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Without another word, she changed her trajectory and went over to her guards, bypassing the medical event in the center of the space.
Absently, Daniel noted the way the diaphanous skirt of her robe moved like mist around her bare ankles and feet.
And then he wasn’t thinking about her.
He was going to Lydia, easing himself down beside her on the cold, hard floor… and taking her hand.
“Is he going to be okay,” she mumbled as Gus’s heart was hit with a second charge.
While the man’s palms clapped on the marble, Daniel focused on the black-and-red burn mark on the side of that neck. Instead of answering her, he let his mind go, the wheels of intention starting to turn.
He might not be physically strong. But as he regarded the battered body of his dear friend anddoctor—and did the math on how long and how much Gus had suffered?
There was a clear mission: Daniel was going to figure out how to get to the person who did this.
And if he couldn’t deal with them, he was going to make sure someone else did.
FOURTEEN
CATHY STAYED WITHGus through everything: The resuscitation on her foyer floor. The trip on the gurney down into the lab. The assessment in the main examination room, and the running of various drugs, the names of which were familiar to her, the precise mechanisms of their molecular makeup unknown to her. After that? The waiting. The endless waiting…
To see if the efforts to support his heart rate, oxygenation, blood volume, and blood pressure worked.
Beep. Beep. Beep…
The sound of the monitor counting cardiac compressions was the only sound in the room, assuming the soft whistling of the HVAC vent overhead didn’t count. Finally, after such flurries of activity, she and Gus were alone, even if just for a moment. The doctors and nurses would be back soon enough, and it was a toss-up whether she wanted themaround or not. If they were in the room? He could get help in seconds if his heart stopped again. But like anybody was all that far?
She glanced at the monitor by his head. Measured the fluid in the bag that was draining into his vein. Tried not to look at his face, because it was just too hard.
The litany of injuries was extensive and gruesome: Broken nose, broken ribs, broken fingers. Burn marks that suggested he had been tased in the legs, torso, and the side of the neck. His back, calves, and under his forearms were the only places that hadn’t been touched, and that made her think he’d been tied to a chair, sitting up while he’d been tortured.
Gus was interrogated. And there is no way he didn’t give things up.
Squeezing her lids shut, she couldn’t block the image of his swollen eye sockets or the raw scrape at his temple or his bruised mouth. And when she started to panic, she tried to focus on something, anything else—
The chair under her was hard.
There. That was as much as she could do.
Beneath her bony ass, the seat might as well have been made of granite, and in a pathetic attempt to regain a sense of order and control, she made a mental note to upgrade the furniture accessories in the four patient rooms.
Except then she remembered all the reasons she wasn’t going to change a goddamn thing.
How has it all come to this, she wondered as she reached out and took Gus’s bandaged hand.
“This was not how we were going to end up, you and me.” She gently rubbed her thumb back and forth over the white wrap. “We were going to cure cancer. We were going to… change the world. We were going to…”
Save my life, she thought.
Considering where she was now—out of money, out of hope, out of time on so many levels—she had to marvel at the sheer arrogance she’d been sporting as she’d moved her underground operation to the property here in Walters, and started working with that vet at the Wolf Study Project. Back then, in what she now thought of as her previous life, she’d been a big swinging dick in the pharmaceutical world, making waves, aware that the Grim Reaper was hot on her trail, but determined to outrun him with Gus’s magic drug.
Their Vita-12b.
Twelve versions to get it right. Twelve and a half, actually.
“But you’re alive.” She put her other hand on her stomach. “And so am I…”
For now, she tacked on to herself. And given the cramping in her uterus, her own blood loss, and allthe cancer cells in her body, she supposed that was a sliding scale with a steep slope into her grave.
