When I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital bed. My head and face hurt, but my mind was relaxed once I saw who was there with me.
“At last, you’re awake!” Nicholas exclaimed, kissing my hand, which he was holding.
“What happened?” I asked, with no idea how I’d gotten there.
“You fainted,” he said, his worried eyes staring at me. “The doctors said it was psychological exhaustion. They gave you some pills. You were worn out.”
I nodded, trying to take everything in. I remembered what had happened, the kidnapping, the blows I’d received from my father and Ronnie, the moment when I thought my father had shot me, when he’d fallen to the ground bleeding…
“What happened to him?” I asked.
Nicholas knew immediately what I meant.
He hesitated for a moment and then finally spoke.
“He didn’t make it, Noah… The bullet pierced his heart. He died before he got to the hospital.”
It was strange. Maybe there was something inside me that was broken, but I felt nothing, absolutely nothing. Just relief, an infinite relief, and a weight lifted off my chest. A weight I’d borne for almost a decade.
“It’s all over,” Nick said, getting up from the chair by my bed and bringing his face close to mine. “No one can hurt you anymore. I’m going to take care of you, Noah.”
I felt my eyes watering.
“I never thought things would turn out like this. I never thought I’d be thanking the stars for bringing our parents together. Two months ago, everything you represented was hell for me. And now…” I got up on my knees in bed and touched his face, and he wrapped his hands carefully around my waist. “I love you, Nick. I love you like crazy.”
His lips kissed mine, gently but with the full force of the love that had grown between us. The kind of love that happened only once in a lifetime, the kind of love that touched your heart and never left you, the kind of love nothing else compared to, a love we sought, a love we may even have hated, but that made us alive, that made us need each other, that turned us into something the other person couldn’t live without…the love that I had just found.
