"Dr. Manello?"
Goldberg's voice from behind him was a relief, because it gave him something concrete to grab onto ... the lip of the pool, so to speak.
He turned around. "Hey. Good morning."
The guy's brows popped and then he frowned. "Ah ... what are you doing here?"
"What do you think. Checking on a patient." Jesus, maybe everyone was losing their minds.
"I thought you were going to take a week off."
"Excuse me?"
"That's ... ah ... that's what you told me when you left this morning. After we ... found you in here."
"What are you talking about?" But then Manny waved a hand in dismissal. "Listen, let me get some breakfast first - "
"It's dinnertime, Dr. Manello. Six o'clock at night? You left here twelve hours ago."
The flush that had heated him up whirlpooled out of him and was instantly replaced by a cold wash of something he never, ever felt.
Icy fear bowled him over and sent his pins spinning.
The awkward silence that followed was broken by the hustle and bustle out in the corridor, people rushing by in soft-soled shoes, hurrying to patients or rolling bins of laundry along or taking meals ... dinner, natch ... from room to room.
"I'm ... going to go home now," Manny said.
His voice was still as strong as ever, but the expression on his colleague's face revealed the truth in and around him: No matter what he told himself about feeling better, he was not what he once had been. He looked the same. He sounded the same. He walked the same.
He even tried to convince himself he was the same.
But something had changed that weekend, and he feared that there was no going back from it.
"Would you like someone to drive you?" Goldberg asked tentatively.
"No. I'm fine."
It took all the pride he had not to start running as he turned to leave: By force of will, he kicked back his head and straightened his spine and put one foot calmly in front of the other.
Oddly, as he went out the way he'd come in, he thought of his old surgery professor ... the one who'd been "retired" by the school admin when he'd turned seventy. Manny had been a second-year med student at the time.
Dr. Theodore Benedict Standford III.
The guy had been a straight-up hard-ass prick in class, the kind of f**ker who liked it best when the students gave the wrong answer, because it provided him with an opportunity to dress people down. When the school had announced his departure at the end of the year, Manny and his classmates had thrown a going-away party for the sorry bastard, all of them getting drunk in celebration that they were the last generation to be subjected to his bullshit.
Manny had been working as a custodian at the school that summer for cash, and he'd been mopping the hallway when the last of the movers had taken the final boxes from Standford's office ... and then the old man himself had turned the corner and wing-tipped it out for the last time.
He'd left with his head high, walking down the marble stairs and leaving through the majestic front entrance with his chin up.
Manny had laughed at the arrogance of the man, undying even in the face of age and obsolescence.
Now, walking that same way, he wondered if that had been true.
More likely, Standford had felt as Manny did now.
Discarded.
Chapter Seventeen
Jane heard the tearing sound all the way down in the training center's office. The ripping woke her up, yanking her head off the pillow of her forearms and snapping her spine straight from its curl over the desk.
Ripping ... and flapping ...
At first, she thought it was a gust of wind, but then her brain clicked on. No windows here underground. And it would take a damn thunderstorm to create that much of a disturbance.
Bolting up from the chair and scrambling around the desk, she hit the corridor outside in a run as she gunned for Payne's room. All doors were open for precisely this reason: She had only one patient, and although Payne was mostly quiet, if something happened -
What the hell was all that noise? There was grunting, too -
Jane skidded around the doorjamb of the recovery room and just about screamed. Oh, God ... the blood.
"Payne!" She rushed for the bed.
V's twin was going wild, her arms flailing around, her fingers clawing at the sheets and also at herself, her sharp nails biting into the skin of her upper arms and shoulders and collarbones.
"I can't feel it!" the female yelled, her fangs flashing, her eyes so wide there was white all around them. "I can't feel anything!"
Jane lunged forward and grabbed one of those arms, but her grip slipped the instant contact was made, snapping off all those slick scratches. "Payne! Stop it!"
As Jane fought to still her patient, bright red blood spackled her face and white coat.
"Payne!" If this kept up, those wounds were going to be deep enough to show bone. "Stop - "
"I can't feel it!"
The Bic pen appeared in Payne's hand from out of nowhere - except, no, it wasn't magical.... The thing was Jane's, the one she kept in the side pocket of her white coat. The instant she saw it, all the furious flapping morphed into a surreal slow-mo as Payne's hand lifted up.
Her stabbing swipe was so strong and sure that there was no stopping it.
The sharp point pierced through the female's heart, dead on, and her torso jerked upward, a death gasp shooting in through her open mouth.
Jane screamed, "Noooooo - "
"Jane - wake up!"
The sound of Vishous's voice made no sense. Except then she opened her eyes ... to complete darkness. The clinic and the blood and Payne's hoarse breathing were replaced by a black visual shroud that -
Candles flared to life, and the first thing she saw properly was Vishous's hard face. He was right beside her, even though they hadn't gone to bed at the same time.
"Jane, it was only a dream...."
"I'm okay," she blurted, shoving her hair out of her face. "I'm ..."
While she propped herself up on her arms and panted, she wasn't sure what was dream and what was real. Especially given that Vishous was next to her. Not only had they not been going to bed together; they hadn't been waking up together either. She assumed he was sleeping down in his forge, but maybe that hadn't been the case.
She hoped it hadn't.
"Jane ..."
In the dim quiet, she heard in the word all the sadness that V never would have let out in any other situation. And she felt the same way. The days without them talking much, the stress of Payne's recovery, the distance ... the goddamn distance ... it was so damned sad.
Here in the candlelight, in their mated bed, though, all that faded some.
With a sigh, she turned into his warm, heavy body and the contact changed her: Without having to turn herself solid, she became corporeal, the heat flowing between them and magnifying and making her as real as he was. Looking up, she stared at his fierce, beautiful face with its tattoo at the temple and the black hair that he always shoved back and the slashing eyebrows and those icy pale eyes.
Over the past week, she'd played and replayed that night when things had gotten so rough. And though a lot of it was disappointing and anxious-making, there was one thing that just didn't make sense.
When they'd met up in the tunnel, Vishous had been wearing a turtleneck. And he never wore turtlenecks. He hated them because he found them confining - which was ironic, given what sometimes got him off. Typically, he wore muscle shirts or went naked, and she wasn't stupid. He might be a hard-core hard-ass, but his skin bruised as easily as anyone else's did.
He'd said he'd gotten into a fight, but he was a master at hand-to-hand combat. So if he was pulling a head-to-toe black-and-blue it happened for only one reason: because he allowed it.
And she had to wonder who had done it to him.
"You all right?" V asked.
She reached up and put her palm on his cheek. "Are you?" Were they?
He didn't blink. "What was the dream about?"
"We're going to have to talk about things, V."
His lips thinned out. And got even tighter as she waited. Finally, he said, "Payne is where she is. It's only been a week and - "
"Not about her. About what happened that night you were out alone."
Now he eased back, sinking into the pillows and linking his two hands over his tight abs. In the dim light, the tight bands of muscle and ropes of vein that ran up his neck threw sharp shadows.
"You accusing me of being with someone else? I thought we went through this."