A few days had passed since the standoff at Kurisu’s club. For most of the week, Kari had been in bed trying to recover after taking a bullet. The sunlight began to creep through the blinds and towards her face. Finally, after a few days of barely being conscious, she had forced her eyes open to see she was in old bedroom. A cloud of dust floated through the rays of light and towards her face, causing her to let out a quick cough.

The sudden reaction had caused a sharp pain to run across her abdominal region. She gritted her teeth and pulled the blanket down to her waist to see bandages over her wound. The inside of the room had a brown carpet and an old dresser with a mirror across from it. There rest a chair across the room and a small nightstand next to her. After a few moments, she suddenly recalled the location.

This is where I made my oath, she started to remind herself. This was the same place her and the others had hid when she botched the mission to kill Isamu. She finally stood to see herself in the mirror. By her bed, there was an IV stand with a tube going down into her right hand. She grabbed onto the needle still protruding from it and pulled it free before walking towards a bath robe sitting on a coat rack.

“Andrew, are you here?” Kari called out as she slid her arms into the robe. She gently fastened the belt around her waist and looked towards the mirror. Her face had still been bruised from the beating she had taken days earlier. After leaning into it, she pulled down her eye lids to see most of the blood vessels in her left eye had burst.

Beats being dead, she tried to be optimistic. The pain in her abs had felt just a bit more bearable as she started to walk around the house. In the living room, she had found the same old table where she had remembered confronting Kurisu and the others.

“I’m done,” she muttered as the thoughts of that day started to play out again. She could hear Brian and Kurisu arguing in her head like before. “I killed the wrong person.”

She sat down at the table and started to replay everything past that point. At first, Andrew and the others had been disappointed to hear her want to walk away. Once she had taken an oath, they had to accept this reality. The pain in her stomach began to surge while she bent forward. She gritted her teeth once more and tried to lean back into the chair before noticing the front door starting to open.

“Hey you,” Andrew said softly as he stepped inside the cabin. He had a few plastic bags filled with groceries in his left hand while the right had started to guide the door shut. “You shouldn’t be out of bed so soon. You still need to take time to heal.”

“I’m fine, I can’t stand lying in bed all day.” She replied.

“I know, everybody hates it,” he walked over towards the counter by the sink and dropped the bags off as he spoke. He then started to make his way over to her to put his hands on her shoulders. “Come on, let’s get you back into bed already.”

“I just got here,” she groaned before shrugging free from his grip. “Can’t you give me a break?”

“Come on, don’t make me drag you into bed.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

“Do you really want me too? I will.”

Kari went silent and bowed her head. After sighing, she tried to stand up once more. The pain had locked her in place, forcing Andrew to have to help pull her from the chair. She let out a quick yelp which had made him laugh.

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“I wish you didn’t take out the IV,” he said before letting out a grunt. She lifted her arm over his shoulder to help prop herself up. “I was lucky enough to get you to a doctor out here in the country. If I took you to the hospital in the city, we’d both be behind bars right now.”

“You took me to a hospital?” she replied. Andrew had helped walk her back into the room and back over to the bed.

“Yeah, it’s really hard to find a doctor who can do what needed to be done to you that can do it with a scalpel and rubbing alcohol, trust me,” he assured her. Kari slowly lowered herself into the bed and let Andrew pull the covers up to her waist. “You were struck in the small intestines, and they had to do a bypass or something like that. It’s a miracle you didn’t bleed out and even more so you were let out so soon.”

“What can I say,” she felt another sharp pain rush through her. After coughing a few times and trying to shift her focus, she turned back to him. “I’m in too much pain to crack a joke.”

“I’ve got something for that, but I dunno if you are into painkillers,” he stood up and made a quick trip towards the counter across the cabin. He then shouted from the kitchen, “I got some morphine, it might be a little too heavy for you.”

“I’ll take anything, just give it to me.”

He had finally returned a few moments later with a glass of water and a small pill bottle. After placing them down on the night stand next to her, he walked over to the chair across the room and pulled it up to her.

“I know you don’t want to talk about this now,” Andrew started to speak after sitting next to her. “However, we really need to start discussing our options because Paradiso is gone. If we set another foot inside of it, we’re done.”

“What are we going to do about money?”

“After your hospital bills, we still have some money left over from the pickup.”

“Thank God,” Kari let out a sigh of relief before pulling her hand up over her face. “At least we got something out of all of that. What do you suggest we do?”

“It’s not the best plan, but we have around four hundred thousand now. That type of money might not seem a lot for this lavish life, but we can take that and what I have and leave the country,” he stopped for a moment as Kari lowered her hand to look at him. The disappointment had been visible from the cold stare she gave him. “I know it’s not what you want to hear, but what choice do we even have at this point?”

Kari lowered her head back into the pillow and stared up to the ceiling before saying, “That’s a big decision.”

“What else are we supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged and started to stare up towards the plaster ceiling. “There’s just a lot going through my head.”

“Well, why not you sleep on it?” he asked before patting the bed and rising to his feet. While he started to walk away, Kari had reached over to the bottle of morphine to retrieve a tablet.

“What day is it?” she called out, stopping him before he could walk through the door.

“Thursday, you’ve been under for the last week,” he replied. He slowly began to turn to face her before adding, “Why?”

Kari took a quick sip of the water after trying to force the morphine. She gritted her teeth put the glass back on the counter before saying, “Nothing.”

I want Isamu, I want to shove my gun down his throat, she tried to refrain from saying anything about it to him. She then said, “I don’t want to be in this bed all week.”

“You don’t have to, just rest now and we’ll start walking tomorrow.” He said before stepping back through the door.

Kari stared back up to the ceiling and tried to close her eyes. She wanted to get up and go back into the city to try and settle things. For now, she had tried to slip back into a dream and rest her head for the next level.