Page 113 of The Rut in the Road

“Rayn—” Violette half-sobbed it out.

I looked over at her.

She pointed at my arm.

“I fell on it,” I replied. “It will heal.”

“It’s bleeding,” she said.

I nodded. “Yes.”

Ward glared up at me from the folding chair someone had brought over for him, given that his chair was missing a wheel and bent funny, and therefore would not have been usable even as a seat. “I’ll go to the hospital if you go,” he said to me.

I clenched my teeth together. I didn’t want to go to the hospital, but I also knew that I probably should.

“Damn it,” I muttered.

Ward’s eyebrows rose. I don’t swear much.

“Mason’s is not going to be happy with me,” I told him.

“I’d be more worried about Raj, if I were you,” he replied.

I sighed. “I know.”

It was almostfour hours later before the police released us to be taken to the hospital after taking our statements. We were officially an hour late leaving the gig.

It was going to be at least several more before we got out of here.

“I texted Mason,” Ward informed me. I’d convinced a nurse to let me be treated from the chair beside Ward’s bed. As the ER had been all-but-overwhelmed by more severe casualties, they hadn’t really tried to convince me otherwise. Ward had a head injury—although they were pretty sure he didn’t have a concussion, head injuries were riskier. He’d had five stitches, and Vi, who had followed us to the ER in Mason’s Tacoma, had joked that we would end up with matching scars when she’d stopped freaking out quite so much. She’d disappeared to go find us something resembling a snack.

“What did he say?” I asked Ward.

He huffed out a sigh. “More or less what you’d expect.”

“That he’s going to strangle me?” I asked.

Ward rolled his grey eyes. “No,” he replied. “He asked what stupid thing I’d done to have that happen.”

“Did you tell him?”

“I told him I’d explain when I got home.” He grimaced, clearly not looking forward to that conversation.

I sympathized, since I knew Raj really wasn’t going to be happy with me, either. Not that we’d done anything wrong, specifically, but because we’d insisted on keeping the gig even though we knew there would be a protest. Even though protestors had already thrown things at Mason’s truck and a brick through a window and into my skull.

We both looked up sharply when the curtain was pushed back with a good deal more force than was strictly necessary.

“What the fuck happened?” Raj demanded.

“Hello, Agent Parikh,” Ward replied mildly. “Yes, we’re both fine. How was your evening?”

I thought I understood what he was doing—trying to diffuse Raj’s anger and remind him about what was actually important, namely, that we weren’t badly injured.

Ward’s stitches would heal, and they’d given him the dissolving kind, so he wouldn’t need to come back to have them removed. Given what had happened, he was unbelievably lucky.

I would also heal, but the fact that I’d fallen on my weak arm was pretty bad—I’d refractured my arm in multiple places, although it wasn’t broken badly enough that I’d need surgery. It did mean that I was once again sporting a plaster cast that Vi had already drawn a little bat on.

Raj’s eyes were alarmingly gold as he studied me. “What. The. Hell. Happened,” he repeated, although it didn’t actually sound like a question.