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Mark stopped beside her. “I’m too late,” Jenna said. “He won’t make it. He’s too weak, and I didn’t figure out how to help him.”
The doctors and nurses tried. They tried using manual methods alongside the defibrillator to get Brett’s heart beating again.
But Jenna knew it wasn’t going to happen. His heart had already been weak without the correct cocktail, and in the absence of the chemicals his body had been programmed to need in order to exist, he wouldn’t make it.
She stood there, transfixed, watching until the doctor finally pulled himself away and looked at the clock on the wall, calling the time of death.
Brett Cochran was dead.All she could dowas what she had done.
And it hadn’t been enough.
Chapter 12
Mark pulled the bus up to the door of the hospital and carried her on board, just like he had from the plane. He loved the feeling of her in his arms. What he didn’t love was seeing Jenna both exhausted and trying to destroy herself from the inside out.
Sealing the door behind him, he set her gently on her feet. “You need some rest. I’m going to drive us to a spot we can park safely.”
While she’d been working in the lab, he’d made sure they had a place to go. They couldn’t just leave the bus parked at the hospital doors. There was an RV parking lot not far away, which would be fine. Plus, the bus Ian had provided was a fortress on wheels. Mark was more worried about getting a ticket than being in danger from anything outside the bus, except for maybe a nuclear blast.
Parking in the RV lot, he shut down the bus and went back into the main part of it, fully expecting Jenna to be passed out on the bed. She’d barely eaten all day, working at a frenzied pace that would have put most people on the floor. He could see she was exhausted, but she wasn’t asleep. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring at the floor.
“Not tired?”
Her eyes lifted to his, and she shrugged. It was a nonanswer, because she couldn’t lie about that. Her shoulders were drooping with fatigue, but she didn’t look like she was remotely ready to sleep.
He slipped off his shoes and set them next to hers before he climbed onto the bed and sat next to her. “Want to talk about it?”
She sighed. “What is there to talk about? Another person is dead because of me.”
“Hey—”
“No,” she said, finally turning to fully look at him. “We can dance around this all we want, but this is my fault. I designed the conditioning program years ago. I engineered the way to hijack people’s brains and let them be taken away from themselves. Not only that, but I’m the one who made it so they won’t ever remember what happened to them, and that whoever takes control of them can addict their bodies to chemicals they’ll need for life.”
Her voice cracked.
His heart broke.
She’d already been through so much with her captivity—the things she’d told him about on the plane had him wanting to put his fist through a wall.
Or to carry her everywhere she needed to go for the rest of her life.
To have that trauma plus what she’d been forced to create while kidnapped come back to haunt her over and over… It seemed too much for anyone to bear.
“And I couldn’t save Brett.” She swiped at her eyes. “Not only could I not save him, I basically killed him. I hurt everybody.”
Her eyes were wild as she bolted off the bed, pacing across the tiny space like a caged tiger.
Mark had plenty he wanted to say, logical arguments he wanted to make for all the reasons she wasn’t at fault. But he’d spent enough time around men and women suffering from the emotional fallout of PTSD to know that logic didn’t mean shit to her right now.
She needed someone to listen, so he stayed silent. He never took his eyes from her so she knew she had his full attention.
“Do you know why I panicked when you fell during our spar? Because a few months after my release, someone touched me when I wasn’t expecting it, and I put him on the ground. I broke his cheekbone and gave him a concussion. All because he touched my shoulder and caught me off guard. I’m lucky he didn’t press charges.”
That explained a lot. Mark could point out that the guy probably hadn’t pressed charges because anybody with an ounce of compassion would understand that her reaction had to do with her captivity. But again, he wasn’t going to be able to logic Jenna out of this.
“Back in the hospital,” she continued, “one of the nurses did the same thing while I wasn’t paying attention, and I nearly broke her arm. How long is it going to be before it’s not just the robot stuff that’s killing people, but I kill someone because I’m distracted and my body acts first? It seems like no matter what I do, I hurt people.”
“And you thought you’d hurt me while we were sparring.”
