Chapter 30
Kaiser
Bella is unconscious and won’t wake up. I’ve tried everything and now I’m panicking. There’s a roaring sound in my head, and the predator in me looks around for a threat, but there’s none in the sunny greenhouse.
My fingertips are red from where they touched Bella. I touch her again, using my opposite hand to wipe away more sweat, and after a few minutes, my skin starts to burn.
I have to think. She has to have been poisoned, right? I look around to see what Bella might have been working on, but there are no plants at her favorite workbench. It could be anything in this place.
The predator in me wants to smash every pot and kill everything with fire, but I need to be smart.
I call everyone I can think of. I even call the number for the Poisoner, but the line seems to be dead. I throw my phone across the room, where it lands in one of the mushroom trays. At least it didn’t shatter.
I need to get a hold of myself. I want to destroy everything. Instead, I go stand over Bella, watching for signs of her waking up. What else can I do? Jaeger roars up in his Lykan. He brought Atticus with him.
“Be careful not to touch her,” I say, showing them my hands.
Atticus frowns but wastes no time checking Bella over. “She’s in a coma. No sign of why. Heart rate is normal. Vitals, all normal. Temperature slightly elevated, but not enough to be concerned.”
“It has to be poison,” I say. “Can’t you give her medicine?”
“Not until I know what poisoned her. Inducing vomiting might cause more harm than good. When my team gets here, we’ll do bloodwork and run some tests. Did you contact the Poisoner?”
“I couldn’t get through.”
Atticus has me move Bella back to her bedroom, which is better suited for a sickroom. He sends Jaeger to call St. James and connect with Bella’s father. Then he turns to me. “Let me see your hands.”
I show them to him. The red has faded. The burning sensation is distant, like a sunburn.
“It looks like you touched a toxic plant.”
“I didn’t. I just touched her.”
“Could she have smeared something toxic on her skin? Like she was working with a plant and wiped her forehead, transferring it to her skin?”
“That’s probably it,” I tell him about how she touches poison ivy and other toxic plants. “She says she’s immune.”
“Hmmm.” Atticus takes a skin sample and offers me a salve and a bandage, which I refuse. I want all his attention focused on Bella.
Atticus’s assistants arrive. I recognize them as his submissives from Club Empire.
They must all have medical training. They surround Bella, drawing blood, setting up an IV.
They have all sorts of portable medical equipment.
St. James makes sure Atticus has an unlimited budget for this sort of thing.
Their ambulance-like van is like a lab on wheels.
Fraternitas members don’t go to hospitals. Hospital staff can be bribed, and Atticus is more skilled than any regular doctor. If anyone can save her, it’s him.
I watch from the doorway, feeling helpless.
Bella looks so small. So lifeless. Jaeger hovers at my shoulder.
He doesn’t touch me; he knows I can’t stand it.
But he stays close enough to make me feel like I’m not alone.
An assistant approaches Atticus and whispers in his ear. Atticus frowns. “What is it?” I ask.
“Her liver enzymes are slightly elevated,” Atticus says.
“What does that mean?” Jaeger asks.
“All signs are pointing to her being poisoned. I don’t think it’s just from wiping something toxic on her forehead, though. Could she have eaten something, drunk something poisonous?”
I flex my hands. I wish I could put my hands around an enemy’s neck and squeeze. “This whole house is filled with poisons. She’s the Poisoner’s daughter.” For fuck sake, she’s still poisoning me somehow. There’s no way I’d be sleeping so deeply every night if she weren’t.
And I’m letting her do it because I want her. I want everything from her. I’ll drink her poison down and ask for more.
“All right. We test everything. I can’t create an antidote unless I know what did this.
” Atticus gives his assistants instructions to take samples from all the plants downstairs.
“Be careful and collect anything else that might be poisonous. Solvents, cleaning solutions, room sprays, balms, lotions—”
“Candles,” I add to the list.
Atticus’s team leaves to search the house. Two head to the bathroom and start pulling bottles off the shower shelf.
“If it’s here, we’ll find it,” Atticus says.
