MARGARET ASHFORD'S POV
The intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital was too bright, too sterile, too cold. Margaret Ashford sat in a chair beside her daughter's bed, holding Victoria's left hand....the only one that wasn't wrapped in bandages and stabilized with metal pins.
The right hand was a mangled mess. The doctors had been blunt: extensive nerve damage, shattered metacarpal bones, severed tendons. They'd done emergency surgery to try to save function, but the prognosis wasn't good. Victoria might never regain full use of that hand.
And the left wasn't much better. The spike had gone clean through the palm, damaging the flexor tendons and median nerve. Which means that more surgery would have to be done.
Margaret looked at her daughter's face....swollen, bruised, one eye completely shut from the beating she'd endured. Her jaw was wired shut from the fracture. Her nose had been reset but would never look the same.
