My eyes opened. Stars! I needed to pee, but I couldn’t move.

  Oh yeah, hospital, cast, skull fracture. I tried to sit up, but Skyla said, “Whoa, whoa, let me help you.”

  “I gotta pee—now!”

  “Alright, alright. Let’s get you up slowly.”

  I was weak. She was right, but I couldn’t wait. “Sky, I gotta go, like, right now.”

  “Bedpan it is, then,” Skyla snarked.

  I groaned, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  She laughed, “No fun when the shoe’s on the other foot, is it?”

  I managed the indignity of the bedpan, and it'd probably been the better choice since everything still hurt, and I was so weak and trembly.

  But I needed food, and I needed to start walking. I had to build up my strength again. I needed to train. I needed to move. I needed to go to the dojo and spar.

  No, I had to rest. Skull fracture. Brain bleed.

  Was I thinking clearly? Clearly, I was not thinking.

  “So, Skyla, how bad is it? How many people know?”

  “Here,” she replied, “Drink some water. You sound like you drank caustic poison for breakfast.”

  She was right. I barely croaked out any sounds, and the water was nice on my dry tongue.

  Skyla shook her head, “Not many. No one knows that Darwin was arrested, and no one knows how you got injured. Just the administrators, Dr. Inkson, and Janet.”

  Janet, our boss: Chief of Obgyneca.

  Neal walked in holding out a take-out bag. “Soup for the patient. Sandwiches for us. You look fantastic, Ryst.”

  “Thanks, Neal. You’re a gem in the night sky.”

  Soup—eat soup. Left-handed. I could do that. Could I do that?

  “Um, I think I need a bib.” I held out an awkward spoon with my unbandaged hand, and they laughed.

  My head still hurt too much for laughing, but I managed the soup pretty well. The warm broth felt really good on my throat.

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  I was so hungry, I wanted more, but instead, I asked Skyla, “So, not many people know that I married Darwin, then he tried to kill me, and now he’s going to spend the rest of his life working in a manufacturing plant on a prison sphere?”

  “No, pretty much no one knows,” Skyla explained, handing me a napkin. “Janet told Investigation that we were your closest friends, so they interviewed us. I told them about the secret wedding, and that you’d said you didn’t think Darwin was who he seemed to be when he was at work.”

  Neal chimed in, “Yeah, I told them that you didn’t want to keep your marriage a secret much longer, but we were really shocked that you wound up like this. And Ryst, he planned this ahead of time. He really wanted to hurt you.”

  “Yeah, the DiBest. And he ambushed me. He knew the only way to take me out was an overpowered surprise attack. Otherwise, he’d never have laid a finger on me. But why? Why throw his whole life away? For what? To punish me for refusing to have sex with him?”

  What kind of logic was that?

  Neal shook his head, “No, no, it’s more than that. It’s that whole control thing. To put you back in your place: do what I say, when I say, or else. It’s like. . . men like that can’t handle being told ‘no.’”

  “Ryst,” Skyla said gently, “Did he do that a lot? Kissing you when you didn’t want to be kissed? Grabbing you?”

  I knew what she was doing. All three of us were obgynecas, trained in how to question patients about partner violence and unwanted sexual advances. I wanted to roll my eyes at her, but I managed to restrain myself.

  “Stars, Skyla, no. I’m still trying to make sense of this. It’s like it just happened a few minutes ago. I can't believe that Darwin took DiBest and attacked me. Really, though, how much time did we actually spend together? We worked weird hours. We weren’t home together that much, and he never wanted to go out in public. That should've been a clue.”

  I barged ahead, knowing I’d get under Neal’s skin. "I know how it is to come home tired and just want to bang one out and crash to sleep. He liked it that I was an adept martial artist, and I like things rough. But now that I think about it, it wasn’t ever gentle. There was never any tenderness with us. It was always just wild; up against the wall.”

  Neal cleared his throat awkwardly. Ha.

  “Soooo, was it a masochistic kind of thing? The Level 9, Level 2 power dynamics?” he wondered.

  I sighed, and I tried to think, but that was impossible with my skull splitting open and feeling loopy and out of touch. Was power dynamics part of it?

  “I dunno, guys. It wasn’t really like that. Darwin liked it that I was. . . assertive. The stronger I came on, the better. He always talked about how hot it was that I was Level 9.”

  And not that I was hot, but that my Jendo rank was hot. Ouch. That stung a bit. “So, maybe I was a trinket that he liked to have on his shelf. I don’t know, but obviously, I made some mistakes.”

  And I needed to get my head on straight because I was completely unable to judge who was good for me and who was not.

  Skyla said flatly, “Ryst Nova, this is not your fault.”

  "I know that, Sky. But I did marry him fast in a secret ceremony. And I didn’t even question the sanity of it. So, I messed up. I need to figure myself out, because I am never doing this”—I waved at my broken body—“again.”

  Then the water works started. I couldn’t keep up the quips and banter. It was all just too much. I didn’t even know why I was crying.

  Because everything hurt. Because I wasn’t going to be able to work for weeks.

  No catching babies. No surgery. Just endless days of doing nothing but thinking about how stupid I was.

  What I didn’t understand then was that I’d already started a journey that would take me far from Jensen Hospital and everything I’d ever known, and that was the best thing that could’ve happened to me.