Wholehearted Read Online Free

can try to fill in some of the blanks and you let me know if anything comes back to you, okay?” Declan turned to Kathy. “Is that all right?”
    “We can try it, but if it seems like Mr. Hale is getting too stressed, I’ll have to get you to stop.”
    “Okay,” Declan agreed. The last thing he wanted to do was to agitate Lucas, but now that he was awake, Declan was up too and wanted to catch the bastards who had hurt him. “We found you badly beaten on the docks. You were barely breathing. The medics think you had a punctured lung, and what appeared to be a knife wound in your abdomen. Is that right?” Declan looked to Kathy for verification.
    Kathy consulted the chart. “Yes, a deflated lung, caused by puncture from one of your ribs, three of your other ribs are fractured. Your right arm is broken in two places, your shoulder was dislocated. You had a knife wound to your abdomen that required surgery, but the surgery went flawlessly, and they were able to repair the damage to both your abdomen and your lung. You have multiple contusions on the rest of your body and they were concerned about intracranial swelling, but you should be out of the woods for that at this point. In a word, you were lucky.”
    “I don’t feel very fucking lucky,” Lucas muttered.
    “Well you are,” Kathy stated. “If Deputy Grant hadn’t called the medics when he did, you might not be sitting up talking to us right now. Things might have ended very differently.”
    Declan shivered at the thought. “Our next step is to try to figure out who did this to you and why. Once we have that information, we can decide how to move forward.”
    “I’m not pressing charges.”
    “It doesn’t matter whether you’re going to press charges or not. The assault was severe. The case went from civil to criminal the second your life was in danger.”
    “But I am the one that was hurt, and I said I don’t want to press fucking charges.”
    “The state will press charges regardless of what you want to do.”
    “Fuck that. It was me who was beat up, it should be me who decides if I want the fucking cops involved, and I don’t, so you can just get the fuck out.”
    “All right,” Kathy interjected. “I think that’s probably enough for tonight. You get some rest and let your body heal. My name’s Kathy, and I’m on for the rest of the night. Kim is on in the morning, and she’s a sucker for cute boys, so you bat those long eyelashes of yours at her, and she’ll be putty in your hands. In the meantime, if you need anything, you just call for me with this button here.” She reached down beside his bed and retrieved the call button. “How are you feeling now? Are you in any pain?”
    Declan’s temper was piqued, but he tried to remain calm. He paced back and forth across the room as Kathy worked her magic. He crossed and uncrossed his arms, forcing his hands to unclench at his sides. It wouldn’t do any good to get angry about this. He had worked enough domestic cases to recognize when a victim was backing down out of fear. He didn’t intend to let that happen here.
    “A little,” Lucas admitted.
    “On a scale of one to ten, one being no pain at all and ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt?”
    “About a six.”
    “All right. We want to keep you somewhere around a four or lower if possible.” She consulted Lucas’s chart. “The doctor has okayed you for a morphine drip, so I’m going to give you a dose now, and you let me know if you’re feeling any better in a bit, all right?”
    “Okay.”
    “We just want you better, so you concentrate on that and let me take care of the rest.”
    Kathy fiddled with his IV line and then left the room. Declan was glad she hadn’t said anything about him staying way past visitors hours.
    Lucas had turned his attention from the doorway back to Declan. “You’re the cop that found me?”
    “Yeah.”
    “How bad was it?”
    Declan tried to swallow past the lump in his throat. He