Chapter 3 - The Awakening
Sloan felt as though she were drowning in thick, warm wool. Her head throbbed with a rhythmic, dull pain, and her mouth felt like powdered chalk.
Slowly, agonizingly, she forced her eyes open.
The harsh fluorescent lights of her dining room were gone. Instead, she was staring at a smooth, cream-colored ceiling. The gentle, rhythmic beep of a heart monitor sounded somewhere to her left. An IV line was taped securely to the back of her hand.
The girls, her panicked brain screamed. Where are Hazel and Iris?
She tried to sit up instantly, but a heavy hand gently pressed against her shoulder, keeping her pinned to the mattress.
"Don't move, Sloan," a deep, velvety voice commanded. "You have a concussion and two IV bags running."
Sloan froze.
That voice.
She would recognize that voice if she were buried ten feet under the earth. She would recognize it if she were ninety years old and losing her mind. It was the voice that had whispered promises into her hair under the autumn trees in Paris. It was the voice that had haunted every single night of her lonely, grueling existence for the last ten years.
She turned her head slowly, painfully, toward the right.
Griffin Drake was sitting right beside her.
He looked devastatingly handsome, despite the dark circles under his eyes and his rumpled, wet suit jacket. His dark hair was slightly messy, and his jaw was covered in dark stubble. But it was his eyes—those piercing, cold blue eyes—that made Sloan’s breath catch in her throat.
"Griffin?" she rasped, her voice barely a whisper. "What... what are you doing here? Where am I?"
"You're at Swedish Medical Center," Griffin said, his voice unnaturally calm, though the pulse in his neck was hammering. "You collapsed in your kitchen at 2:10 AM."
Sloan’s eyes widened with sheer, unadulterated terror. "The girls! Where are Hazel and Iris?! Did someone—"
"They are right over there," Griffin interrupted, pointing toward the sofa.
Sloan’s head snapped toward the corner of the room. Hazel was curled up sleeping, but Iris was awake, sitting on the edge of the cushions, watching them both with wide, watchful eyes.
"Mommy!" Iris squeaked, scrambling off the sofa and running to the side of the bed. "You woke up!"
"Oh, baby," Sloan sobbed, tears spilling over her lashes as she reached out with her non-IV hand, pulling Iris into a tight embrace. "Are you okay? Did you get hurt? Where is Hazel?"
"Hazel is sleeping. She cried a lot," Iris whispered, burying her face into Sloan's neck. "Mommy, we called the emergency man on your phone. He came in a big black car and he saved us."
Sloan’s heart felt as though it were being squeezed in an iron vise. She slowly lifted her head, looking over Iris’s dark hair directly at Griffin.
Griffin was standing at the foot of the bed now, his arms crossed over his chest, his face an impenetrable wall of steel. But beneath that corporate armor, Sloan could see the raw, bleeding fury and grief that she had feared for eight long years.
"Hazel called me, Sloan," Griffin said, his voice dropping into an icy register that made the room temperature feel as if it had dropped ten degrees. "She used your emergency contact."
Sloan swallowed hard, her chest heaving. "Griffin... I can explain..."
"You set me as your emergency contact," Griffin continued, stepping closer to the side of the bed, his shadow towering over her. "You ran away from me ten years ago. You hid in this city, three miles from my office. You lived in poverty. You worked yourself to the point of brain hypoxia. But when you were dying on your kitchen floor, your phone called me."
He leaned down, placing both hands on the edge of her mattress, bringing his face inches from hers.
"Why, Sloan?" he whispered, his eyes blazing with a terrifying intensity. "Why was I your emergency contact if I was dead to you?"
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Sloan couldn't speak. The lie she had rehearsed for eight years—the story about a random donor, about moving on, about not wanting his money—withered and died under the weight of his gaze.
"And more importantly," Griffin added, his voice dropping so low that only she could hear it, "why does your eight-year-old daughter have my father's eyes?"