“She handles poisonous plants all the time,” I say. “She knows the risks.”
“Maybe she was careless. You said she was distraught last night, right?” I close my eyes and nod.
“It could’ve been an accident. Or… would she poison herself?” I start to shake my head but stop. Why would Bella knowingly ingest poison? “Maybe she did, thinking she was immune.”
“Is there anyone who would want to incapacitate her? An enemy?”
The only enemies are the Vesuvios, and they prefer brute force to anything subtle like poisons. But there is someone with a knowledge of poisons she visited only yesterday. Someone who might want to drug her, to make sure she’s obedient to his will.
Benjiro Bosco. The Poisoner.
I’m out the door before Jaeger can shout for me to wait.
I drive at breakneck speed back to New Rome. Jaeger follows me in his car, but I use every maneuver I can to outpace him. By the time I pull up to the Bosco residence, he’s too far behind to stop me.
This place is a fortress, with bars over the window and layers of security, but there’s a side door that isn’t secure. I kick it in and sprint through the house, bursting into her father’s lab. “What did you do to her?”
The Poisoner looks up at me, surprised. “What do you mean?” I stalk toward him, every muscle taut and ready to fight. “Bella’s sick. Poisoned. She’s in a coma.” I loom over him. “Did you do it? Did you poison her?”
“I would never do anything to harm my daughter.”
“You did something. Or… you upset her… and she did something.” I grab him by the throat. He’s petite, like his daughter. It would take nothing to crush his throat like a soda can.
“Take your hands off me,” he says. His gaze is steely, but he sounds calm. There are shouts from the rooms upstairs. My brother has come, and he has reinforcements. They thunder down the stairs. Jaeger appears at the door with Asmodeus at his back.
“Kaiser, no,” Jaeger calls. “You can’t kill him.”
“Can’t I?” I squeeze until fear flickers in my future father-in-law’s eyes. The predator in me is roaring, dying to taste his blood.
“Atticus says we need him alive,” Jaeger says. “If she dies, you can kill him, alright?”
I release the Poisoner before he turns beet red. He bends over, heaving, and Jaeger and Asmodeus insert themselves between me and him. The Poisoner rubs his neck where I started to choke him. He swallows a few times and rasps, “What are her symptoms?”
“Here.” Jaeger holds up a phone. On the other end of the line, Atticus rattles off a bunch of information, including Bella’s vital signs. “Her temperature is also elevated. One hundred and one and rising. Her body is fighting something.”
The Poisoner sighs and straightens his shirt. He doesn’t seem too concerned about his daughter. Fucking father of the year. “It sounds like poison. But she likely did it to herself.”
“What?” Why would she poison herself?
“What do we do?” Atticus is asking.
“Nothing. This will probably pass,” the Poisoner says.
I’m still too stunned to speak. Why would Bella do this? She was broken up over Livia’s death, but I never thought it would come to this.
I think back over last night. Bella cried over Livia’s ashes. A woman she never knew but mourned like she was mourning her own mother. It was almost like she blamed herself for Livia’s death.
Is this her way of punishing herself?
I rub a hand over my face. Jaeger touches my shoulder briefly, bringing me back.
Atticus is asking the Poisoner to explain.
The Poisoner sighs and takes a seat on a nearby stool.
“Since she was little, she’s always been fascinated with poisons.
She was exposed to many of them at a young age.
When she was three, she crawled through a dog door and into the woods.
She was lost for half an hour. We searched everywhere and found her playing in a patch of poison ivy.
Her mother was horrified, but we monitored Bella, and she never had symptoms.
“When she was four, she figured out how to unlock the door to the greenhouse. She found a bucket of yew berries and ate as many as she could. Her skin turned red, and she fell into a fever, but after a long night, she woke up and was fine. Her body seems to process things differently.”
“Why wasn’t this in her medical records?” Atticus asks.
“Her mother had medical training. She called in a few favors, but we never took Bella to a hospital. We didn’t dare leave the safety of our home in case our enemies were lying in wait.”
“How many times did this happen?” I ask.
