Addicted To You (MAYHEM #1)

Chapter 45

The hospital wasn't somewhere I was familiar with. I had only been inside one once, and it had been this one. I'd had pneumonia when I was eight.

I remembered more about going to the hospital than the actual visit. Tito Henry had taken me. I had been sick for days, but his wife was saying that I was being lazy and didn't want to do my chores.

Then one night I had heard them yelling at each other. It was the first and last time I had ever heard them fight, at least like that.

Tito Henry had come into my room, picked me up, and taken me to the hospital. They had admitted me, and then he had left. A week later he had picked me up, and I had gone home. No one had visited me that week. No one had brought me balloons like the other kids down the hall had been given. It had been just me and the television.

As I walked back through the doors of the hospital, that memory replayed in my head. Tito Henry had seemed fierce that night. Like he was protecting me. But then he'd left me alone again. Maybe this was a pattern in my life.

"This way," Lucas said. He had already asked where we needed to go when he'd called earlier. Tito was still in the ICU, and he needed surgery. He had a blood clot. Surgery was risky, but if he didn't have it, then there was a good chance he'd just have another heart attack due to blockage.

We took the elevator to the third floor and made a right into a large waiting room. Lucas pointed to a chair. "Go have a seat. I'll let them know we are here."

I did as I was told. I had rather he handle it anyway. I didn't want to talk to people.

"Felicity." I glanced up to see several pairs of eyes on me. Tito Henry's office personnels. Of course. They would be here. No one ever really spoke to me. I was almost surprised they knew my name.

I turned to look at the lady who called my name. She was my tito's secretary for as long as I could remember. But I couldn't remember her name.

"Hello po," I said, unsure what else they wanted from me. I was back in this world. The one where people ignored me or whispered about me. The one where I was an outcast and had evil inside me. Evil I had grown up wishing so hard I could get out of me.

"We wondered if you'd come," she said, studying me through her round glasses that perched on the tip of her pointy nose.

She wasn't a nice person. I knew that much.

I wasn't sure what she wanted me to say to that, either. I wasn't sure if I would have come if I hadn't just had my new world snatched from underneath me, but I was here because I was running.

"Felicity." Lucas was at my elbow, guiding me away from the chair I had been told to go to and out of the waiting room. What were we doing now? "I need to talk to you. It's important."

If he was about to tell me he had to leave, I wasn't sure how I would handle that. I couldn't stay here alone with these people. But now that I was here, could I just leave?

Lucas pulled me around a corner and looked around to make sure no one was close enough to hear him. Then he turned to meet my curious gaze.

He was acting weird. I wasn't sure I could take another man acting weird on me and then unloading something on me I couldn't handle. But then there wasn't anything Lucas could tell me that would shatter me the way Kyson had. I was sure Lucas couldn't even hurt me.

"There's a problem. I . . ." He rubbed his hand over his face and muttered a curse. I had never heard him curse before. "I shouldn't be the one who has to tell you this. I don't want to be the one. But . . . I think you would want to know. I mean . . . you have to know." He made a frustrated noise in his throat, then he asked. "What's your blood type?"

Was he kidding me? He was acting like this because he wanted to know my blood type?

"B negative. It's rare. Why?"

I only knew this because we did blood typing in high school. My teacher had made a big deal out of my blood type. Most people had been O positive.

"Wow, yeah, okay. At any time in your life did you wonder why Tito Henry and his wife were raising you?"

I nodded. "Yeah. Because my mother was once working in Tito Henry's company, and they didn't want me to end up in foster care or something. Why are you asking me such random questions?"

Lucas massaged his temples like he had a headache. "That's all you ever thought?" he asked."Uh, yeah."

Dropping his hand to his side, he fidgeted. Then he finally looked directly at me. "I know that this wasn't something that they ever told anyone. It was a secret. One that I only know because Tito Henry is a close friend of my dad's. He needed to tell someone so he talked to my dad about it. I've only known since you got to Manila. My dad explained your situation before I met you that day. I was never really sure if you knew the truth or not. But . . . I don't see how I can't tell you now," he paused and took a deep breath.

"Tito Henry had an affair with a girl twenty years younger than him, and that girl got pregnant. Then she died in childbirth. He refused to let his child go into the foster care and forced his wife who couldn't have children to let the baby come live with them. His wife agreed because she had no choice. She wasn't going to divorce her husband, but she hated what he had done. She was jealous of the child. And I'm pretty sure she never treated that little girl right."

I had been wrong.

There was something Lucas could say that would once again shatter me.

I grabbed the counter for support and blinked several times. Did I just hear him correctly? Had he just said . . . ?

"He needs surgery now, but they don't have the blood he needs and he's gonna need it. They have sent for blood, but it could take hours, and that's too long. They need to have some now. He has B negative," he said in a hurried rush. "Look, I never wanted to be the one to tell you this. But he could die, and you are the only one right now who might be able to save him. If it was my dad, I'd want to know."

He needed my blood. That's the only reason Lucas was telling me. Yet he had known the story. How many people knew this? Was I the only one?

The man I had lived in a house with my entire life and not had any relationship with was my father. He'd watched me grow; yet he had no attachment to me at all, and he was my father. My stomach clenched, and if there had been any food in it, I was sure I would have lost it, too. But I was empty. I hadn't been able to eat.

"Talk to me," Lucas urged.

I shook my head. I wasn't ready to talk to him.

"Where do I go give blood?" I asked him.

That was the only thing I needed to know right now.

The man had basically abandoned me while living right there in the same house as me, but I wasn't about to let him die if I could do something to help him. I'd lived my whole life thinking I had no family.

When all along . . . I could have had one. If he'd wanted me.

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