Addicted - BOOK 1

24

"Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can."

"Virat!" Everything goes in slow motion in front of my eyes.

All I can hear is a buzzing noise in my head. Like that the machine in the hospital makes when it doesn't detect a heart beat. I don't hear anything else. I don't hear what the news reporter on the TV was saying. I don't hear what dad was saying to Viren and Ma, while speaking to the cops. I don't hear what Swetha told me when she put a jacket around me and kissed me at the door. I don't hear what Blanco told me when he escorted me out of the house, into the car. I don't hear what Ma was telling me while sobbing and hugging me inside the car. I don't hear a thing.

All that is filled in my head is an image - image of Virat unconscious in a blood soaked shirt, being carried away into an ambulance.

What is happening around me? Everything seems so surreal - a small portion of me is sitting inside the car, riding towards the hospital to my bleeding husband. But the major portion of me is just up there - watching the whole scene, like I wasn't a part of it - like it was all a part of some evil plot in a twisted novel I was reading. How can I be a part of this? How can a day that started with magic wands and sweet nothings end with blood and bullets? There were bullets - two of them - inside him - inside my husband - eating him away - spreading their poison, this very second.

I see me running out of the car, into the hospital with about a dozen security people behind me, holding Blanco's hand. He is fielding away the army of media gathered at the entrance. I see us going into the emergency, towards the post they pointed out, but instead of my husband, I meet an empty bed with blood on the sheets that the nurses were cleaning up. I see myself rushing inside with one of those nurses towards the waiting room of the operation theatre. I see myself standing there all expressionless and indifferent with my eyes full of unshed tears for the next three hours as the scrub nurses tell us that they are operating to remove his bullets.

And then I hear the words - the golden words of my life. "Mr.Vadhera is doing fine. We have removed both the bullets. He has lost a lot of blood and is very weak, but he is doing good." The doctor breaks the news.  It was like life returned back into my veins. I breathe a fresh lease of life.

We are going to make it! We are going to be just fine. 

Virat is going to make it. 

They are wheeling his bed out of the operation theater into a suite. Mom and dad run to him. He is conscious. My world was a flat line and seeing him, was like the charge that revived my pulse.They have a cast around his arm and his upper body was tightly bandaged and his face and neck had small cuts everywhere.

He is shocked seeing his mom. He gives her a small smile of assurance. Then he sees his dad, Viren and Jeevika and he is just confused. His eyes scan around the room looking for me and once our eyes lock, all the tears that I have been holding since the last few hours pool out of my eyes, cascading through my cheeks like a water fall. My love! He is here, he is alive and he has come back to me.

He blinks his eyes at me and then his eyes are back on his mother. I close my eyes in sweet relief but I cannot move. Blanco comes to hold me.

"You guys thought I died?" he asks his mom with a chuckle.

"Chup!!! Aaise baatein nai karte beta." She pats his cheek and kisses his forehead. The nurses were waiting to wheel him out of there. They let them do their job. All of them follow Virat.

"He is back now Manvi." Blanco tells me. I look at him and he nods at me, his eyes are moist. I manage to stagger my feet behind everyone.  

Once inside the room, Virat asks Blanco about Randy and Blanco leaves to check on him.