Stutter (Rayne-Moore University Duet #2)

Prologue

Damon.

Lorne Wood Falls Hospital

Two Weeks Prior

The gears in the pulley of the elevator whir quietly as it ascends, taking me up the second, third, fourth… I watch the large antique dial move until it lands on the tenth floor of the hospital, my memories reeling along with the dial.

“Maman said Paris at night is dangerous. You shouldn’t go, Maddie. It could be bad for your heart!” I worry for her. She’s been so crazy lately., sneaking out, partying, coming back late. I think she even smelled like cigarettes one time.

I don’t like it.

Silver eyes dart to mine in the mirror as she lays her green hairbrush atop her vanity.

Our only genetic similarities are our black hair and silver eyes we got from our mother.

She smiles sweetly at me in the reflection.

“I have lived every day worried about my heart. I’m tired of being afraid of living…

But you’re right, Arrow.” The nickname is a nod to our different last names. “How about we play and then go to bed?”

My heart jumps, excitement thrumming through my eight-year-old self at just the thought that my big sister wants to play with me. “You’ll really play with me?”

She nods happily. “It’s been a while since I’ve played, huh?”

“Okay! I’ll go grab my cars!” I yell excitedly and dash away.

And so we played. For over two hours my sister played with me, creating huge ramps and obstacles on the floor of her room, my Hot Wheels flying at top speeds, crashing into the barricades we built.

And then, before bed, after she promises to play with me when we wake up, we build a fort in my room, where she tells me stories of Greek gods until I fall asleep.

When I wake, she’s gone.

I stand at the threshold of her room, looking in, but staying outside of the small bedroom, afraid to disturb the setting. My cars and our ramp and obstacle course are still set up in place.

I wait for her to come back to play with me, never touching nor disturbing them, even when dust begins to settle on them.

Because she’ll come back. No matter how angry Maddie is, she always come back to me.

For six days I stand in the doorway outside of her room, my mother quietly sobbing in the living room downstairs.

She thinks I can’t hear her but in the quiet little home we rented from her friend, it echoes.

Not loudly. Just a low, shy sound, only floating when it gets to be too much for her.

Her worry. Her grief mirroring my own. Her insecurity that she wasn’t enough of a good mother which makes me angry.

How could Maddie make maman think she’s a bad mother?

The bell in the elevator dings, and the steel doors of the elevator slide open as the memory of my mother opening the doors and her wails ricocheting off the walls rings in my ears when they tell her, they found Maddie’s body behind a building buried under trash.

The sterile hallway leading to the ICU ward’s nurse’s station seems to pulsate, the soft thuds of my casual Italian dress shoes seem to reverberate with each step I take, adding to the tension around me.

The low comfortable chatter from the nurses a growing hum as I advance closer.

“Dr. Archer?”

I pause, letting my eyes focus on the stout woman before me in sky blue scrubs, with matching eyes, blonde and silver hair in a high tight bun on her head, searching for her name in the recesses of my mind, blinking.

“Nurse Elliot, a pleasure to see you. Thought you’d have left this place behind years ago. ”

A bright grin spreads across her tired face, laugh lines deceiving you into believing they aren’t from decades of hard work and worrying about possibly losing her hard-earned position caring for patients, that are often so close to death in this ward but the silver in her roots and the lilac bags under her eyes and deep laugh lines and crow’s feet tells a different story.

“Oh gosh it’s been ages since you’ve stepped foot in the ICU.

It's so good to see you. What brings you by?”

She must not know I no longer work for Lorne Wood.

Good. The less she knows, the better.

“My colleague is here, unfortunately. My girlfriend asked me to bring by flowers during my visit before I go home to her.” I say, conveniently holding a vase and the important thing tucked between the leaves of the thornless dark red roses.

“Girlfriend?” She asks with a slight gasp, and I don’t dare say Raven because this nurse was there the night they brought her into Lorne Wood Hospital, when reporters were everywhere. There the night they transferred her to my ward to be under my care.

I give one singular nod .

When I don’t give more information she takes the hint. We aren’t friends. We’re former colleagues. Nothing more. Nothing less. “Who is the patient?”

“Whitmore.” I reply.

“Oh, yes! He came in just yesterday. Room 1001. Just down the hall and to the left.”

I thank her and step aside and resume my journey. The thrum starts again, the halls pulsating, narrowing into a stretch as I find his room, and enter, standing beside the bed to unplug the call button in his hand.

It's dark, the only light in the private unit is above him, a dimming fluorescent beacon as I take a seat beside him and place the vase on his bedside table.

I take a good look at the older man before me, fifteen years my senior, an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, wires everywhere, but most importantly an IV to administer drugs and fluids.

Seven years too old for Maddie.

“Thaddeus.” I say aloud and his eyes flutter open. He tracks his surroundings, the wall, the window and finally, me.

He blinks when I lean closer and I pluck the syringe from between the woven stems, uncapping it.

His muddy eyes widen in surprise as I suck nothing but air into the tube and twist it into the port of his IV wire where drugs are administered.

I hear the click of a button and smirk, pulling the mask off his face.

“Come now, Whitmore. This is twenty-five years in the making.”

“Why are you doing this?” He rasps, breaths shallow, wheezing.

I would feel bad for the old man if this wasn’t for the greater good.

One less brother in the Syndicate. What I’m about to do should have me nervous, should have my belly swooping.

I took an oath , to save and never harm.

I should feel something other than this thrum in my veins that feels more like encouragement than resistance.

“In 1999 you took a trip to Paris. Where you met one Maddeline Celine Bordeaux. A fifteen - almost – sixteen-year-old visiting with her mother and her baby brother. I will say, Whitmore, it was smart, to preach love to a fifteen-year-old girl born with a broken heart.”

“Don’t know… what you’re talking… about.” He denies between wet gasps, but my focus is on the large barrel of the syringe. My weapon of choice. Ironic, maybe.

I’d call it… poetic justice.

“It would be improbable, wouldn’t it? In a perfect world.

Those thousands of miles and an entire ocean twenty-five years ago, we were at the same place – me, as a boy enjoying summer vacation with my mother and my big sister.

And you – tearing that same family apart.

I myself never would have believed it. It was far too coincidental for it to be real…

except I saw the ledger for myself.” I grit out between clenched teeth and push the plunger, watching the divine separation of air and fluid in the clear plastic with fascination.

A large gap, that slowly travels from the tube down to his hand, and we watch it enter his body.

“Won’t… get away with this.” He rasps.

I shrug. “And you never should have.” I reply, throwing the syringe in the biohazard bin, and walking out, the door closes with a soft click . Like a silent predator I stride past to the nurse’s station and straight to the elevator as a code blue is called, and chaos ensues behind me.

But I don’t even glance back as the steel doors of the large elevator open and only turn forward once they shut behind me.

The pulsating in my mind stops, the blur at the sides of my vision dies down, and for a moment, I’m not alone in the elevator.

For a moment, I can see Maddie’s reflection standing beside me.

Her head comes up to my chest where once upon a time, I came up to hers – proof of how much time has passed.

I watch as her ghostly hand covers mine, cold against my skin and I suppress a gasp and a shiver.

Our eyes clash, silver with silver and she gives one solemn nod, and when the elevator whirs, beginning it’s descension, I blink, and I’m alone again.

And for the first time in twenty-five years, I allow myself to grieve what could have been.