4. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
Demetrius
I didn't sleep well last night. It shouldn't bother me anymore. I haven't slept well in a decade. The cost of responsibility, like my grandfather used to say.
Cornelius Thornwood used to say lots of things.
Only what kept me awake all night wasn't the weight of responsibility of my multi-billion-dollar empire.
No, this wasn't my usual kind of insomnia.
The usual kind takes the shape of numbers and contract clauses.
That kind of insomnia I can work with. Literally.
I can get up, I open my laptop, and get down to it.
Last night, my insomnia had a face.
Specifically, it had the face of a girl I spent a decade chasing in my dreams and in every waking hour. It took me another five years for that face to fade to something like a ghost, haunting me from the corner of my bedroom late at night.
All those years pushing that face out of my mind were wiped clean by a single glance from Madison Berwick.
She's still as gorgeous as she ever was.
More, even. Those plump lips, that soft, silky skin, the way she looked at me like she could see straight through my ribs.
She haunted my hours as I tossed and turned, trying my best to ignore the raging hard-on that wouldn't go away even as I focused on how angry she was.
She hates me. It's plain to see. I understand why.
But none of this matters this morning, because I'm standing in a hospital room with a seventy-eight-year-old minotaur who is as immovable as a boulder.
My grandmother has been grumbling since I arrived this morning. It's not surprising. Agatha Thornwood is a force of nature and being confined to a hospital bed is not going to sit well with her old bones.
Still. Tough luck and all that. Also quoting from my grandfather.
Cornelius Thornwood really used to say a lot of things.
Doctor Astrid Mercer pulls me from my taciturn thoughts as she steps into the room.
Even this early in the morning, Agatha's doctor is perfectly put together.
She is a minotaur, tall and striking, with dark amber fur and polished horns adorned with gold jewelry bands.
She smooths her coat the moment she spots me and her smile widens as she plays with her long black mane.
I don't mind. I'm used to women reacting this way to me. I'm not fool enough to think this is about my charming personality. The only charm any of these women find in me is the size of my bank account. Or accounts.
"Doctor Mercer, thanks for coming by this early."
"For you?" She gives me a smile that is several degrees warmer than the occasion requires. "Anything, Demetrius."
I smile and nod politely. She is an excellent doctor and I am not in the habit of making things complicated with people I need.
"How is my favorite patient?" Astrid asks.
I scoff.
"Irritable and snarky enough to scare the nurses away."
"Good." Astrid chuckles, half a register too low. "Anything less and I would worry."
I stand there while Astrid goes to the bedside, turning to the still sulking elderly minotaur in the medical bed.
"Mrs. Thornwood, how are you this morning?" Astrid pulls at her stethoscope and I get the sense that she's all too willing to reveal her ample cleavage as her white coat parts open.
"I am feeling like someone who is fed up with having people fuss all over her," my grandmother says with a bite.
"That seems like an appropriate response," Astrid says with a small smile. "Any pain?"
"Apart from my pride, no."
Astrid laughs, then approaches Agatha while I go out and wait in the corridor while she examines her patient.
The corridor is quiet. The floor hums with its own particular rhythm. The distant sound of a rolling cart, the muffled voices at the nurses' station, the baseline hush of a building that runs on emergencies and never quite stops.
I stand with my back against the wall and my treacherous brain returns to its obsession about Madison Berwick.
Not intentionally. I have been not doing it intentionally since two in the morning and it has been working about as well as most things I try not to do.
When Astrid calls me back inside, the temperature in the room has dropped by several degrees. A quick glance at Agatha and I see the tension reflected in the stubborn set of the older minotaur's jaw.
And the way she crosses her arms over her chest and looks like she's about to head-butt her primary care doctor.
Not good. The only person I know who is more stubborn than my grandmother is me. Many things can be said about my grandmother, but soft of will is not one of them.
"Mrs. Thornwood, I can't discharge you without home care," Astrid says with a gentle tone.
"I have Mrs. Fairweather," Agatha says between clenched teeth.
"Mrs. Fairweather is not a nurse," Astrid responds. "You need professional care, I'm afraid. You're going to need a nurse for the next six to eight weeks at minimum. Wound care, mobility assistance, pain management, the bathroom. A nurse is what you need, not a housekeeper."
Agatha glares at her doctor with the kind of stare that used to send me hiding under my bed, but Astrid does not retreat. Granted, her smile loses some of its shine and a tic flicks at her left eyelid, but she still holds her ground. It's admirable, really.
"If you don't want to hire a nurse to care for you at home, then may I suggest Cliffwood Rehabilitation Center for the recovery period?
" Astrid says this without flinching, even after Agatha huffs at her with an expression of such outrage, I'm surprised the good doctor doesn't spontaneously combust. "The rooms are very comfortable, the staff is twenty-four seven. "
The silence in the room is thick enough to slice with a knife. Knives my grandmother is shooting through her eyes at the both of us.
"Doctor Mercer, I will take your recommendation into consideration," Agatha says with pinched lips. "Now I trust Demetrius can see you out, because I'm rather immobile at the moment."
Then Agatha turns her gaze to the window pointedly.
