over to see her.
"So I know how you came to be here. You tracked Bobby. The question is, why?"
"Why what?" She looked at him with big, innocent eyes.
"Why are you here, Gemma?" He stood over her, his arms folded, his expression stern.