Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CASPER
You would have thought I’d be used to waking up in some hospital bed with a tube down my throat and a buncha machines keeping me alive.
And you’d be right. I was used to it. If there were a god up there somewhere, he wasn’t ready for me and neither was the devil.
So fuckers kept playing hot potato, tossing me back and forth until the music stopped and I landed somewhere in the middle.
This was that middle. The makeshift hospital room Lambo had set up in Briarwood. No matter how much he and the other docs thought they were god, they weren’t. They were his lackeys and I was his dirty work.
“One of these days, I’m not gonna be around to save you, you know,” Bossman huffed. He had that disappointed dad tone down pat.
I grinned, attempting to force some smart-ass remark out but my throat was having none of it.
Bossman grinned wider. “Guess I should thank your little friend for that. Gonna be a lot quieter around here for the next few weeks.”
I quirked a brow. He knew what I was asking. He knew my every expression. Just like I knew his.
Instead of answering, he pushed off where he was propped up against the wall watching me, closing the distance until he was leaning over the bed.
He adjusted a few of the wires and tugged on the straps on my wrists.
He’d learned quick if he didn’t tie me down, I would be ripping everything out.
And then he would be stuck fixing the damage I’d done twice over.
He could have just left me to choke, or bleed, or OD on whatever toxin was working its way through my system.
But he couldn’t help himself. The doc was a fixer.
Not in the empathetic way. It went back to the part of him that thought he was a god and that part of both of us that knew he wasn’t.
Franks wasn’t much different. Even if neither of ?em would admit it, they were shades of the same delusional gray.
Bossman was prettier, though. He had that grumpy old man charm about him. Barely even noticed the white hairs unless I was pointing them out…
He bent over to check the tube popping from my neck, and I went to pluck a few of those whites loose for him, only to stop and glance down at my wrist again. Oh, right. That.
I looked back up at the side of his head, and as if sensing me staring, the vain fucker eyed his reflection in the stainless-steel cabinets.
“Stop calling me old. I’m not even forty yet,” he grumbled under his breath.
I twisted one of my hands to point to my throat. I didn’t call you anything.
“Tell me how you’re even more irritating now,” he asked, and I shrugged.
The way I saw it, I wasn’t the problem here. His subconscious and whatever blanks he was filling in on his own were.
That sounds like some deep-rooted psychological shit, Doc. Maybe it’s the fear of being inadequate because wifey married your brother first.
“She chose me in the end,” he grunted. “She’ll always choose me in the end.”
Yeah, then how did you know that was what I was thinking if you weren’t thinking it too?
That was what I would have asked him if I could have asked him anything.
But I couldn’t. All I could do was continue to listen to him talk to himself.
Which was probably worse than anything I could say to him.
People’s heads were dark places. It was why none of us liked being alone with our thoughts.
When he was done going down whatever black hole of insecurities currently had him spiraling, the bossman schooled his features.
Back to the man I remembered the first time I met him in a room not too different from this one.
A med student with a stick up his ass and a burner phone in his pocket.
Then he straightened his tie and tucked his hands into his coat, that easy way he did whenever he was hiding something or whenever he thought you were hiding something and he’d just figured it out.
“She’s gone, by the way.”
My smirk dropped, just a smidge before I could stop it. Usually I was good at predicting what someone was about to say, and that wasn’t it. I tilted my head to the side as much as I could do with the brace on.
“How?” he asked and immediately answered himself, “Easy. Trixie’s always been… how do I put it?” He paused like he was trying to find the right word. He wasn’t. He was fucking with me like I fucked with him. “Resourceful.”
He continued to watch my face, analyzing my reaction. We’d done this before too. More than once over the years. The difference? It had been a long time since he had information I didn’t have first, and he was gloating about it.
“Grew up in the same house. Well, I grew. Trix stayed about the same size.” He laughed while pulling one of his hands out of his coat and gesturing to his chest. “Always was a sick little thing, in and out of hospitals, paraded in front of doctors—none of them quite as brilliant as me, of course.”
Of course. I rolled my eyes.
“If they were, they would have treated her with sodium oxybate, instead of assuming the insulin deficiency was causing all her symptoms. They are treating her now though. Or someone is.” He turned to walk out the door, stopping before he crossed the threshold and peering back at me over a shoulder.
“It’s why the gamma-hydroxybutyrate you stole out of my pharmacy didn’t work on her.
Her body’s built up a tolerance. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? ”
He was talking about all the drugs I’d snorted over the years and the reason a lot of sedatives didn’t work on me anymore. And he was letting me know he knew what I’d been up to. Problem was, I didn’t care what he knew. Or what he thought he knew.
We all knew more than we were letting on around here. Didn’t matter unless you were going to do something about it and it was clear the bossman wasn’t.
He was going to sit back and see how it played out. Which told me he’d been pulling everyone’s puppet strings all along. I just didn’t know why.
Yet…