Chapter Thirty-Seven
Max
Iwake up to the sound of retching. Ember isn’t where she’s supposed to be, beside me, curled around me, and that’s what snaps me out of my sleepy daze and into alertness. I’m fully awake in an instant, sitting up and looking around.
Bathroom. The sound of heaving is coming through the bathroom.
I sprint in there. Is she sick? Did she get hurt? Is she hurting herself?
Ember is hunched over the toilet, hugging the bowl, and vomiting bile into it. Her body is pale, covered in sweat. She looks exhausted. Even the sound of her vomiting is exhausted.
Did she not sleep?
Or, did sleep have some sort of adverse affect?
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I went hard on her last night. I don’t regret that—she provoked me, knowing that I’d resort to more… persuasive measures—but I certainly feel guilt over the sight in front of me.
For a moment, I’m frozen in place, not knowing what to do.
Then, I turn on my brain, kneel beside her, and gather her hair from her face, holding it behind her back.
It only takes a minute before bile turns into nothing, but Ember keeps heaving. Maybe she caught a bug from something she ate—maybe stress has really caught up with her. She used to throw up before math tests; I assumed she’d grown out of that after everything she’s been through… but maybe not?
“Ember, baby,” I say softly once her heaving’s calmed down, and the coughing ensues. “What the fuck happened?”
She coughs so hard she gags again, but then, it’s finally over. She slumps against the bathroom wall, exhausted, coughing and gasping for breath. I move to gather her in my arms, but she gives me an alarmingly weak push away.
“That—” she pauses, still gasping, “—is why I don’t sleep.”
Sleep. Sleep caused this?
The fuck?
“What the hell are you talking about?” I ask.
She shakes her head, looking profoundly tired.
Flame draws her knees up to her chest, and rests her cheek on them.
She’s pale, her complexion waxy. She needs to be hydrated, fed, and tucked in for a day-long nap, but I don’t think she’s in the mood to be ordered around. And, after that show, I won’t push it.
Could she have some adverse physical reaction to a normal sleep schedule? Is that even possible?
“I tried to shoot him once, you know,” she mumbles tiredly.
I’m not even sure if she’s aware she’s speaking.
“That was before I knew how to handle a gun properly. So he shot me.” She lets out a wheeze that turns into a cough.
“And then threw me out of a fourth-story window.” Her eyes roll into the back of her head, and she slumps over.
My heart’s in my throat as I lift her up, carefully wrap a bathrobe around her, and then bring her down to medical to find out what the fuck just happened.
“Stress, probably,” the doctor deduces. “Any sharp change in routine for a patient with her history could have staggering physiological effects. She’s not ill or injured; my guess is her mind’s waging a war on her body.”
“Her routine is improving,” I grit out, staring at Ember, who’s tucked into the bed, still passed out. “She’s slept for a few nights in a row, and…” I scratch the back of my head. “I think she has memories. She did the first time she slept through the night, anyways. She remembered me.”
The doctor thinks for a few moments, rocking back on his heels.
“A sharp shift in environment and schedule can sometimes have this effect on patients with retrograde amnesia. That’s why it’s highly recommended for them to spend time around the things and people they’ve forgotten; it can prompt the brain to retrieve those memories.
Sometimes, relive them in a fugue state.
This isn’t unheard of.” He nods at her. “What was her reaction to the first memory received during sleep? Was it similar?”
I shake my head. “Not remotely. She was confused, a little dazed, but she wasn’t emptying her entire digestive system into a toilet.”
“Did you happen to glean what sort of dream she may have had last night?”
Considering what she said about Dagon… “Potentially reliving a trauma.” I wince.
“That’s it, then.” The doctor nods. “PTSD is well known to impact patients in a plethora of unpleasant ways. Combine this with her head injury, routine change, and release of new memories, and it’s not surprising she felt ill.
The good news is, she’s perfectly fine. The not-so-good news is that there will be an adjustment period if you hold her to this routine, during which she may experience such symptoms again. ”
I swallow. He’s essentially telling me that even healing her will have bad side effects. “Are they temporary?”
“Yes. The question is how temporary. It could be days or weeks, but in rarer cases… this could last months or years.”
Can I keep putting Ember through that? Playing Russian roulette every time I fuck her to sleep, knowing she might wake up physically sick and exhaust herself?
It doesn’t feel like I have much of a choice, but the idea weighs on me.
