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Snow shook his head. “I have a feeling I’m going to hate what you’re about to say.”
Lucas grinned. “You and I are too well known to go in. But I know just the person to help Jude and Andrei’s cover in that place. And I imagine we can easily find him at one of my bars…trying to find you.”
Snow slumped. “Geoffrey. Shit.” He glanced at Jude to find him frowning.
“The one from The Dock?” Jude grumbled. “The one made of hands?”
Andrei started laughing.
A grinning Lucas began to sketch out his plan. Soon none of them were smiling, too wary of the danger they were about to get themselves into…too sickened by what they’d be seeing. Snow knew himself well; knew that no carefully laid plans would save him from the nightmares that would inevitably come. Not with fucking Gratton back in Cincinnati.Chapter 14Blood pooled in her open abdomen. It slipped over her side in thick rivers, onto the table, to drip on the floor. He handed the forceps to his surgical nurse, the clatter of metal loud as she returned them to the tray. He preferred a quiet operating room. No music filling the space. No unnecessary chatter. But this time, the silence was too complete…too wrong. It turned his head into a black echo chamber that held nothing but the powerful drumming of his heart.
He lifted his hands, stared at the red coating his surgical gloves.
“There’s nothing I can do,” he said, his voice muffled from the mask and from the grief forming a knot in his throat. “The cancer has spread everywhere. Close her up.”
Along with the clanging of tools, a nurse he didn’t know started crying. “Can’t you try to take some of it out?” she asked on sob.
He shot her a glare. “Did you eat paint chips as a child?”
She didn’t answer and he didn’t give a shit if she was upset or not. Unfortunately, everyone knew who this was on the table. Knew it was his mother. He looked back down to close her body and noticed the blood on the floor writhed and twisted like it was alive. It congealed, rising to darken his surgical shoe covers, then his scrubs. His arms. He flung out his hands and blood spattered across the wall. The shape of the streaks was so familiar; it was like a punch to the gut. And as he watched, the table turned into his mother’s rickety bed in their home in Collinsville and that stink was back. That horrible, horrible stink that crept out from the room that had turned into her tomb. It had invaded most of the house during those many months of her slow death, hollowed out her constant cries…her pleas.
“Just hold the pillow over my face, Ashton.”
Those weak, whispered words jerked Snow’s gaze back to his dead mother. She’d said those same words when he’d been a little boy. Begged him. As if a seven-year-old could be strong enough to hold down a bucking body. Everyone fought death—even those who so desperately wanted it.
Now, he stood over her, his body covered in bloody surgical scrubs, helpless just as he’d been as a child. Then, she blurred and turned into the man killed in his home. His eyes snapped open as his mouth slowly gaped to show black holes where teeth should have been.
He looked at Snow much as his mother had, his eyes begging for help Snow couldn’t give. And right before his eyes that bloodied, begging man turned into Jude.
The scream yanked Snow from the nightmare.
He sat up in bed, gulping in great mouthfuls of air, staring around the unfamiliar room before remembering he was at Lucas’s. He blinked and ran his hands through his sweaty hair while trying to shove aside the horror. It wasn’t the first time he’d had the nightmare. He always had them when he let his stress levels built too high. But the last part had been new. He knew what the dream meant, that he’d felt helpless as a child as his mother begged him to end her suffering. His shit stain of a father had just left her in that room and Snow had tried so hard to help her. He’d fed her and washed her face and arms with a cool rag…
She was the reason he’d become a surgeon. He’d originally planned to go into oncology, but the nightmares had grown so bad while he’d been in medical school, he’d switched to general surgery. If his mother had gone to the doctor when her pain had first started—if she’d been allowed to go—a good surgeon would have been able to help her.
Allowed. He cursed and buried his head in his hands, hoping his stupid, overly-religious father was long dead and gone from the Earth.
His door opened and he blinked as light fell across the bed. Lucas’s big frame was a silhouette before he came into the room and crawled onto the bed. He sat back against the headboard and pulled Snow into his arms. He hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt with his pajama pants and his skin felt overly hot—probably because he’d been plastered to Andrei.
