Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 67614 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67614 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
And now, no one can find Giles. What if he’s in danger?
“Breena, we need you to calm down.” The voice doesn’t come from the doctor. It’s coming from inside my head.
I look over and see Jonas looking at me intently. He nods.
“Yes, it’s me. We need you to calm down, my darling. We can’t help you until you calm down. Don’t worry, Giles is just fine. Everything is going to be fine.”
I feel more tears falling down my cheeks, but I take a deep breath and let it out again.
“Good. Very good. More breaths, just like that.”
With Jonas talking to me in my head, I find my calm, and the doctor and nurses are able to get an IV started. It helps alleviate some of the horrible symptoms relatively quickly.
But I’m still so scared.
“Giles,” I whisper.
“We’ll find him,” Lucy says, her hand on my leg. “He’ll be here soon. I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”
I nod. No, she wouldn’t. But what if something horrible happened to him? Why did I leave the house without him?
What if he’s gone, and it’s all my fault?
“You’re panicking again,” Jonas says in my head. “Slow, easy breaths, Breena. There’s no need to be so anxious.”
I nod and breathe with him, watching him. Jonas has quickly become one of my favorite people in the whole world, and I trust him implicitly.
He’s like a brother to me.
He wouldn’t lie.
“Good,” Lucy says. “Very good. Are you starting to feel better?”
The nausea is almost gone, but my mouth still feels like it’s on fire. “A little.”
“It’s going to take a few hours,” the doctor says. I don’t remember his name. “We’ll keep her here until I’m sure all the symptoms are under control and the poison is out of her system.”
“Thank you,” Lucy says to him. “Thank you so much.”
He nods, gives the nurse some orders, and then hurries out of my room and on to the next.
“Any word from Xander?” I ask.
“You’re speaking in full sentences,” Lucy says with a grin. “You are feeling better. Not yet, but he’ll probably bring Giles straight here.”
“I hope so.” I lean my head back and close my eyes. “Goddess, I hope so.”
Breena! I need you, baby.
I frown at the sound of Giles’s voice in my head.
“What’s happening?”
Chapter Sixteen
Giles
“She’ll be fine,” I assure myself as I wander into the living room and sit on the sofa. The book I’ve been reading about a sapphire mine in Montana sits on the end table, so I pick it up, lie back on the couch, and open it up to where I left off the last time I read it.
The Yogo mine is in the mountains of central Montana, and they recently reopened it for digging, which is really exciting. It’s a bucket list trip for me to go and tour the area.
Just as I flip a page, Merlin jumps up onto my stomach and starts to make biscuits, purring loudly.
“What in the hell?” I narrow my eyes on him. “Where were you? I thought you were at Lucy’s.”
I start to call out for Breena, thinking maybe she’s back already, but my phone pings with a text.
Breena: Hey! Gonna hang out here and chat with Lucy for a while. Just letting you know.
I grin and send back a heart, then settle in with the cat. “I guess it’s you and me for a little bit. I can’t believe you were hiding from us the whole time.”
Merlin purrs contentedly, and I go back to my book, but not long after, my eyes feel heavy. Breena wasn’t wrong when she said I looked exhausted. I am. I’ve been busy at Gems, and the mental toll this whole thing has taken on me is significant.
So, when my eyes close and I feel sleep bearing down on me, I don’t fight it. Maybe what I need until Breena comes home is a little nap.
“There is no time to write anything down, Giles. We must go now.”
“I do not want to write anything down. I need to destroy the book. If they find it, they will surely execute us, Martha.”
“They will do so anyway. Come, make haste. We must run. Leave everything.”
I should have taken Martha out of here months ago. We should have loaded up the wagon and gone to my children in Boston, but I never dreamed the hysteria would spread so far and so quickly.
Or that so many would die.
“Giles Corey, come out of your home immediately.”
Martha and I freeze and stare at each other in horror.
“No,” she says, already weeping. “No, Giles.”
“’Tis nothing.” I kiss her forehead. “They merely have inquiries, nothing more.”
She only shakes her head as I walk away from her and out the front door. The sheriff, George Corwin, who should not hold that title at all and would not at his tender age of five and twenty if his uncles were not judges, stands with his band of deputies at his back.