The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 128

Glam

Chapter 76-1

The hospital room is quieter than the ambulance, but that doesn’t make it any better.

A monitor pulses beside me. The lights are dimmed, but nothing is ever truly dark here. There’s always a glow beneath a door, a green number flickering on a screen, a shadow moving behind glass.

I lie beneath a thin blanket with fluids running into my arm. The doctor says that I’m seriously dehydrated, and my blood pressure dropped crazy low. They want to monitor me for at least twenty-four hours.

The door opens now, and I know who it is before I even look.

Locke steps inside. He hesitates on the threshold, as though he’s suddenly unsure whether he has the right to cross it. For a heartbeat, we simply look at one another.

He looks nothing like himself.

His hair is sticking up in every direction, as though he’s spent the last few hours dragging his hands through it. Dark stubble shadows his jaw. His t-shirt is creased and twisted, one sleeve stretched where someone must have grabbed him. There’s a dull smear of dust across one knee of his jeans, and I realize with a strange, detached clarity that he probably ended up on the floor beside me after I collapsed.

His eyes are bloodshot. Not tired. Bloodshot. As though he hasn’t blinked enough, as though he’s been staring at hospital doors, monitors and paramedics for hours. He looks exhausted. He looks terrified.

The sight punches straight through me, and for one dangerous second, all I want is for him to come over here, take my hand and tell me everything’s going to be okay.

Then the kitchen flashes through my mind:

Willow’s hand on his wrist. Her n*****s pressing against her dress. Him leaning a bit closer. Everything inside me turns to ice.

“Get out,” I rasp. “Now.”

He stops. “Zara.”

“I said get out.”

He closes the door behind him, and despite Leah and Tom telling the doctors to keep him from me, somehow he’s in my room, and he’s not leaving. And weirdly, now that he is, I find that I do actually want him here it seems that I have a few choice things to say to him, and I want to say them now, and face-to-face.

“I need to know you’re all right,” he says. “I need to know what’s going on.”

“The doctors know.”

“You wouldn’t wake up, baby.” His voice catches. “Back home, they couldn’t wake you.”

I watch him swallow

“They kept asking me questions, asking what medication you’d taken, whether this had happened before,

Chapter M

and I didn’t have any answers. I just told them about the chemotherapy.” His hands flex uselessly at his sides. “I thought…

The words die in his throat. For the first time since he walked into the room, he looks completely lost.

“I called the ambulance.”

“Congratulations.”

He moves closer to the bed but stops well beyond touching distance. “I thought that you

“Don’t,” I snap. “Just fucking don’t.”

He presses his lips together. “I don’t want to upset you.”

“Too late.”

His brow furrows, and he looks genuinely confused. It only makes me angrier.

“Zara, whatever’s going on here, I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“My family is coming.” I stare at him. “And by that, I mean Dad, Mayhem and Jade.”

His face changes. “I was hoping I could stay too.”

“No.”

He takes a breath. “I understand you’re scared.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Explain my feelings to me, like I’m a stupid child.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.” I grip the blanket beneath my hands. “You think I’m sick and confused and overreacting. You think I don’t understand what I saw.”

His eyes sharpen. “What did you see?”

“Where’s the wonderful Willow?” I say casually. “Huh?”

A pause. “She’s in the waiting room.”

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