Chapter 42
forty-two
I stand nervously outside her new room. She can’t see me through the one-way mirror, but from the way she tilts her head and stares at it, I have no doubt she knows I am here.
Her hands are folded neatly on her lap as she waits patiently in the room while the nurse looks over her vitals and gently murmurs at her, asking her questions and testing her memory and awareness.
My mother looks frail and thin sitting up in the hospital bed.
Even with the Botox injections and daily stretching, her muscles have atrophied with the passing of time.
Dr. Radick explains that she will need extensive physical and speech therapy in order to recover fully from her ordeal.
But the prognosis of a full recovery is good, and that is all that matters.
Time is no object anymore.
Even with the threat of Sheila and Remus out there.
“She won’t be able to say much for a little while,” Radick informs me.
“Her voice box is slightly damaged from all the endotracheal tubes she had to endure over the years and also from disuse. The propofol might have messed with her memory slightly, so do not be surprised if there are gaps. It is all right if you fill her in, but if you can, try to let her remember them on her own. Guide her, but don’t force her. Yes?”
I nod at him numbly, my eyes still not believing that she is awake. She has a slight smile on her face as she continues to stare straight at me, sensing me as she always did when I was a child.
“Can I see her now?”
Dr. Radick gives me a broad smile and nods toward the door. “After you.”
Without a backward glance, I rush through the door and to her side. It takes everything in me not to throw myself into her embrace and weep like I am a child again. I know she can’t take that, but it doesn’t stop the river of tears from sliding out of my eyes.
And I was going to be so put together for her.
She smiles up at me, her eyes shining brightly.
“M..mo…ch..roi.”
My heart.
“Mama.” My lower lip trembles, and I gently take her hand in mine. It is cold and listless, but it won’t be that way for long.
“Sit, Red.” Matthias pulls up a chair next to the bed and guides me to sit. I don’t protest. My mother’s eyes glance up at him with interest before settling back on me.
“She’s been awake for almost three hours now,” Dr. Radick tells me with pride in his voice. “Your mother is a fighter.”
“My wife had to get it from somewhere.” Matthias smirks. At the word wife, my mother’s eyebrows bury themselves in her hairline. My husband grimaces. “Sorry, Krasnyy.” Guilt washes over him, but I wave it away. There will be no hiding anything from her.
“It’s okay.” I drag my gaze away from my mother to smile up at him. “No secrets.” Matthias nods, repeating the phrase that has become a staple since he returned from the dead.
“A…a…” My mother’s eyes mist over as she stares at me longingly.
“It’s okay, Mama,” I whisper, placing her hand against my warm cheek. “Everything is going to be okay now. I am so sorry for everything.”
Then the gates holding back the flood open.
“I can’t believe you were alive this whole time,” I sob earnestly, clutching her hand to me like a lifeline, afraid that if I let go, she will disappear.
Tears track down her face, sorrow imprinting itself in every fine line.
The nurse gently wipes at my mother’s cheeks, but the moisture keeps pooling.
“How long will the listlessness last?” Matthias asks Radick as I weep.
“She still has a good amount of the cocktail in her system,” he says. “Propofol, which is the most recent drug the facility was using, has a short half-life, but since she has been receiving it continually for so long, it could take up to twenty-four hours for it to completely clear her body.”
“And the other drugs?”
Radick waves it off. “Minimal,” he assures us. “It looks like whenever she started to wake or build a tolerance to one of the drugs used to induce comas, they would shift to another one.”
Sniffling, I ask, “Isn’t that dangerous?”
Radick nods. “Extremely.”
“How long before I can take her home?”
Radick smiles at me. “If everything goes well and we see an upward projection in her ability to stay conscious and we don’t find anything alarming on the MRI or CT, and she takes to physical therapy, she can go home in about two weeks.”
“That’s so long,” I argue. Matthias shoots me a look, and I flush. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see my mother watching us. Even now, she is sensing the situation and compiling information. From the way my husband’s lips turn up at the edges when he looks at her, he can see it too.
Radick chuckles. “Trust me; it will go by fast,” he assures me. “But let’s give the patient some time to rest, and you can come back tomorrow.” I frown at him. My eyes flicker over to my mother, whose face is drawn and pale, her eyes growing heavy with sleep, and I know he is right.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, Mama.” I lean over her bed and plant a soft kiss on her temple. I don’t want to leave her. What if someone comes to take her away again?
The frightened little girl inside me makes an appearance after so many years, casting doubt and fear in my mind. Elias is dead, but someone has to have been paying the doctor. It has been months since his death. Surely the money would have run out.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” I tell my husband as we settle into the back seat of the car. Matthias looks over at me.
“What do you mean?”
I rub at my temples, staving off the mounting migraine. “Who’s been paying the clinic since Elias’s death? Actually, the Ward assets were frozen a month prior to Christian murdering him, so—” I trail off, twisting my hands in my lap. “Maybe there is another player we don’t know about? Or—”
“Ava.” Matthias stills my hands, bringing them up to his mouth and kissing them gently.
“No one other than Elias was paying the clinic,” he assures me softly.
“According to the financial records, Elias paid one giant sum of money toward the clinic every three years and provided a host of other incentives that were somewhat disreputable to keep the clinic busy and the staff fairly rich.”
“Oh.” The breath in my lungs whooshes out. I hadn’t even known I was holding it in.
Matthias smiles. Jesus, he is all smiles and gentle whispers nowadays. As much as it makes me swoon and makes my panties dampen, his surly, growly demeanor has me wetter than a Texas whorehouse.
“Mark has been digging into everything since the night of your mother’s murder,” he relays. “We think Elias knew Remus and Sheila were looking for her. Even though she had disappeared, your mother was still an obstacle they needed to get rid of.”
“So they sent Marianne to do the job?” I remember that, in her journal, Libby said that she overheard the conversation between Remus and Elias.
“I sent the woman to deal with your obsession years ago…”
I relay what I read to Matthias.
“I’ll have Mark track Elias’s movements on the days leading up to the event,” he assures me. “I wonder if he followed her, waited for her to leave, and then stepped in. That would also explain why it took anyone so long to find you.”
I furrow my brow. “What do you mean?”
“From your own memories, it sounds like everything was practically cleaned up by the time that officer found you in your hiding spot,” Matthias points out. I don’t see how that matters, and I tell him so. “You said the officer told you the phrase your mother taught you to listen to. Correct?”
I nod. A chroi. Heart. It had been our codeword for as long as I can recall.
“I think the officer knew where you were all along.” The car pulls into my father’s parking garage. “He had to wait until anyone who wasn’t on Sully’s father’s payroll had left to keep you secure. He would have known about the cleanup.”
I shake my head. “But Elias still found me.”
“The social worker was most likely a plant,” Matthias offers. “He went to do the right thing but got stabbed in the back for it. Otherwise, you might have grown up with him and his wife. He had filed a petition for custody, stating familial ties. It probably tipped off whoever worked for Elias.”
“Fuck.” I could have grown up in Portland with a loving family instead of in the hellhole Elias created for me every day. Love and comfort. Sighing, I set those thoughts aside. What-ifs will get me nowhere, and thinking about what could have been will only lead me down a road I don’t want to go.
This is where I am today, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. My path led me to Matthias and Vas.
To my father and my siblings.
It led me back to my mother.
These are things I never would have had if it wasn’t for Elias.
I can’t be bitter about the past when it has brought me to this point, and I can only hope that the future keeps getting better.