Chapter 197: A Hurtful Conversation
Our conversation took place in the living room which started smelling like lavender and scorched leather.
Mostly because I hadn’t showered yet, the stains still present on my body, and because Sienna, in her infinite wisdom, insisted on burning calming candles whenever there was a "crisis."
I sat slumped on the edge of the oversized suede couch, stripped down to a blood-streaked undershirt and torn pants, trying my best not to bleed all over the furniture. It was a losing battle. A small but growing stain was already seeping into the pristine suede. At this point, I couldn’t even tell what injury I was bleeding from. Hell, I couldn’t even tell if I was bleeding out or it was just blood that hadn’t fully dried up and was still leaking a bit.
Alexis hovered over me like an executioner preparing her tools.
"You’re an idiot," she said calmly, yanking open a medical kit that looked suspiciously military-grade. There were scalpels, adhesives, syringes, and enough disinfectants to drown an army.
I gave her a relatively flat look. "Glad to see my heroic rescue effort is being properly appreciated."
She didn’t even dignify that with a response. Her hands moved with the cold efficiency of a surgeon as she snapped on black gloves, laid out gauze, stitching needles, antiseptics, all in a neat, terrifying little line.
"Heroic?" Camille drawled from her perch on the arm of a nearby chair, perfectly poised as if this was some lazy Sunday debate instead of an intervention. "You call sprinting into a full-blown revolution with half your guts hanging out heroic? Or maybe fighting a bear in the forest is what you call heroic? Or what about going live to hundreds of thousands of people while bleeding and refusing to take the advice of your partners?"
Sienna, bless her, sat cross-legged on the other couch, her small hands wrapped tightly around a cup of steaming tea. Her eyes shimmered, too bright, betraying the tears she was desperately trying not to let fall.
"You could’ve died," she whispered, her voice a threadbare thing barely holding together.
That hit harder than any of the punches I’d taken.