the secret garden

Neve knocked gently on the door to Rook’s hospital room. There was no response, other than some quiet shuffling, but she gave it a moment. She wouldn’t barge in without an invitation — so if he’d fallen asleep, she would have to come back — it would feel like an overstep. He hadn’t asked her to be there. If anything, the seeming disaster he’d caused when he had found out she was coming suggested he very much did not want her there at all.

She listened intently for any signs of life, and had resigned herself to turning up again nearer to supper time when the soft click of the door knob turning caught her attention. Neve stepped back as the door swung outward and a blonde woman, bright blue eyes narrowed in question, stood in the doorway.

“Are you Neve Gallus?” She asked softly. Neve nodded, and the woman stepped back, gesturing for Neve to follow her in.

The soft beeps and whirs of machinery filled the room, and the windows — blinds down but turned open to reveal a view of the Ventus skyline — let the bright light of the day filter in. She didn’t know how anyone could sleep through it, but Rook lay in the bed unmoving but for the gentle rise and fall of his bandaged chest.

She wasn’t surprised by the amount of relief she felt seeing him there. Just perturbed.

His face was bruised, nose had been broken at least once and was set, giving him two black eyes. One arm was in a sling, and there were bandages wrapped around his torso down to where it disappeared beneath rough hospital blankets.

As she’d already known, reading between the lines of his genuinely pathetic efforts at avoiding giving Neve the full picture, Rook’s accident had been anything but minor.

The woman who’d let her in sat heavily on a small vinyl couch below the window. “He’s…well, not fine, despite what he told you, but he’s just resting now. His pain medicine kicked his ass once they gave him more of it,” she said. She smiled tiredly and offered Neve a handshake. “I’m Livinia, by the way. Micah’s cousin.”

Neve took her hand gratefully, shaking it. “I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but given the circumstances…”

“Less than ideal,” Livinia agreed, chuckling softly. She gestured for Neve to join her. “He’s been out for a few hours, so I’m sure he’ll be making our lives difficult again any moment if you want to wait.”

“Sure.” Neve took a seat next to her, managing by sheer will not to slip off the cracking vinyl, and allowed herself a moment of giving Rook’s cousin a good look. She looked around his age, roughly, but other than that and the general look of someone who hadn’t had much sleep recently, that was where the similarities ended. Livinia’s pale skin, light eyes, and blonde hair stood in stark contrast to Rook’s dark curls and warm skin.

She looked a bit like Octavian, really, though Neve wouldn’t say so. Families could be complicated, she ought to know, and given how well Rook and Octavian seemed to get along she didn’t expect that she understood the politics of his.

“So how do you know Micah?” Livinia asked curiously, not bothering to hide that she was sizing Neve up in return. Her gaze was sharp, exacting, and Neve felt the slight edge of defensiveness at being examined.

Hypocritical, maybe, but it was what it was. She shifted as a rogue spring jabbed at her arse through the upholstery.

“Would you believe he’s my handyman?” She asked. It sounded absurd, she knew. What woman traveled from Minrathous to Ventus because the man who repaired her plumbing had been in a car wreck?

She knew the answer. She didn’t care for it.

“I would.” Livinia’s probing eyes didn’t waver. “But I can’t say I’ve ever taken a train to check on my maintenance guy in the hospital. Still…

She glanced over at her cousin. “He’s mentioned you. More than once.”

An almost painful curiosity had Neve arching an eyebrow as she dug into that. “Has he?”

“Mmmm. Not by name, but now that I’ve met you it’s pretty obvious.”

That did not even begin to satisfy, and impulsively she pushed, “What did he say?”

Livinia’s lips slowly curled up in a satisfied smirk. “Why?”

“Not sure…who is interrogating who…here.” The beep of a heart monitor picked up as Rook shifted in his bed to look over that them. His teeth were grit with effort, but that amusement she so associated with him was there nonetheless.

“That’s not a fair match, is it?” Livinia said. “You told me she’s a detective.”

“Best in…Minrathous,” he agreed. He maneuvered himself into what he’d apparently decided was a comfortable enough position and took several shallow breaths before grinning at Neve.

She decided not to examine that she finally felt like she could take a full breath.

“Maybe ‘beloved handyman’ wasn’t a bit far,” he teased, and Neve rolled her eyes.

Livinia looked between the two of them thoughtfully before standing. “Well, now that there’s another responsible adult to keep an eye on you,” Rook pouted, “I’m going to run home for a bit.”

She went over to Rook’s bedside and, after kissing him on the cheek, hissed something into his ear that made him frown.

Smiling sweetly as she straightened, Livinia turned to Neve. “Do you mind walking with me for a moment on my way out?”

A quick glance at Rook, a muscle in his jaw clenching and releasing rhythmically while he glared at his cousin like she’d betrayed him, confirmed Neve’s suspicion that whatever his cousin wanted with her he didn’t much care for.

“Sure.”

Livinia quickly gathered him a few odds and ends, stuffing them in a tote bag, before leading the way into the hall.

“I won’t be gone long,” she said as soon as they had cleared the room, her smile turning apologetic. “So if you have somewhere else to be — Micah mentioned you might have business to attend to entirely unrelated to him, his words — don’t feel obligated to stay. The healers and nurses are watching him too.”

