Business Arrangement

Part 13

CHAPTER 13:

I STEPPED INSIDE the hospital grounds and move slowly inside. The hospital was private, staff were only present if a member of the family was here, and the receptionist stands slowly when I step in, recognising me immediately. She bows her head to me, "She's in room one, Miss Stinger." She murmurs with soft violin music playing in the background. When we arrived back in London, after the trip in Vancouver, I thought it was more than odd how my sister could disappear off the face of the grid when she loved the attention, the spotlight, the world's eyes on her.

I did believe she'd been taken to the academy.

That definitely crossed my mind.

Until that one phone call.

I stare at her, "Thank you. Please have one of the guards check I wasn't followed."

My eyes weren't ready for what I saw. She-Lauren Stinger, the eldest of us was lying in the queen-sized hospital bed. Beaten and bloody with tubes attached, holding her to dear life. I close my eyes slowly, leaning against the wall. Astrid was seated on the side. Holding what looks to be a notepad, she preferred drawing, I preferred reading...Lauren preferred dancing.

She doesn't look up from the pad, the moment I opened my eyes to look at her, find her in the white room with a large transparent window for the waterfall garden outside, green moss over charcoal rock. Beautiful. But poisonous. Only a Stinger could enter that garden and come out alive.

Astrid rips a page off her pad and trails her eyes up to mine.

I study her, "I was under the impression you were returned back to the academy. As did your Lion lover." I mention, her eyes don't lose their dulled specialty as she leans up. Her yellow blouse stands out against the tight skirt she didn't think was uncomfortable when they were. They very much were.

"A fake summoning, worked well to give me a break from the trades." She mutters, shrugging her arms before folding them and moving closer to me.

I stare at her, "Who did it?"

She snaps her eyes to Lauren, "I did. I didn't want to, but I did." She says truthfully. I drop back on the wall and sigh in frustration. Stepping away from my sister and dropping my purse on the chair with a clang of golden charms.

I turn to face her, her wavy curls down her back matched mine to the very strand. Even our stylists knew the Bee code with hair-dos, "I genuinely hope you have sharpened the right edge of your stinger, or I swear, Astrid, Mom and Dad, they'll verbally beat the crap out of you. And I'd avoid drinking, eating, even inhaling anything once they find out you beat our sister bloody to the point where she looks like she's in a...of, for Bee's sake-she's in a coma?" I whisper-yell.

She struts around me and hands me a vial, "Don't inhale it, she tried to poison me three times. First with a synthetic substance in fucking cake. Then during tea when I thought it was in the op tea she made, she'd actually poisoned the handle so the substance I'd absorb would put me in the freaking state she was in, then she tried making me inhale it by dropping this in my diffuser. We fought, she couldn't land any hits because we both know she's a lover, not a fighter and she fucking sucks at being a Stinger too." She growls, pacing in a figure-eight format.

I stare unblinkingly. "Did you search her and find the fuck out why?" I question.

She squeezes her fists tighter, "Yes, of course I did. You wanna know what I found-eighty million in her account, paid anonymously to end me, and then come after you." She gestures to her, then me, with exaggerated forces.

I step forward, "The account number-show it to me." I demand, she hands it over and I run my eyes over it like a doctor to a wound. I purse my lips and hand it back to her.