Everleigh…

My hands hurt.

They were wrapped in swaths of clean white bandages and looked like mummy hands. I lay on my side in the hospital bed with them carefully cradled to my chest, where they ached sharply, but whatever they had going in the IV taped to my inner arm was working. The pain was much less. They had me on fluids, too, the doctor declaring I was dehydrated some. Not surprising, with how much I’d cried.

I was all out of tears now. If anything, I was uncomfortably numb. The shock had worn off, but the sorrow and pain was just beginning. I closed my eyes.

I jumped when, a short time later, the curtain was whisked aside on its track, revealing a man in black leather. I scrambled into a sitting position and back up against the head of the bed, but he pulled his hands from his pockets and held them out.

“Easy! Take it easy. I’m one of the good guys,” he said, and I froze. I eyed him warily and he finally asked, “Are you Silence?”

I nodded cautiously, after a few more moments of sizing him up.

“I’m Detective Sam Stahl, with the Indigo City Police Department.” He sighed, his eyes sweeping over me, a heavy weight seemingly settling on his shoulders.

“Mind if I sit down?” he asked, gently.

I weighed the pros and cons, and finally shook my head. King was going to kill me for even remotely entertaining the cops… But then again, hadn’t he already? At least, as far as he knew, he had.

I waited for the cop to settle into the chair beside my bed, and then for him to say something. I mean, it wasn’t exactly like I was a talker.

“I understand you’re, uh, mute?” he asked.

I bit my lips together nervously and shook my head yes, anxiety jangling, more than I actually willingly nodded.

“Okay, I’ll, uh, try to keep this to ‘yes’ and ‘no’.”

I stared at him, frozen in place, and waited him out.

“Do you know who did this to you?” he asked.

The hospital had been calling me ‘Jane Doe in bed three’ since they’d put me here. I had made a strangled noise when I tried to give them my real name, and immediately flustered and sealed my lips, embarrassed. The fact that he knew my nickname meant that he also knew who I was and that I knew who had done this to me. I nodded.

“Was it Kingston Prentiss?”

I stared at him and wouldn’t nod or shake my head. I just stared at him, willing him to understand that I couldn’t speak in any way about what had happened to me…

“Silence,” he said gently, scooting closer, and I tensed. He stopped and let out a frustrated sigh. “Silence, he’ll never touch you again. We won’t let him.”

I wanted to believe him, but –

“Detective?” The doctor stood at the door.

The cop stood up and gave me his back, and I gasped. He turned back to me at the sound and frowned slightly.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded without thinking, and he turned back to the doctor, where they conferred in hushed tones.

I let my eyes travel over the colors on the back of his cut. The light gray shield, the knight chess piece picked out on it in indigo thread. It was the same as Whiskey’s when he’d brought me here hours and hours ago.

I knew it was a cop’s club. I knew it meant Whiskey was a cop, and I knew how this man must have learned my nickname.

They were talking about me, about my name, adding it to my chart: ‘Silence,’ given name unknown, except it wasn’t unknown, it was Tate, Everleigh Tate. As much as I wanted to tell them, I couldn’t. I was tongue-tied and twisted, and finally, I decided that, ultimately, it didn’t really matter. ‘Silence’ was good enough.

I settled down again and let the detective argue with the doctor, listening to them with keen interest. As far as the doctor was concerned, I was free to go. The detective, however, was practically begging the doctor to run more tests, to do anything he had to do to keep me at least one night, so he could get things set up with the department to take me into protective custody.

I closed my eyes and listened intently, as finally the detective managed to win his way, though I wasn’t keen on staying here ‒ or going with him when they let me go.

I was at a disadvantage when it came to my own agency with my inability to effectively communicate. With my inability to speak in any sort of social situation, I could conceivably communicate in other ways such as writing or even, potentially, with sign language if I had ever learned it, but not with my hands in such a state. I had holes clean through them about the third of a size of a dime.

They’d irrigated them and contemplated surgery on the one to repair whatever vein had been compromised to cause it to bleed so much, but then had dismissed it when the bleeding had begun to stop on its own. I’d been started on antibiotics and pain medicine, but they’d left the holes open to heal and close from the inside out.

I wanted to know why, had no way to ask, but had been lucky enough that the doctor seeing to my wounds had been educating some students of some sort ‒ something about this being a teaching hospital. One of them had said it was because if anything had been left in the wounds, that stitching them closed could trap any potential infection and it could make things worse.

So, they’d bandaged me up, had given me a shot in my arm for tetanus, and had started me on some powerful antibiotics and IV fluids to ward off any infection and to help me recover from my slight dehydration.

I contemplated what would happen to me, and the answer was, I didn’t know. I despaired, feeling lost and lonely, cut off from the world, trapped. My anxiety was spiraling, but I lay quietly. I couldn’t fix any of it. I couldn’t stop whatever was coming. I needed to be patient, to wait, to see what it was I was dealing with before I could deal with anything at all.

For now, all I could do was lay still, my heart and mind racing, until the next dose of pain medicine took me far away from all of it by finally plunging me into an exhausted sleep.