The Beloved, page 32
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Twenty minutes of hot water drilling on his skull later, Nate stepped out onto his bath mat and toweled himself off. Leaning over his sink, he cleaned the condensation off the mirror with a swipe and stared at himself. He looked like shit, his face pale, the whites of his eyes bloodshot, his lips pursed.
A ghost haunting himself. Oh, wait, his past was the specter stalking him.
He should have known that he’d have one of his really bad nightmares again. He’d never had a female he’d cared about in his bed before, he’d been kicked out of the Brotherhood’s fighting protocol, and the best friend he hadn’t had for thirty years had broken things off with him. Oh, and then there were his parents, and the fact that he was coming to understand what an absolute shithead he’d been to them. And Rahvyn.
And everything else.
Jesus, why couldn’t he just dream about wasps under his pillow? And why did he have to fall asleep in the first place—
“Because you didn’t sleep all day,” he muttered as he looped the towel around his hips. “You were too busy thinking about her.”
Over at the door, he braced himself. Nalla had to have questions, and all the answers he didn’t want to give her were going to be a wedge between them. She deserved some kind of explanation, but he knew, by the look in her eyes, the conclusions she’d come to were the accurate ones, even if she didn’t have all the details.
So did he really need to get personal about things…?
Yes, he fucking did. Because he cared about her more than he cared about himself, and his father was right. That transformed a person… and was the kind of self-improvement that made all the difference.
But God, he just couldn’t find the words.
Opening the door, he stepped out into the much cooler and drier open space, and looked to the bed.
She wasn’t in the messy sheets—
How could he have missed the smell of bacon, he wondered as his head snapped over toward his hot plate.
Nalla was standing with her back to him, the Oscar Mayer package open on the counter, along with the eggs and the loaf of bread that had yet to be called into service. She was in her turtleneck and jeans, but her feet were still bare and her hair was still loose down her back.
But she hadn’t left him. Yet.
Glancing toward the steps up to the cabin, he told himself not to dwell on the fact that she’d hung her parka off of the end of the railing, and positioned her snow boots right under all that Patagonia.
He went over and took out a fresh pair of jeans from his dresser. After pulling them on, he grabbed a t-shirt to cover up his torso.
“Can you set out plates?” she asked without looking back at him.
“Sure.” He rubbed his palms on his thighs and headed for his shelf. “Thanks for cooking.”
Shit, he only had the one place setting. And no table to set any places on. He always just ate standing up at the stove when he was here.
“How do you like your eggs?” she asked.
“Any way you make ’em.”
“Scrambled it is.”
They didn’t talk again until she was passing him a plateful. Or trying to.
“You keep that, I’m eating out of the pan.” He nodded across the way. “And you can have my chair and the fork. I’ll use the spoon.”
“I’ll accept the fork, but I’ll trade you the chair. I’m used to eating at the counter at Luchas House.”
Fine, he’d take the chair.
As they assumed their positions and ate in silence, he realized how the clinking of forks and spoons (or rather, fork and spoon) on plates (or rather, plate and pan) was lonely when there was someone else with you. When it was just yourself? Well, you were watching something stupid on your phone, or it was like the sound of your own breathing—the kind of thing you didn’t notice.
When they were finished, he got up first and took her plate to the sink. At least he’d thought to get groceries. Like the clean sheets, he’d wanted to be prepared without taking for granted.
“It’s getting closer to dawn,” he said as he started to run water over the plate and pan.
“I’ll go.”
“I’m not rushing you off.”
“Okay.”
He cut the water and turned around.
Fuck. She was all the way over at the stairs. Ten feet up those steps and with an opening of that hatch—and he was suddenly worried he would never see her again.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Nalla finally looked at him, really looked at him, and her yellow eyes weren’t mad. They had a vivid kind of grief in them. And he didn’t want that for her. Even though there was the temptation to get frustrated over the fact that he’d fallen asleep, to think that maybe if he’d stayed awake, he could have spared her, he needed to get real. Sooner or later, that shit from the lab was going to come out.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” she said.
“I don’t know what to say about my past.”
Oh, shit, was he really going there—
Fuck it, yes he was.
“I don’t talk about it because when I do, those memories take over everything—and I don’t want you to look like you do right now, like you’re in mourning or something. I’m still here. I’m still alive.”
“I know you are.” She put her hand over her heart. “I just had no idea what you’ve been through. I am so sorry, Nate. So… sorry.”
Something about the compassion she offered cracked him right open, and before he could stop himself, his mouth was going, the speed of his words increasing until they were a blur.
