Page 119 of Speechless
A nurse slipped into the room, quiet as a mouse, and performed the same checks on the equipment that Sarah had just done. He ignored her, ignored the fact Sarah moved around to talk to her colleague. He looked Zeke square in the eyes. “That damn dog deserves a fucking medal, Zeke. I’d have lost more than a shitload of blood without her.”
“I’m starting to see that.” Zeke shifted his stance and his attention flicked over to the women huddled around the IV stand, pointing at something on the automated system. “No matter what happens over the coming days, I need your word you won’t attempt to get into Jenna’s room, Connor. I’m working on getting you in there, but the family is resistant. I’ll get you what you want, but it has to be on their terms for now. Do you understand?”
He wasn’t an idiot. Perhaps seeing Jenna and making sure she was truly alive was worth more than taking his next breath, but even he wasn’t stupid enough to break into her room to do. At least, not stupid enough to get caught doing so…
“You can’t let them have control over her, Zeke. She’s a grown woman, an adult, and she’s been manipulated into surrendering herself for years.” Connor worked his tongue in his mouth, wondering why it suddenly felt thick and sluggish. “Jenna isn’t crazy. She isn’t insane, she just…”
His eyes rolled lazily to the side, blurring as they locked on Sarah. The other nurse, a mature lady with silvering red hair, walked out of the room, humming softly to herself. “Oh fuck, Sarah. Whatcha do that for?”
She gave him a sad smile and stroked her hand over his forehead as his eyes tried to flutter closed. He fought it, bearing down to stave off the sedation, to no avail. “I love you, Connor, but I don’t trust you. The moment our backs are turned, you’ll sneak off and cause a war.”
His lip twitched. Damn straight he would.
Just as soon as the drugs wore off.
*
“What aren’t you telling him, Zeke?”
Sarah continued to stroke Connor’s forehead even though he was well away with the faeries. A low blow, sedating him unawares, but if it kept him from making a huge mistake, it needed to be done. She’d spoken to Ilene Abernathy, Jenna’s mother, and disliked the woman on the spot. Aaron, her husband, wasn’t far behind his wife on the unlikability scale.
They were already making plans to have Jenna—Penelope, as they insisted on calling her—moved as soon as humanly possible to a medical facility in Denver. An undisclosed facility where Jenna would be admitted as a psychiatric patient for an unspecified period of time, and where Connor wouldn’t be able to find her.
Where Jenna would be lost in a prison not of her making.
Sarah trusted Zeke to make sure that didn’t happen, but if Connor found out, if he did anything to anger Jenna’s parents…she dreaded to think what would happen.
Zeke—the man she loved with everything she had inside her, the man who’d given her two precious sons, the man who gave her the world—looked her in the eyes and sighed. “This goes no further, Sarah.”
When he usedthattone of voice, she knew not to joke around. She nodded, her fingers pausing on Connor’s forehead as a sense of foreboding fell over the room. She didn’t like it, not one bit. The deathly silence implied something bad, and hadn’t they had enough bad shit to last a fucking lifetime?
Didn’t they deserve some semblance of a normal life in a small Montana town? They didn’t live in a big city, for God’s sake, they lived in Howler’s Creek where the total sum of residents could have filled a handful of blocks in a city. Shit like this shouldn’t happen here.
“The feds are looking into the possibility more deeply, but from certain things found in the main residence, it’s looking highly probable Sire wasn’t working alone—he either had a partner or a protégé.”
Sarah blinked twice. “Well, fuck. That’s bad.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ouch.
Despite the warmth and the softness of whatever cloud she drifted on, Jenna decided she didn’t like dying based purely on the fact her body was riddled with pain. She’d always believed death was supposed to be the end of pain, unless a soul ended up in hell and then, well, all bets were off.
If that were true, she was in hell.
Laying still didn’t pose a problem. Reluctant to move, to breathe, she gathered data from her body and came to the conclusion Sire had really done a number on her before he sent her plummeting to the next stage of her miserable existence.
It was easier to catalogue the three places on her body that didn’t hurt, rather than pinpoint all the areas that did.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Everything inside her ran cold at the sound. She knew it, feared it. There was only one place she could recall with a machine that made that noise, and it meant she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t in hell. She was somewhere far worse.
She tried to swallow, found her throat obstructed. Panicking, choking, she clawed at her neck with a hand bundled into a mitten. Her breath squeaked around the blockage, agony imploded through her chest like a grenade, and the machines went wild with alarms.
The racket speared through her head, made her face throb as she scrabbled desperately at the thing stopping her from taking a full breath.
“Penelope, darling, don’t fight it. Don’t fight it. Aaron! Aaron, get the nurse, a doctor!” An unfamiliar voice twined into the cacophony of noise and sent her panic rocketing. “Quickly!”