He picked up the bottle of sulfuric acid, slowly swivelling his head to face me. An eyebrow raised, he asked in an annoyed tone, “Want me to do it for you?”
My face scrunched up out of fear, instinctively taking a step back and increasing the distance between us. “Jared, listen. There’s still a way out for you if you stop now.”
His lips pulled back in an ugly sneer. “Scared, Scarlett?”
No sh*t, Sherlock. Anyone would be.
He took slow, lazy steps towards me, and I unconsciously kept backing away from him. “Jared, you can’t bring back people from the dead, but you can still treasure the living while they’re still alive,” I tried to convince him.
He merely jeered at me, refusing to listen to anything I said as he twisted open the bottle cap.
Waving the bottle in the air menacingly, he went on to say, “You look so much like Naomi right now. She was this scared and vulnerable when she died, too. I remember thinking: she must have wanted to continue living, but she couldn’t find a good reason to do so anymore. Why couldn’t I have been her reason? Why couldn’t she have continued living for me?”
I felt my back hit a wall. I’m cornered.
Delighted by my new predicament, a wide grin spread across his face as he splashed the contents of the bottle in my direction.
I reflexively reached up and tried to cover my face with my hands, but only managed to block some of the liquid.
In the blink of an eye, I was aggressively pulled into someone’s embrace at the exact moment that I heard the blood-curdling sound of something dissolving, as well as caught a whiff of the rancid odor of rotting flesh.
A man’s voice hissed into my ear in pain as a group of people suddenly barged into the building.
When I’d finally snapped awake from my daze, I realized that it was Ashton. He’d used his own body to shield me from the sulfuric acid.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could somewhat see that all the blood was drained from Jared’s face as he stared at Ashton, dumbfounded while Ashton’s men wrestled him to the ground.
I tried to open my mouth to speak, but no words came out.
Ashton instantly fell to his knees in front of me. There was a constant ringing in my brain as I stood there blankly, watching someone else carry Ashton away.
At the hospital, I silently watched the doctors and nurses as they moved around me. It was only then that my brain finally registered that my face hurt slightly, and I realized that the sulfuric acid must have burnt some parts of my skin off.
“The burn area isn’t large. Your right eye is hurt, but the cornea isn’t damaged, so you don’t have to worry about blindness,” a doctor told me as he bandaged up my wounds.
I contemplated his words for a while. I now knew that my face and right eye hadn’t managed to escape Jared’s fury unscathed.
But why didn’t I feel any pain at all in the beginning? Maybe it all happened too fast that my brain wasn’t able to register it.
The doctor left as a nurse came in to help with my IV injection. After pressing lightly all over my hand and not finding any prominent veins, she glanced up at me. “Please hold your hand in a fist.”
I did as I was told. She carefully inspected the back of my hand and then picked up the needle, setting it upon a certain spot on my skin.
I turned away, refusing to watch her actually push the needle into my flesh. My pain tolerance had always been horrible.
“All done,” the nurse helpfully supplied after she was done.
Only then did I sigh in relief, all the muscles in my body relaxing. The spot on the back of my left hand where the IV needle had pierced hurt slightly, and it looked swollen.
I couldn’t help but ask, “Did you accidentally pick the wrong vein? It looks like the wound is starting to bleed.”
The tube that connected the IV needle to the drip bag was indeed starting to turn from clear to blood-red.
The nurse looked over her shoulder at me and did a double take. When she tried to pull out the IV needle, tiny drops of blood spurted out.
Using a cotton swab and iodophor to clean the wound, she instructed, “Hold this for a minute.”
I held the cotton swab in place, internally lamenting about how complicated humans’ blood circulatory systems were. All veins had the same purpose of sending blood to different parts of the body but getting them mixed up might potentially cause a health hazard.
The spot on the back of my left hand was no longer bleeding, but a bruise was starting to form, much to my dismay.
As I chucked the cotton swab into the nearby trash can, the nurse also noticed the growing bruise on my left hand. She furrowed her eyebrows slightly and looked apologetic but didn’t say anything.
She took my hand in hers and inspected it closely, searching for another more suitable spot to insert the IV needle.
I couldn’t help but pity myself whenever I looked at the tiny lump on my left hand. “Maybe we could try my right hand?”
I would’ve hated it if the nurse somehow accidentally inserted the IV needle into the wrong vein on my left hand again, creating yet another bruise there.
Nodding, she lowered her head and gestured for me to clench my right hand into a fist.
Fortunately, the process was much smoother this time, and nothing happened after the IV needle went in.
The nurse packed her medical tools, staring woefully at the bruise on my left hand. “I’ll go get a pack of ice for you.”
I nodded. My vision of her was slightly blurry due to one of my eyes being covered by bandages.