Astrid recovers cleanly. I have to give her that. She nods and assures my grandmother that she will come check on her in a few days, whether she chooses the recovery center or home. She is at the doorway with her hand on the frame when she turns back.
"I'll be in touch about the follow-up schedule, Mrs. Thornwood." She pauses, then turns to me with a smile that has nothing whatsoever to do with the follow-up schedule. "Demetrius. If there's anything you need, anything at all, you have my number."
She holds my gaze one beat past professional.
"Thank you, Doctor Mercer."
She leaves. My grandmother is watching me from her bed with the expression of a bull about to run down a bullfighter.
"I am not going to some old-folks center." Agatha lifts her chin defiantly. "No point in even talking about it."
I knew this battle was coming. I've been in countless boardrooms where tempers flared and billions were at stake, and never have I felt less equipped for a negotiation than I do now.
Because make no mistake, a negotiation is what this is. And Agatha Thornwood is as formidable an opponent as any CEO of any multi-national corporation I've ever sat across.
"Grandmother, you cannot just ignore your doctor's advice here. You need a nurse or you need to go to a recovery center. There's no way around it."
"I. Said. No."
I cross to the visitor's chair beside her bed and sit directly across from her. It squeaks under my weight and is slightly too small for my frame, which feels appropriate for a negotiation I am already losing.
"I am not a foolish woman. I knew I would need care after coming back home and I have decided who I want to hire to come live with me at Stronghold for my recovery."
There's something about the way she says it that makes me slightly nervous. Like she's about to say something that will pull the rug right from under my hooves.
"There is one person I will accept. Only one. I am not negotiating on this, boy. I would like you to make the arrangements."
A sense of doom slithers around my chest, but I nod anyway.
"Anyone you want, Grandmother. You know me, name who you want to care for you and I will make it happen."
Agatha's eyes reduce to slits as she holds my gaze. "Promise me."
I blink. "Excuse me? Promise you what exactly?"
"That you will hire whoever I name."
That sense of doom rises until I feel the underside of my horns prickle. Suddenly, she doesn't look so old or so frail anymore. She doesn't look like a minotaur at all. She looks like a lioness watching a gazelle, waiting for it to lie down for the killing blow.
And the gazelle is me.
"Fine." I breathe out. "I promise I will not argue and that I will hire whoever you name next, even if it's the Queen of England."
Agatha's smile is purely evil as she inclines her head in assent. She knows she has all the power here, anyway. It's not like I'm about to discharge her without proper care lined up, and no one in their right mind would try to force Agatha Thornwood anywhere she doesn't want to go.
I'm cornered. I really am a gazelle and she a lioness.
"I want Madison Berwick."
Something happens in the room. Or to me. The distinction feels important and I can't make it.
I sit very still and the name rings again inside my skull, and for approximately thirty seconds I am eighteen years old again.
But I'm not that helpless, heartbroken boy anymore. I'm a successful businessman, a minotaur known in all circles of power for his ruthlessness and cunning.
Still, I feel closer to that boy than to the CEO I really am as my grandmother watches my reaction with predatory intensity.
"Why her?"
"Because she is good at her work and because I am seventy-eight years old and I will not have a stranger I do not know in my home for two months. I have known Madison Berwick since she was a child. She is a familiar face. She is the only caregiver I am willing to accept."
No. Not even Agatha Thornwood can force me to do this.
"There are agencies." I shake my head and my horns cast a long shadow over Agatha's bed. "I can have a dozen nurses for you to interview within the hour."
"I want Madison Berwick, Demetrius, or no one at all."
I look down at her hands, folded neatly on her lap above the wool throw and it strikes me again how fragile they look. How thin her skin is. How vulnerable.
And behind that thought, uninvited: Madison Berwick watching me with those big, angry eyes. Madison Berwick walking right by me and bumping me with her shoulder as she went away, all prickly pride and wounded beauty.
Madison Berwick, the girl who made me the man I am today.
I take a deep, long breath. I know I'm being irrational. The Madison Berwick I knew when I was a teenage boy, wearing my heart on my sleeve and waving it around like a target, is no more. So much time has passed, I shouldn't be feeling this way just hearing her name.
So what, she broke my heart into a million pieces and danced all over the remains? It was years ago. Water under the bridge now.
Then why does this feel so hard?
"You win. I'll hire her for you."
Agatha's smile turns triumphant and she squeezes my hand.
"I look forward to going home now."
"All right, Grandmother."
I stand, then pull the wool throw up to her waist. I tuck the edge on the side of the mattress, just like I know she likes it. I stand at the bedside for a moment, watching my grandmother settle in the bed, her eyes already closing.
I leave the room and I walk to the elevator, ride it down to the lobby, and push through the front doors into the parking lot.
I sit in my car for longer than I need to.
I am, it occurs to me, nervous. I am thirty-four years old.
I have acquired eleven companies on three continents.
I once sat across from a naga king and told him no to his face without blinking.
And I am sitting in a hospital parking lot working up the nerve to knock on a door in the tiny coastal town of Saltford Bay.
Oh. To Hell with it. Just get it over with.
Then I drive. It shouldn't surprise me that I remember the way to the Berwick house as well as if the last fifteen years haven't existed at all.
What's the worst thing that could happen anyway? I'm over Madison Berwick.