The Untold Truth

Chapter 3

I waited for him to say that he was joking, but he only gave me a pointed look toward my side. I followed his eyes and saw a bulge underneath the shirt I was wearing. Curiosity got the better of me and I lifted the shirt, only to see a bulge of bandages wrapped around my side. Shadow quickly took my hand before I was able to make contact with the bandages.

He shook his head and said, "You aren't going to want to do that."

I asked with curiosity soaking my words, "Why not?"

He shrugged his shoulders  and said, "You were shot there."

The way he said it with complete calm to his voice made me wonder if he was just waiting a really long time to tell the punch line of this joke. No one could be this calm about getting shot...could they?

I asked him, "You're serious? I was shot?"

He nodded his head and said, "I was too though so you shouldn't feel that bad. Look! We have twin scars!"

He lifted his shirt to show me his scar from being shot and it almost made me vomit. I could tell that his wound was still healing and there was some dried blood on the area around the stitches. The movements with his shirt made me realize that I hadn't recognized him because he wasn't in his normal "Shaodw" outfit. He wore a dark grey shirt, along with a pait of dark wash jeans. If he had been walking down the street, he would've looked like a normal person.

He looked down at his wound when he saw my face wrinkle with disgust and said, "Yeah, I haven't been shot like this in a while. Don't worry though, Benjamin has been helping me make sure both of our bullet wounds heal properly."

I gave him a confused look and asked, "Benjamin?"

He nodded and said. "He's my assistant of sorts. He helps me find places where people are in trouble, diverts the media away from me, and keeps any unwanted visitors away from this place."

"And where would this place be?"

He smiled and said, "You're at my house."

"Which is where?"

He shook his head at me like I was a child and said, "You can't know that. That information is classified."

I rolled my eyes and tried to sit up. Shadow put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back down on the bed.

He said, "You can't be up with a wound like that."

"But you're up..."

His face went somber in under a second, "You had more damage than what I had."

I gave him a confused look, and he just sighed heavily.

He said, "Dorian was...Dorian was poisoning you while he had you. He was giving you arsenic in hopes that if I ever got you back, I wouldn't have you for very long."

I shivered in fright at just how much of a monster Dorian had been.

Shadow continued, "So, with the poisoning, you also had a gunshot wound."

The weight of what he had just told me finally hit me. I was being poisoned? The memory of Asher telling me about arsenic flooded my head and I finally realized what he had meant by that. Other memories threatened to resurface, but I pushed down the other memories and focused on what Shadow was saying.

He said, "Arsenic poison can lead to death if it's not treated quickly. They were poisoning you for quiet a while, Benjamin thinks the whole time they had you, so the effects were just starting to show when I came for you the second time. I had noticed a litlte bit, but I didn't realize what they had done to you until Dorian told me. Benjamin was able to get treatment for you as soon as he got us back to this house, so we have him to thank for keeping us alive."

I said shakily, "But...but I remember...being shot and all the blood...there was so much blood...you said I had died..."

Shadow chuckled and said, "Yes, I remember all of the blood. You were so close to death, but Benjamin brought you back here and after hooking you up to some machines, he realizzed there was still a tiny heartbeat hiding somewhere in there."

Tears pricked my eyes. This man, Benjamin, had saved me and I didn't even know him.

Almost as if he was reading my mind, Shadow said with a smile, "Don't worry, you'll get to meet him soon."

I looked up at him and saw that he had a few small bruises that were almost faded away, but not completely.

I asked him, "What happened to you after I... well..."

Shadow crossed his arms and said, "Well, after I thought you were..."

He seemed to have trouble finishing his sentence, but he quickly coughed to cover it up.

He kept saying, "I fought Dorian. He managed to shoot me in my side, but after he told me about what he had done to you, the anger just pushed me so much that I didn't care. I killed Dorian, then crawled back over to you because I knew we weren't goign to make it out of there alive. I... I didn't want to...die alone..."

Conflicted feelings of sentiment and sadness filled me. I remembered how he had kissed me while rescuing me and wondered if his words had any extra feelings behind them, or if he just simply saw me as someone he knew to spend his last moments with. The thought back to our kiss had me blushing slightly, but before he could notice my sudden change of mood, I refocused back on what he was saying to me.

He continued, "Benjamin told me that after I didn't respond to my radio with him, he came down to the warehouse where we were and saw us there. A fire had started and he grabbed you and tried to carry you out. The ceiling of the roof collapsed because of the fire. Benjamin got you out with only a couple of burns on him, but by the time he got back to help me make it out, I had a little worse than him."

He got up from the bed and turned around so his back was to me. He lifted his shirt up and I gasped as tears flooded down my cheeks.