“Only once more.” He swallows as if he’s bracing himself against what he’s about to say next.
“The day her mother died, Bella was trapped for seven hours in a room with highly poisonous plants. She was unconscious with a fever for three days, but then she recovered fully. That was the last time it happened.”
“So you think she’ll be fine? If we do nothing?” Atticus asks.
“Keep her hydrated. Monitor her vitals.” The Poisoner shrugs. “Her mother kept journals—there might be something in them that will shed light on what Bella has done.”
What Bella has done. I don’t like how he talks about her. I clench my hands into fists. It would be so satisfying to punch him. Drive my fists into his face over and over, until his skull caves—
But I can’t. It won’t help Bella. It will hurt her.
Atticus says he wants to see the journals.
“I’ll dig them out of storage,” the Poisoner says. “And I can come and run some tests if you like—”
“No.” I move closer to him. Jaeger and Asmodeus block my way, and I ignore them. “She doesn’t want to see you.” I don’t want her to see you. The Poisoner nods, his expression resigned. “Let me know if I can help.”
“You’ve done enough,” I say. The way he speaks to her, I should cut out his tongue. The only thing stopping me is knowing Bella won’t like it. But she can’t stop me from threatening him.
I point at the Poisoner. “If she dies, I’ll kill you. Come near her and I’ll kill you. She’s not yours to protect anymore.”
I wait for him to shout at me or insist that Bella belongs to him, but he just nods.
I leave the room before the predator in me pounces, and I have to come up with a way to convince Bella that she’s better off with him dead.
Jaeger catches up with me on the stairs. He lopes along by my side. “What do you want to do?”
“I’m going home,” I say.
“I’ll drive.”
There are a few Fraternitas members standing around my car who straighten when I storm out of the house. They’re there to keep me from going on a rampage.
And suddenly, that’s all I want to do. I can’t kill the Poisoner, but I need to spill blood. My skin feels itchy, all over like it’s too tight.
I want to throw my head back and roar.
I round on my brother.
“Did you call them?” I ask.
“You can’t kill your father-in-law,” Jaeger says, annoyingly calm.
It’s the last straw. I charge him. He waits until the last second to duck me.
But I know his moves better than he does.
I taught them to him. I kick his shin. He goes down but hammers a blow to my knee.
I stagger, barely managing to stay upright.
He comes up and pops me in the face. Blood trickles in my eyes. It hurts, but it’s a good, clean pain. It cuts through the itchy feeling. It feels right.
I charge my brother again, roaring. I slam a haymaker into his jaw and two more into his gut before I realize he’s not trying to hit me back. He just takes the blows and straightens, his hands loose at his sides. I punch him in the face, but my heart isn’t in it.
This isn’t a fair fight. The predator snarls, wanting more, but I’m back in control.
I can’t kill my brother. I face him, chest heaving. We’re mirror images of each other. Identical. Even the black eye he just gave me matches the one I gave him.
The rest of my Fraternitas brothers have formed a loose circle around us. We’re on a public street in the middle of a nice neighborhood, putting on a free show.
I wipe the blood off my face. Jaeger resets his jaw.
I go to offer him my hand, and the men around us tense.
“It’s okay,” Jaeger says at the same time I say, “We’re good.”
We clasp hands. My knuckles throb from hitting him, but the pulsing pressure feels good.
“Your car or mine?” I ask.
“Mine.”
I get into Jaeger’s car without another word. A few minutes later, we’re roaring down the highway.
I feel him watching me, but he doesn’t say anything. He lets the silence hang between us. Leaving me to wrestle with the questions I don’t want to answer.
Did Bella try to kill herself? To escape me?
When we get back to the Metropolis house, Atticus takes one look at us and sighs. I’m no longer bleeding, but my black eye speaks for itself, and half of Jaeger’s face is swollen.
“How is she?” I say.
“Better than you. But no change.” Atticus doesn’t tell me that fighting is a waste of time and energy. He doesn’t have to. I know it in my bones.
I return to watching over Bella. I wish I were a better man, but I’m not. I wish I could deserve her.
But I never will.