Chapter 270

I wake up on the couch in the apartment, a cool damp cloth on my head that’s been draped over my eyes, but no one is here with me and I clamber to get up in panic. My shoes are on the floor next to me and there is a throw pulled over my body by whoever deposited me here. I blanch in complete disorientation.

I guess the men put me here, probably Jackson, considering the care I have been shown. I have been shoved out of the way and left to sleep for God knows how long; an unimportant hysterical woman who just got in the way of the bigger picture. They are probably down there like panicked rabbits, running about in chaos, falling apart, trying to find out if their leader is dead.

Alexi might be dead.

It hits me with the same shock it did downstairs and I instantly wretch in reaction to a real magnificent trauma to my heart. Pulling myself off the couch I have to run to get to the kitchen sink before I vomit all over it. I throw my face in the steel sink and brace on my palms, either side of me as sheer devastation consumes me.

Despite the heaving of my body trying to expel what’s in my stomach, nothing comes up except pain and saliva through tears and desperate choking. I continue to wretch over and over, but again there’s nothing there because I haven’t eaten in hours to even bring anything up. I was so overly anxious all night I couldn’t think about food.

I slump down when it subsides, clutching my ribs, sliding down the unit into a heap on the floor, fatigue gripping me suddenly. My body’s giving up on me and I roll down into the foetal position as I try to gasp for air as all my thoughts come cascading in on me at once—The realisation that this isn’t a dream.

I can feel the atmosphere in the building around me, almost as if it were trembling in movement. The chaos of a kingdom trying to find it’s king and tearing apart, crumbling to dust… or maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s me that’s falling apart.

My body hits full blinding panic mode and as it all comes rushing back for another sweep. I turn, hysterical in excruciating pain, convinced my insides are going to self-combust or I may pass out from the inability to breathe. My lungs are aching with the effort as I try and drag air into them, shaking like a leaf as tears pour down my cheeks, blinding my vision, clog up my nose and throat and soak my dress. I can’t move; the weakness that has overtaken me is suffocating me with extreme weight.

I believe the worst … five of the eight he said—that means three are dead …

Alexi and Mico wouldn’t answer their phones.

Maybe because they can’t.

The two men who mean the most to me.

I can’t survive this.

I don’t know how.

I start sobbing all over again, howling like a dying animal with a noise I never knew I could expel, and gripping at my hair as I try to stop the gnawing pains stabbing through every single cell of my entire body. It’s more than I can bear and I am just wailing desperately, brain crashing and stuttering because it cannot function anymore.

I have my first panic attack in years. The room closing in and vision blacking out as my heart pounds; it feels like I’m having a heart attack inside my ribs and my limbs stiffen in chaos. I gulp and gasp and claw at my throat and will myself to breathe, but end up face down on the floor as I struggle to get control—A mess of tears and running makeup as I claw for something to take this pain away.

I knew … deep down … I knew something was wrong.

Why didn’t he listen to me? Why didn’t he stay with me?

I manage to crawl to my knees desperately and head for the table like a child learning to move; trying to just stop the terror from an inability to fully expand my lungs.

A part of me is telling myself to get up, to pull myself together and rationalise. Trying to find that little girl who curled up to die at eleven years old, much like this, and pushing her to stop … just stop Camilla.

Breathe.

Except how can I breathe when my oxygen is gone? Snubbed out and taken from me before I really got to see if there was more for us than this. I’ll never breathe again if he doesn’t come back to me. I will lie down and go with him.

He promised me.

HE PROMISED ME!!!

I reach blacking out levels of oxygen starvation, and as my lungs finally realise, I gulp in air; my brain pushing through and urging me on. That sense to survive reigns supreme, and gives me enough to haul myself back together and calm the god-awful noise coming out of me.

I haul myself to the table heavily and grab my phone painfully. Robotically type in his name, doing the only thing I can to get my shit together. I push it to my ear as a part of me tries so hard to just make him answer. It’s all I have to cling on to, to make this not true. To stop myself being ripped apart by the devastation of the possibility that my Alexi might never come back. I can’t allow myself to think that way.

He can’t be gone … I won’t let him go. I won’t let him leave me.

I push my back against the table as I come to curl on the floor in the space between it and the couch, tears streaming down my cheeks as it rings and rings and I close my eyes and curl up tight, sobbing as once again I get his answer phone. My mind is unable to accept that it’s true.

I just need him to answer. I scrunch my eyes tightly closed and even consider praying to a god I don’t believe in. I’ll do anything to bring him back.

‘Cam?’ A painfully familiar husky voice startles me, only not from my phone … it comes from behind and I spin in muddled brain confusion to the figure in the open doorway looking my way, and double blink at the shadowy form framed by the bright lights behind him.

My heart somersaults and blinding tears halt mid-sob in disbelief. Everything in me just stops dead. A moment of complete pause as my world stops spinning and my head catches up.

He can’t be real … it’s not him. I’m having some sort of grief-fuelled hallucination as I scan the unfamiliar casual clothes, knowing he left in a tux, and he can’t be standing looking at me like that if he is dead. He’s dressed all wrong, in a black hoody over black trousers and a pair of trainers.

He looks confused, normal in every way and completely the best sight I have ever laid eyes on, and I just gawk at him stupefied and blink away the tears and hazy vision to look again.

‘Cam, what’s wrong? What is it?’ He sounds deeply concerned, genuinely so, as his eyes search mine for signs of a reason, and I just openly stare at him. I can’t quite get my mind to translate what I am seeing.