Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 65552 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 262(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65552 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 262(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
Chapter 20
Wyatt Hernandez
Wyatt watched in stunned silence as Doc took care of Phantom, being as delicate as if she were handling a budding flower, the sharp turns and rattling van doing nothing to break her concentration and focus. She used her hands in the way a magician would, seemingly pulling salves and sutures out of thin air, all while uttering gentle reassurances and keeping her patient as calm as possible. Next to her was a bundle of bloodied cloths, some of them having been used to wash off the blood from Wyatt’s hands.
Bang Bang craned his neck from the passenger seat. “How’s he doing back there?”
“Good,” Roman said. “Stable and awake.”
“Here, give him some of this.” Bang Bang pulled out a rose-gold flask from his pocket and reached it over. Wyatt grabbed it, uncapping the flask and taking a whiff.
“Smells like good rum,” Wyatt said over the sound of tires spinning over rocks and gravel. He held the flask up against Phantom’s lips.
“It’s damn good rum, broki. Directly from my family’s farm in Puerto Rico.”
“Thanks,” Phantom said, lifting a hand and wiping his smiling lips, seemingly unaware of the antibiotics being injected into his arm.
“Mind if I take a sip?” Wyatt asked before handing back the flask.
“Of course, broki. Take it home.”
Wyatt didn’t finish it, but he did take a sip and was pleasantly surprised at just how good the warm, golden drink tasted. He was normally a whiskey kind of guy, but Bang Bang’s family rum may have just switched him over. He took another sip before seeing if Roman wanted some. He shook his head and continued to look out the tinted windows, the city of Paris blurring past in a way that erased all the romance.
“We fucked up,” Roman said. They were sat on the floor of the van’s rear, cross-legged with their backs against the uncomfortable plastic protrusion where the wheel was housed. “The Pride wasn’t up there looking for the page—they were waiting to attack. They knew. And now one of ours is hurt, and we don’t have the page.”
“Amelia didn’t even have the page,” Wyatt noted, as if that would help.
“And it’s not like we can exactly call her and ask where she hid it.”
“No, no we can’t.” A particularly bumpy stretch of road had Wyatt falling against Roman. He put a hand on Roman’s thigh to stabilize himself but didn’t take it away once the road flattened out. “She did say something pretty interesting. How it’s with her son.”
“Which doesn’t make much sense, unless she dug up his gravesite and dropped the page inside.”
Wyatt shook his head. “She doesn’t seem like the type of person who’d do that.” And that’s when it hit him, like a comet hurtling out of the sky. He dug in his pockets and pulled out his phone, scrolling directly to his photo album. “She does seem like the type to name her new bakery after her son, though.”
He tilted the screen in Roman’s direction, pointing at the gold frame that held a smiling Amelia, standing outside of a bakery with her arms spread wide, looking up at the name: Remy’s Sweet Treats.
Roman looked at the photo and then at Wyatt and then back at that photo, his plump lips curling up at the corners. “That has to be what she meant. She hid the page here, with her ‘son.’ Not only the name, but she’s given interviews where she talks about her bakeries as if they were children. It has to be there.”
Roman set the phone down, grabbed Wyatt’s face in both hands, and pushed in for a kiss. His smile jumped to Wyatt, his freckled cheeks dimpling. A swell of pride filled him. He was happy, nearly ecstatic, really. It was a welcome change from the helplessness he felt as he hid behind a couch and watched Phantom bleed out. There had been many moments these last few days that made him wonder if saying yes to another one of Roman’s wild plans was a good idea.
But there were other moments—the quiet ones, the passionate ones—that made him realize regretting anything was just a certified waste of time. Regret did nothing but gnaw away at his insides without giving anything back in return. It was a parasite, taking and taking and taking. Making doubts grow like weeds, working to strangle off any positivity and hope that might exist.
Wyatt was done with that. He was here because he was meant to be. He had nothing to regret, and that extended all the way back to the life-altering decisions he’d made in college, in part led by Roman himself. The past couple of years had been filled with regret, weighing him down and suffocating any kind of happiness he tried to hold onto. It left him without energy or inspiration, turning him into a zombie at work and a not-so-much better version of that at home. He lost interest in coding his side projects, and he stopped looking for new opportunities, anything that could get him out of working at the Science Museum.