“What happened in that lab is the kind of thing that gets away from me. Even now, all these years later. Like, I get into an elevator at a scene down in the field or my arm gets caught in a coat sleeve? Suddenly, I’m locked in a cage and I can’t get out and I know they’re coming for me again. Or maybe it’s that antiseptic smell, you know, the one in clinics?” He snapped his fingers, the sound loud as a slap in the tense silence between them. “I’m back there, in the lab, and they’re cleaning up after I’ve vomited because they’re trying to give me lung cancer, and they can’t figure out why I’m not getting it, so they’ve pumped me full of human cells and my body’s rejecting them. If I bleed? Because I’m injured? I just remember coming around on the table because the anesthesia they gave me didn’t work and I could feel them cutting open my stomach so they could look at my liver firsthand. And here’s the bitch about it. It takes nothing to pop the top off that jar, and hours or nights to get it all stuffed back down again.”
He glanced down at her feet. Looked at his own. Had some kind of absurd, magical thinking that surely, because they were both not wearing shoes or socks, that meant that she wasn’t going to bolt out of his crappy little home and never come back again…
… because his shit was too heavy for even a compassionate, professionally trained social worker like herself.
“So yeah,” he finished hoarsely, “I just don’t know what to say without going into the swamp of it all—and really, who needs that.”
“I don’t blame you for wanting to keep it private. But I’m glad you’ve told me.”
“I would have preferred to keep it to myself.”
Their back-and-forth was stilted, and like she recognized that, too, she said, “Look, I’m not going to feed you some kind of line that talking about what happened to you will make it all better. But I’m not scared of your past. I hate it, and I hate what it does to you, but I’m not running, just so we’re clear.”
“Thanks.”
Those were, of course, the right words. But her composure was almost professional-grade. So maybe she saw him as a client now, instead of a male, a project to work on, instead of a partner.
Just what he wanted.
As the silence grew even heavier, he wanted to break it, but as God was his witness—or Lassiter, as it were—he could not think of what to say. His mind was a total blank. Well, empty of words. Like an engine trying to turn over, images from the lab kept flickering into his consciousness and replacing the world around him.
So that he couldn’t see her through them.
Eventually, she said, “It’s about four a.m. I, ah, I think I’m going to take off.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Utter exhaustion sucked him down, but it wasn’t the kind that was cured with sleep. “Can I give you my number?”
“Oh, yes, please.”
How they had gone from where they’d been in his bed before they’d fallen asleep to these one-syllable answers, he had no clue.
Oh, wait. He knew why.
She got her phone out of her parka and held it up. “New one, same number.”
“Vishous is good like that.”
“He’s had to replace a lot of broken cells for sure.” As he read the number of his burner phone out to her, she entered it. “Got it.”
“Okay.”
As she started to put on her jacket, he wanted to tell her to stop. That she should stay. That maybe he’d find his voice later. Shame and shock and sorrow kept him locked in, though—another cage that existed only in his mind, but worked just fine to pen him in—and the harder he tried to pull something coherent out of his ass, the worse the paralysis got.
Her boots went on too quickly. “So, I guess I’ll be going.”
“Thanks. For coming here.”
“Thanks again for Amore.”
“Anytime.”
And then he was giving her some lame-ass wave, and she was turning away to the steps. He found that he couldn’t even move so he could go over and open the hatch for her, but she knew what to do. Then again, it wasn’t brain surgery.
After she stepped out, the sound of the hatch locking back into place was like the top of a coffin, and as he glanced around, the fact that he was underground made sense. This place was like a grave, and though he was going to live forever, it felt like he was dead.
Without Nalla, he supposed he was. Bonded males were like that.
Fucking hell. Those goddamn humans in that lab had now robbed him not only of one of his two mahmen… but of the other most important female in his life.
His true love.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Even though the Brothers had relocated their living quarters off the mountain, the Brotherhood’s clinic was still up there, a main anchor of the subterranean training center that was still used regularly for all its components. The medical facility, with its OR and examination rooms, was just too expensive and hard to move.
Plus, from what Bitty had heard, Uncle Vishous had built the clinic as an engagement present for Doc Jane. And just like you didn’t toss out a diamond ring because you bought a watch, a surgeon like that Brother’s shellan wasn’t walking away from a couple million dollars of state-of-the-art equipment and supplies.
As Bitty re-formed in a forest of pines, she was instantly racked with disorientation—and it was always like this. On the rare occasions she came back onto the property, the mhis that buffered the landscape and made it impossible for trespassers to find their way always made her wobbly. Which was how it worked.
But she had the right coordinates, so she knew where she was.
The structure she had come for was just off to the left, and as she closed in, she had to smile. An outhouse, faithfully re-created to look old, even sporting a half-moon in the door. “The shitter,” as Uncle Butch called the thing. It wasn’t until you tried to open it up that you realized what looked rickety was solid as a frickin’ rock, all the off-kilter as carefully made as a stage set for a movie.
And needless to say, you didn’t get in unless you were allowed.
As she put her gloved hand on the pull, she looked up to the slit in the door where the tiny camera was. Not more than three seconds later, the locking mechanism was sprung and she was able to step in. The panel, which was wooden on the outside, and steel on the inside, closed on its own and relocked. Then the floor started a descent.
She was always surprised, given how cooped up she was in the tight space, that they’d made the thing this small. But the Brothers didn’t use this remote entry.