“What do I do after?” I ask.
“Wait for her to settle, then hydrate and feed her. If she isn’t properly hydrated and fed, she’ll get genuinely ill. Light foods at first, but keep them nutritious. For PTSD cases, self-care and self-soothing is immensely important.”
“Should I wake her up?” I ask, wiping at some sweat on the back of my neck. This morning has already been a stressful one. Ember’s so strong, so fiery, sometimes it’s easy to forget that she’s been broken in countless ways and has a fragility that she does her damn best to hide.
“You can. I’d let her sleep it off, however. Her vitals are all stable and her scans are fine—she’ll be okay. This is how healing often goes. Sometimes it hurts before it gets better.” There’s a weariness in the doctor’s tone that suggests he knows a thing or two about this.
I don’t press, and he doesn’t offer. Instead, I scoop Ember up, hold her tight to my chest, and take her back to our rooms.
Like the last time Ember passed out on me, I’m a wreck until she wakes up again. I can scarcely get any work done, but I give it my best shot. I sit next to her with my laptop in front of me, and try to work through some administrative bullshit Cain’s assigned me.
As of now, he, I, and Greyson all handle the books—which is a pretty shitty setup, considering none of us are mathematicians. I’m good, but I don’t revel in dealing with this crap. Nevertheless, I crunch our quarterly numbers until the screen starts to blur and the numbers begin jumbling.
Thank fuck, that’s just about when Ember begins stirring restlessly on the sheets. I shut the laptop and shift to face her head-on, stroking my hand through her hair. Her eyes flutter, then blink open, and she gives me a sleepy once-over.
“Hey,” I murmur. “How are you feeling, Flame?”
Her eyes shut again. I think she might be considering her response, but then, she speaks. “Hungry and thirsty. Feels like I haven’t eaten in a year.”
There’s my Flame.
“I’ll order something up. Can you open your eyes for me, please?”
She opens one eye, giving me a cranky look. “Where’s my food?”
I pull out my phone and send a quick text. “It’ll be up in fifteen.” I grab a large bottle of water from the nightstand and hand it over, watching as she sits up, unscrews the cap, and gulps it down.
“You scared me this morning.”
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “I don’t do well with normal human routines.”
“Could be because you haven’t experienced them in quite some time,” I say carefully. “This is an adjustment period, Flame, but I think it’s worth it.”
The look she gives me speaks to bone-deep exhaustion. Not just physical; emotional. I slowly pick up her hand in mine. “What did you dream about?” I already have a sickening sense of what she’s going to say before she says it.
“Dagon.”
I hate that another man takes up so much space in her mind. I hate that he’s like a dark shadow, constantly looming over her and threatening to tear her apart from the inside.
What I hate most of all is that, thanks to a bargain with Cain, I have to let Dagon get close to her in order to kill him.
“A memory?” I ask.
It’s a long moment before she nods her head carefully.
“New?”
She shakes her head. “Not quite. Well, some pieces were…” she winces and lifts her free hand up to her head.
“Was it about the injury?” I ask carefully.
She nods again. “Yeah. I already had fragmented pieces of it in my mind, I remembered the pain, and…” the color drains from her face. She stops talking and swallows, taking a full deep breath. “But there were holes. Those holes have been plugged now.”
“I’m sorry,” I say softly.
“That you literally fucked me until I passed out?”
I shake my head. “No. I stand by what I did. I’m sorry that you have such horrific memories swirling around in your mind.”
She winces. “So am I. I wish I could cut them out of my brain, sometimes. Give myself a lobotomy if that’s what it took to just… forget.”
I scan her expression, a sharp twinge of fear curling through me. She’s displayed some poor decision making, but for the most part, Ember has struck me as analytical. Smart. Careful.
Right now, she sounds emotional and impulsive. I’m not sure which version of her I prefer more.
I open my mouth to reply, but my phone releases a shrill shriek. It’s not the ring of a call or the chime of a text—no, this is an alarm.
My heart quickens and my focus sharpens as I reach for it. Scan the message that spills across the screen, and abruptly stand. “You’ll have to eat alone,” I say, fear tightening my gut. “Something’s just come up.”
Code black flashes across my screen in bold, large, lettering. There’s only one cause for a code black, and only leadership knows about it, because it has to do with us.
A code black has never been called before, and I doubt it ever will be again, because it signals that there’s an emergency in leadership that requires immediate attention.