10. Claire
“It’s very clearly infected.” The doctor mumbles. Even through her thick accent, the irritation is obvious. “I don’t know what this is all about, but she should have been taken to the hospital and put on antibiotics.”
“I know.” Elaine nods her agreement. “But we can’t have people asking questions, Carmen. You know that.”
“Then you should have called me instead of trying to handle it yourself.” The doctor—Carmen— snaps.
I can hear them, though it sounds like I’m listening to their conversation from the bottom of the ocean, and I can see the outline of them standing together by the door, but everything is too fuzzy to get a good sense of what’s going on. “Please,” Elaine says, desperation streaking her voice. “Help her.”
“What do you think I’m here for, Elaine? Of course, I’m going to help her. But the antibiotics may not be enough. You really shouldn’t have waited.”
“I don’t care what you have to do.” Elaine assures her. “Save that girl’s life or we are going to have some really big problems. I promise you that.”
A sigh escapes one of them, and a moment later I see the shape of the doctor as she comes closer to me. “I’m going to start an IV and some antibiotics to help your body heal, okay?” She offers me a smile that I think is meant to be calming, but it doesn’t matter. I’m calm. I’m barely lucid. She could tell me she’s going to chop off my hand and I’d close my eyes and wait for it to be over if I thought it would make this torture stop. “I’m also going to take some blood samples. I’ll be quick, promise.”
I barely feel the needle piercing my flesh. It’s the least offensive pain I’ve experienced in the last week, so I close my eyes and drift on the edge of sleep until the doctor’s words call me back from the fringe.
“I’m going to stay a little while, Miss Monroe, if that’s alright with you.”
I don’t honestly care what happens—to me, to the doctor. Nothing matters anymore.
I’m back on the wings of sleep, flying away into another world, before I can even open my mouth to answer her.
**
When I wake next, the doctor is standing near the window with her back to me, which is convenient because I don’t have to worry about vomiting on her when I roll over and throw up on the floor. I don’t remember the last time I’ve eaten anything with substance, and the bile on the floor makes that clear.
As I sit up, I feel the pull of the needle in my skin, and without thinking about why it’s there, make to rip it out. A hand on mine stops me; I look up to see the woman I recognize as a doctor. But something about her looks different now. I blink as I try to figure out what it is, and then realization hits. It isn’t the doctor that’s different—it’s the room.
Where the hell am I?
Panic starts to flare in my chest, but it doesn’t make it far, because the woman grabs my cheeks between her hands and angles my face so that I can get a good look at her. “You’re okay, Claire.”
Something about the way she speaks makes me want to believe her, but she’s a complete stranger. On top of that, I’m no longer in my room, so she hasn’t given me a whole lot of reasons to trust her.
Seeming to sense my hesitation, the doctor answers the questions I didn’t ask out loud. “You’re in the hospital.” She says. “You’re completely safe here. Your friends are right outside that door. Just sit back, okay?”
My eyes flicker around the room before landing on the door. The room doesn’t look like any hospital I’ve ever seen—it’s too cheery. It looks more like a hotel, with a little kitchen set up in one corner and a comfortable-looking sofa pushed against the opposite wall. The giveaway to her truth is that everything is eerily sterile.
I ease back against the bed and meet the woman’s gaze to demand more answers. But my voice comes out strangled, and I realized my throat is raw, so I gratefully accept the water she hands me and take a few long sips through the straw.
“You were severely dehydrated. I was trying to set up an IV, but I couldn’t even find a good vein—that’s never been my specialty, so I called in the big guns, and we brought you here. You’re in a private room reserved for hospital donors and receiving the best care. You’re already leaps and bounds better than you were when we brought you in. How do you feel?”
I have more questions, but I stop to consider hers first. I feel… better. I’m not burning or freezing anymore, my double vision has cleared, and the world seems balanced again. My head is clear enough to recognize that despite her thick accent, she speaks in perfect English. “I’m okay.” I say, and this time my voice doesn’t crack when I speak.
Mentally, I’m still certain I’m fucked, but physically, I feel a world away from where I’ve been before.
“Okay,” the doctor nods. “I’m glad to hear that. Now I have some questions for you, and I need you to be completely honest with me.”
Something about the way she says that sends a chill over me; suddenly I feel like I’m being interrogated. Does she know what I’ve done? Am I going to be thrown in a Costa Rican prison? The nausea in my stomach roils, but I fight it back by taking another sip of water and nodding my consent for her to continue.
“Are you in danger?”
I blink, unsure of how to answer that. I’m in danger of being found a murderer, of having my whole life wrenched away from me, of being locked away and never seeing the light of day again. I’m also in danger of losing my grip on sanity, of being dragged to hell, of being captured again when somebody comes calling to follow up on their purchase of me.
“No.” I swallow. With Rhea, I’m safe. I’ve never had a single doubt about that. And even after what Remy and I did, after he’d pulled a gun on me on the boat and pinned me by the neck against his wall, I knew that I was safe with him. He proved as much when he found me in that filthy warehouse and single-handedly took them all down.
“Okay,” she nods, tucking a loose strand of her dark hair behind her ear. She doesn’t sound entirely convinced, but she lets it go, moving onto the next question. “Your injuries—were they caused by anybody in the Boudreaux home?”
“No!” I answer that one quickly, because it’s easy to see where she’s going with this. I don’t want to give her any reason to think that the only people who are keeping me safe are causing me harm. “Rhea is like my sister, and Remy has been… he’s making sure I’m taken care of.”
“And in the time that you’ve been with them, you haven’t been forced to do anything you don’t want to?”
“I…” I’m not sure how much she knows about what happened. Hopefully none of it. I’m not going to tell her I was kidnapped and sold, which I most certainly hadn’t volunteered for. “Not at their hands, no.”
“Good.” The doctor looks reasonably more relaxed by that admission. “One last question, and then you can tell me how you’d like to proceed. Okay?”
I press my lips together, noticing how dry they feel, and nod again.
“Other than the sleeping pills, have you taken anything that may alter your consciousness? Alcohol, illicit drugs, stuff like that.”
“Not recently.” I shake my head. “We went to the club—I don’t know when that was, but that’s the last time I drank. As far as drugs, just the stuff that Rhea or Elaine gave me.”
“Hmm,” she mulls over my response a minute, trying to figure out what her next words are, before she speaks again. “Well, your blood work came back.” She holds up a tablet, which I presume holds the results of whatever tests she had run.
“Is everything… okay?”
It’s been a while since I’ve had any sort of testing done—four years, almost to the day, since I tried to take my life and was admitted to the hospital for a litany of tests and questions that my social worker had helped me field. I did an STD test not long after I began at Darrington, but otherwise I haven’t seen a doctor in years. I also threw myself at Remy the other day without stopping to consider any sort of protection, although I trust him not to put me at risk considering what we’ve been through together.
Panic starts a drumbeat in my chest and my overactive imagination roars to life as I consider the possibilities of what she’s about to tell me—that I’m sick, that I’ve been exposed to something like herpes, that I have blood poisoning from that dirty blade Slick had dragged over my skin, even the possibility of pregnancy, though I’m not sure testing can tell so early considering I wasn’t with Remy until last night.
None of those possibilities prepare me for reality when the doctor looks levelly at me.
“You’ve been poisoned.”