Free Love You to Death by Melissa March

I remembered the
kid beating me, but I wanted to know what happened after that.
“Where’s Stewie?”
    “Well, let’s see.” He blew out a breath. “You
got your ass handed to you in Patterson Park. You’re lucky someone
called it in when they did.”
    “Who—”
    “Who knows?” He cut me off. He was angry.
“Probably a hooker. Does it matter? What were you doing in the park
after dark?”
    “We were swinging,” I explained. It sounded
lame, even to me.
    “Swinging?” He huffed. I could just picture
the sparks shooting out of his light blue eyes.
    “Yeah, you know, at the playground. It’s
relaxing.”
    “Don’t,” he said. The hard edge to his voice
told me he wasn’t in the mood to joke. “Don’t even go there with
your smart mouth. Do you know how close you came to being
killed?”
    Yes, I did.
    “So someone called it in?” I prompted.
    He didn’t answer me right away. I could tell
by his labored breathing he was calming himself down. It was kind
of sweet that he cared so much.
    “I heard it on the scanner. An anonymous
caller said two kids were attacked in the park.” He paused, huffing
out another breath. “I had a gut feeling. I decided to check it
out. They were loading you into an ambulance when I got there.”
    “The guys got away?” I knew they did. Thugs
are street savvy.
    “Yeah, they got away. But they did a great
job rearranging your face first. You have two black eyes, swollen
shut. Your bottom lip is busted. Your whole face looks like a damn
plum,” he growled.
    “Call me Violet Beauregard,” I smiled. Well,
tried to. My lip started throbbing.
    “You also have a fractured arm and a bruised
clavicle, Violet .”
    I felt the bed dip as he settled beside me.
“Do you have any idea how lucky you are? They almost killed you,”
he said softly.
    “I think it was a gang initiation.”
    He cursed under his breath. “Did you get a
good look at them or their clothes?”
    “Yeah, but right now I wanna know about
Stewie. Is he alright?”
    I felt Cass shift his weight on the bed. He
didn’t say anything for a while.
    “Where is he?” I asked. My heart started
skipping. My palms broke out in a sweat. Cass tried to hold my
hand, but I pulled it back.
    “I’m sorry, Arden,” he said quietly.
    “No!” I yelled, ignoring the pain pulsing
from my lips and the flames licking up my throat, still raw from
all the screaming yesterday. “No. You’re lying! I wanna see him. I
wanna see him RIGHT NOW!” I struggled to sit up, kicking the
blankets off. Cass held me down on my right side; my left arm was
numb. I fought against him as much as my drugged stupor
allowed.
    “Nurse!” he yelled.
    I heard footsteps hurrying into the room.
    “Shhh. Calm down, querido, ” Flor
soothed into my ear.
    Big fat drops of tears collected in the
corners of my swollen eyes. I killed Stewie. It was my fault he was
dead. Oh, how I wished I were too. I felt the warmth of the
sedative seeping into my body. I heard Flor humming a light tune,
maybe a lullaby.
    Then I didn’t hear anything.
     

 
    Chapter
Eight
     
    “Your ride is here,” Flor swept into the room
pushing a wheelchair. She was a tiny little Hispanic woman with a
cropped cap of dark hair. I just stared at her.
    “Mr. Cass is on his way up for you. He said I
could perform a citizen’s arrest if you give me a hard time.” She
laughed.
    I’d been in the hospital for two weeks. I
think they wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to kill myself. I
wouldn’t, of course, because that would require some sort of
emotion for me to do that, and right now, I wasn’t feeling too much
of anything. I was numb from the inside out.
    “Mr. Cass will take good care of you,” Flor
was saying. “You need to eat more. You are so thin. A body needs
fuel to heal.”
    She helped me ease into the wheelchair. I
held my tattered backpack in my lap as she pushed me down the
hallway to the elevators. Cass was waiting for me in the lobby. He
loaded me into the