Leaving him here by himself, healing staff aside, didn’t sit right with her, but Neve nodded in understanding.

“Okay, now that he can’t hear us,” Livinia said as they drew near the lift bank. “Between you and me? He isn’t taking this ‘accident’,” Neve’s skin prickled at Livinia’s use of air quotes, “nearly seriously enough. I know, and I’m pretty sure he does too, that someone sabotaged that car. But he’s brushing it off.”

“You think someone meant to do this to him?” Neve asked.

“His brakes were cut. Or…the car’s brakes were cut, at least. This wasn’t reckless driving — that’s the one thing he’s usually careful about — he just couldn’t stop,” Livinia explained, rushed and quiet as she glanced around as though the perpetrator might hear her.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Neve promised.

Livinia’s smile was grateful. “Thank you. He’s also being a stubborn idiot and refusing potions or magical healers, so feel free to berate him for that. I know I have been.”

Neve snorted. “I’m not sure why he’d listen to me.”

“The new friend who is ‘out-of-his league gorgeous and brilliant’? I think you have a shot.” Livinia winked and hit the call button for the lift. “It was nice to finally meet you, Neve.”

The lift chimed and opened, and she disappeared inside of it with a wave.

Rook’s gaze was fixed on the door as Neve returned to his room.

“Have you been just staring at the door this whole time?” She asked.

“Maybe.”

Neve chuckled and shook her head, and he grinned. Slowly, with frequent glances between the hand his IV line trailed to and the large monitor beside his bed, Rook scooted his body sideways. Once he’d left a good foot and a half of space beside him, he gestured to it.

“Feel free to take a seat, if you want. That couch looks it was designed as a torture device.”

“I’m certain your healers would be thrilled to hear you’re offering up your hospital bed as common space,” Neve commented dryly.

“Oh, I don’t just offer this space up to anyone.” He was in rare form today, and Neve had to wonder just what pain medicine he was on. “Very select, VIP even, seating.”

“Is that so?” She teased. “Well aren’t you sweet.”

He patted the bed next to him. “My nephew Marcus tells me that couch is full of pokes and is slippery in an unfun way. Just sayin’.”

Rook’s nephew wasn’t wrong.

Neve stood next to his bedside and, free of his cousin’s observation, let herself look him over again. His eyes were unfocused, pupils wide — the drugs, she assumed — his breathing shallow. Considering how his ribs were bound, she wondered if he’d broken some. The arm in a sling, now that she’d a closer view, had surgical dressings around the elbow, and his shoulder was wrapped and taped. The bruising beneath his eyes was stark and parts of his face were shaved and covered with taped gauze. He’d gotten stitches there.

“Minor car accident?”

He sighed. “Okay, major car accident. But I took the brunt of it; everyone is okay. So it could’ve been worse.”

Neve perched carefully on the edge of his bed. “What happened?”

“Hit a truck.” Rook wasn’t paying much attention to the question, she could tell, as he looked up and down his bed, eyes following the line of her on it. “I don’t know? I was driving, and then I couldn’t stop, and then a semi kept me from going over a cliff.”

He chuffed a laugh and then winced. “Wrong place wrong time for them, but not for me.” He sobered. “They weren’t hurt though. At least that’s what Livvy said. Just shaken up.”

Rook looked away, as though embarrassed or guilty. “Like I said, could’ve been worse.”

“Mmm.” He could have been dead, more like, and it was sheer luck that he wasn’t. “Then what?”

He exhaled shakily. “Then I woke up here. I’ve mostly just been laying around uselessly since while Livinia takes care of everything.”

Rook met her eyes again, and she could see his earnest apology in them. “Sorry for disappearing. And probably for making you have to deal with Tarquin. Livvy said he called over fifty times.”

Neve snickered and then felt the expression melt away, replaced by wariness as he smirked. “She said you called thirty.”

“Tarquin was bugging me,” she demurred. His smirk only grew.

“Sure, Neve Gallus.” He paused, and his mischief seemed to leave as quickly as it had entered. “Thanks, though. For checking on me.”

The air felt heavy as their eyes met. There was something probing in his, deep and quiet — the bottom of an iceberg below the sea — that made her stomach twist.

“I’m glad you’re still here.”

His smile was back, but no longer cartoonish in its intensity. Small and soft. “Me too.”

“Micah Mercar.”

That dragged a laugh, and an accompanying grimace, out of him. “Yeah, I wasn’t sure how to tell my cousin I have an alias without her asking a lot of questions I couldn’t dodge well on drugs,” he admitted. “So…”

He tried to sit up further, with limited success, but managed to offer her his left hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Neve Gallus. I’m Micah Mercar.”

“Sorry about that. And yep, you got me,” Rook said when he returned, amused and for some reason winded. “Had a minor accident — stop laughing, Livvy, she’s gonna get the wrong impression, ow — and had to take a few days off. But I’m fine.”

“Why is Uncle Micah lying!?” A small voice cried out in the background, and Neve couldn’t help snickering.

She was now piecing together the scene in her mind. Rook had suffered a serious injury, and the hospital had contacted his next of kin — his sister, if she had to guess — who had rushed over with her child.

Rook groaned. Mental pain or physical she couldn’t have said.