“M..mo…ch..roi.”
My heart.
“Mama.” My lower lip trembles, and I gently take her hand in mine. It is cold and listless, but it won’t be that way for long.
“Sit, Red.” Matthias pulls up a chair next to the bed and guides me to sit. I don’t protest. My mother’s eyes glance up at him with interest before settling back on me.
“She’s been awake for almost three hours now,” Dr. Radick tells me with pride in his voice. “Your mother is a fighter.”
“My wife had to get it from somewhere.” Matthias smirks. At the wordwife, my mother’s eyebrows bury themselves in her hairline. My husband grimaces. “Sorry,Krasnyy.” Guilt washes over him, but I wave it away. There will be no hiding anything from her.
“It’s okay.” I drag my gaze away from my mother to smile up at him. “No secrets.” Matthias nods, repeating the phrase that has become a staple since he returned from the dead.
“A…a…” My mother’s eyes mist over as she stares at me longingly.
“It’s okay, Mama,” I whisper, placing her hand against my warm cheek. “Everything is going to be okay now. I am so sorry for everything.”
Then the gates holding back the flood open. “I can’t believe you were alive this whole time,” I sob earnestly, clutching her hand to me like a lifeline, afraid that if I let go, she will disappear. Tears track down her face, sorrow imprinting itself in every fine line. The nurse gently wipes at my mother’s cheeks, but the moisture keeps pooling.
“How long will the listlessness last?” Matthias asks Radick as I weep.
“She still has a good amount of the cocktail in her system,” he says. “Propofol, which is the most recent drug the facility was using, has a short half-life, but since she has been receiving it continually for so long, it could take up to twenty-four hours for it to completely clear her body.”
“And the other drugs?”
Radick waves it off. “Minimal,” he assures us. “It looks like whenever she started to wake or build a tolerance to one of the drugs used to induce comas, they would shift to another one.”
Sniffling, I ask, “Isn’t that dangerous?”
Radick nods. “Extremely.”
“How long before I can take her home?”
Radick smiles at me. “If everything goes well and we see an upward projection in her ability to stay conscious and we don’t find anything alarming on the MRI or CT, and she takes to physical therapy, she can go home in about two weeks.”
“That’s so long,” I argue. Matthias shoots me a look, and I flush. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see my mother watching us. Even now, she is sensing the situation and compiling information. From the way my husband’s lips turn up at the edges when he looks at her, he can see it too.
Radick chuckles. “Trust me; it will go by fast,” he assures me. “But let’s give the patient some time to rest, and you can come back tomorrow.” I frown at him. My eyes flicker over to my mother, whose face is drawn and pale, her eyes growing heavy with sleep, and I know he is right.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, Mama.” I lean over her bed and plant a soft kiss on her temple. I don’t want to leave her. What if someone comes to take her away again?
The frightened little girl inside me makes an appearance after so many years, casting doubt and fear in my mind. Elias is dead, but someone has to have been paying the doctor. It has been months since his death. Surely the money would have run out.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” I tell my husband as we settle into the back seat of the car. Matthias looks over at me.
“What do you mean?”
I rub at my temples, staving off the mounting migraine. “Who’s been paying the clinic since Elias’s death? Actually, the Ward assets were frozen a month prior to Christian murdering him, so—” I trail off, twisting my hands in my lap. “Maybe there is another player we don’t know about? Or?—”
“Ava.” Matthias stills my hands, bringing them up to his mouth and kissing them gently. “No one other than Elias was paying the clinic,” he assures me softly. “According to the financial records, Elias paid one giant sum of money toward the clinic every three years and provided a host of other incentives that were somewhat disreputable to keep the clinic busy and the staff fairly rich.”
“Oh.” The breath in my lungs whooshes out. I hadn’t even known I was holding it in.
Matthias smiles. Jesus, he is all smiles and gentle whispers nowadays. As much as it makes me swoon and makes my panties dampen, his surly, growly demeanor has me wetter than a Texas whorehouse.
“Mark has been digging into everything since the night of your mother’s murder,” he relays. “We think Elias knew Remus and Sheila were looking for her. Even though she had disappeared, your mother was still an obstacle they needed to get rid of.”
“So they sent Marianne to do the job?” I remember that, in her journal, Libby said that she overheard the conversation between Remus and Elias.