Chapter 41
Ash
Jonas transports me to a different location, leaving me strapped to the gurney in a room that looks oddly like a morgue. There are silver operating tables and rolling carts covered in sharp tools. Everything in here is spotless and sterile, just like the hospital.
“How long will this take?” Jonas asks, handing off the cryogenic tank with both mine and Adrian’s semen in it.
The threat that tank represents has rewritten my own worst nightmare all over again.
This is why I hate trying to predict the depths of my father’s cruelty. It’s always deeper than you think.
I’m soaked in sweat now, frozen in a drug-induced hell where I’m awake, but only in my mind. Without Widow here, it’s easy to be tempted by despair. I want to believe Scarlett will come for me, but…maybe it’s best she doesn’t.
“Two to four hours, Mr. Kelly,” a nurse says, wearing pink scrubs and a pink mask instead of the pale blue the staff at the hospital had on.
Where am I? I try desperately to curl my fingers into a fist. Something.
Anything. I just don’t want to feel helpless anymore.
If I’m going to die, I won’t do it whimpering and still.
No matter how bad this gets, I’m going to keep fighting.
I have a frog stuffie. I have a real frog. I have friends and backup and brothers.
I have a wife.
My wife.
Scarlett. Doki-doki. I should’ve left you well alone when I saw you. I knew better than to think that I would ever be able to love someone and not watch them suffer because of it.
“Fine. That’s just fine. My flight is at six, so that should leave plenty of time to get to the airport.” Jonas is shrugging out of his jacket. As I watch, he strips out of his clothes completely and rinses off in the shower that’s in the corner.
While he’s doing that, I’m stripped naked by the staff and washed by hand, with rags and iodine.
Keep thinking about Scarlett, about the way her hand feels when your fingers are wrapped around it. The scent of her. That cocky smile. Fight, Ash! I try again to squeeze my hand into a fist and fail.
Jonas slips into a hospital gown and climbs onto an operating table on the opposite side of the room.
Time moves so slowly inside my head, a prisoner in my own body. All I can do is wait as both Jonas and I are given injections, given IVs, hooked up to machines. He’s knocked out with anesthesia. I’m left awake.
We’re wheeled into the operating room together and surrounded by medical professionals.
I’m staring up at the ceiling, at all the bent heads and the white lights. Awake and aware, able to feel pain.
Tears—definitely tears this time—pour down my face as a four inch cut is made above my pubic bone. The physical agony is sublime torture. Because I can’t move, the press of the scalpel into my flesh is more intense than any pain I’ve ever felt. And believe me, over the years, I’ve felt it all.
It’s nothing compared to the emotional and mental anguish, lying here comatose knowing that Widow is experiencing this same thing somewhere else. Our future babies. The babies we were supposed to give to Scarlett. Where is Scarlett?! Bohnes and Alexei. Scarlett. Widow.
I’m trying to scream, but as usual, it doesn’t come out of my body.
It stays on the inside, a haunting specter that ricochets through my bones and is echoed in my too-wide eyes.
They’re dry and dripping, all at the same time.
I can’t close them. My lids have been taped. I’m not allowed to close them.
The blade goes deeper and my body starts to convulse, seizing on the table as something intrinsic inside of me is cut away.
I’m held down by a dozen hands, locked in place while my insides are carved up.
There’s a part of me there, inside that open wound, that I’ve lived all my life without ever noticing… until it’s being severed.
The scream inside gets louder, and the tears waterfall down my cheeks. I’m seizing harder now, thrashing around as my body is plundered and ravaged. My kidney. He’s finally getting that kidney, isn’t he? I’m conscious enough to see the organ lifted out of my lower abdomen and carted away.
A heart transplant. Widow. Scarlett. Bohnes. Alexei. Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.
Unconsciousness sweeps over me, but it doesn’t last. I’m woken up with another drug, just in time to be dragged from the operating table and thrown into a cage.
A literal cage.
Naked.
With four inches of stitches in my lower belly.
The effects of the initial drug are wearing off just enough that I’m able to move my head. I look down and see the perfect surgical wound and its careful bandaging. I’m not going to die here today.
Jonas isn’t going to kill me, not yet.
Oh God, no. All I want is to die, reaching a trembling hand down to my stomach and wondering if I shouldn’t plunge my fist in there. Maybe I could kill myself if I widen the wound, bleed out on the floor of a dog cage in the pitch-black.
Keep holding on, Ash. Just don’t stop. Keep fighting.
Bohnes did it. I can do it, too. I can do it, no matter how much this hurts.
I try to curl up into a ball, but the pain is too much. All that ends up happening is that I lie there on my back, sweaty and half-dead.
Scarlett. Bohnes. Alexei. Widow. Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.
Providence, divine guidance.
If such a thing exists, then the four of them will live—even if I can’t be saved.