No way her father could get in here, that was for sure.
There was a bump as things bottomed out, and she knew she had to wait. The door would only open when it was ready.
“Thank you,” she said to the security person as she stepped out.
The windowless, doorless steel room she now found herself in was bombproof, or so she’d been told, and the whirring sound was a HEPA-filtered, self-contained, negative airflow system in the event of a chemical attack. She’d never been able to find the cameras, but they were somewhere—and she could never really locate the door until it opened, either—
Oh. Right in front of her.
“Thanks again,” she called out.
On the far side, the training center’s parking area was multi-leveled and largely empty, just a couple of blacked-out vans angled butt-first in their spaces—oh, and a blacked-out school bus that looked like it was delivering pupils to an academy for pool sharks and loan enforcers. As she walked over to the reinforced entrance into the training center proper, her footfalls echoed around in a way that would have creeped her out if she hadn’t been in a Brotherhood’s facility.
But she was super safe here. Nobody got this far unless they were allowed.
At the fortified steel door, she had to wait again, and then she was permitted to pass into the concrete corridor that ran the length of the training center.
Now the nerves hit, and to distract herself, she got walking and glanced into the classrooms that were dormant. Waves of trainees had gone through the Brothers’ program and received all kinds of instruction, but the classes were staggered, sometimes by whole calendar years, and she didn’t know when the next one started. There would be a new crew coming in at some point, though.
The war with the Lessening Society demanded it.
The clinic was about halfway down, right before the weight and locker rooms, and as she reached the series of closed doors, she wasn’t sure what to do.
Or really even why she was here.
Well, she’d overheard her father talking about how much fun he’d had posing as a cop downtown—and then he’d mentioned his “precious cargo” as he’d called it.
So now she was here—
“Hey, stranger. Twice in one week, what’re the chances.”
Swinging around, she smiled. “Hi, Shuli—oh, wow.”
The guy was in a set of red silk PJs and coordinating silk robe, a pair of monogrammed velvet slippers peeking out under the hemmed bottoms. He also had a medical supply cane braced against the floor, and as he came closer, his limp was such that he probably shouldn’t have been out of whatever bed he’d been assigned. His hair, which was usually styled with a swoop, had been combed back wet, straight from his aristocratic face, as if he was fresh out of the shower.
He certainly smelled that way, some kind of expensive cologne or shaving cream wafting toward her.
“Like my hospital duds?” He went to do a little turn, but then winced and seemed to rethink the effort. “My doggen brought them in.”
“Very spiffy.”
His handsome face tightened. “You’re not here to see me, are you.”
“Oh, of course I am. I heard my father—”
“Got me and L.W. out of the field.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Shuli took a deep breath. “He’s right in there. The door you’re standing in front of.”
Before Bitty could say anything to make it look less like she’d come uninvited to see a male she really had no business visiting, Shuli smiled.
“I’m going to get back in bed. The break room’s enticements are not as enticing as I thought they’d be. Fucking Percocet. Always messes my stomach up.”
The fighter continued muttering about how he’d prefer a bottle of bourbon as he headed into the patient room next door.
And then she was by herself.
Before anybody else came along—although it wasn’t like this whole thing wasn’t being recorded anyway—she knocked on the door.
“Yeah?” came the deep voice on the other side.
“It’s… um, me. Bitty?”
There was a pause, and yup, it was entirely possible L.W. was going to send her packing. Except then she heard something that sounded a lot like—
“So I can come in?” she asked.
“Yeah. I’m waiting.”
Pushing inside, she had a quick visual of the hospital bed he was on, the vitals monitor he was plugged into, and the IV bag that was tubed into his arm. And then it was all about the male who was lying back on those pale blue and white sheets: L.W. had no top on, his tattoos and his muscles out of place on the pristine bedding, not because he was dirty, but because he was the kind of thing that looked like it would sleep on a bed of nails.
There were a lot of bandages. On his shoulder. On his side.
And his eyes were not as focused as they usually were. They were still that beautiful pale green, though, and they were, as usual, on her.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay?” She hesitated. “I don’t mean to intrude or anything.”
L.W. shook his head and shrugged with his hands. “You’re not. What’m I doing here. Just marking time until all this is fixed.”
“You’re not stitched up?”
“Not yet. Manny says I need surgery. My liver’s leaking or something. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. He’ll take care of me soon enough.”
His sentences were short, likely because even with the drugs, he was in pain. Other than that ever so subtle shift in speech, though, you’d never know he was so badly injured.
“You’re so brave about being cut open.” She winced. “Okay, that was a stupid thing to say. I mean, if I were facing surgery, I’d be terrified—”
Shut up, Bitty.
The smile that hit L.W.’s face was… transformative, making him look closer to his actual age. As opposed to something that was ancient and tired of the world.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve gone under. The knife a lot of times. With Manny. He’s amazing. I’m really not. Worried about it.”
