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“It’s okay.” I dragged my gaze away from my mother to smile up at him. “No secrets.” Matthias nodded, repeating the phrase that had become a staple since he’d returned from the dead.
“A…a…” My mother’s eyes misted over as she stared at me longingly.
“It’s okay, Mama,” I whispered, 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 opened. “I can’t believe you were alive this whole time.” I sobbed earnestly, clutching her hand to me like a lifeline, afraid that if I let go, she would disappear. Tears tracked down her face, sorrow imprinting itself in every fine line. The nurse gently wiped at my mother’s cheeks, but the moisture kept pooling.
“How long will the listlessness last?” Matthias asked Radick as I wept.
“She still has a good amount of the cocktail in her system,” he said. “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 waved it off. “Minimal,” he assured 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 asked, “Isn’t that dangerous?”
Radick nodded. “Extremely.”
“How long before I can take her home?”
Radick smiled 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 argued. Matthias shot me a look, and I flushed. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my mother watching us. Even now, she was sensing the situation and compiling information. From the way my husband’s lips turned up at the edges when he looked at her, he could see it too.
Radick chuckled. “Trust me; it will go by fast,” he assured me. “But let’s give the patient some time to rest, and you can come back tomorrow.” I frowned at him. My eyes flickered over to my mother, whose face was drawn and pale, her eyes growing heavy with sleep, and I knew he was right.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, Mama.” I leaned over her bed and planted a soft kiss on her temple. I didn’t want to leave her. What if someone came to take her away again?
The frightened little girl inside me made an appearance after so many years, casting doubt and fear in my mind. Elias was dead, but someone had to have been paying the doctor. It had been months since his death. Surely the money would have run out.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” I told my husband as we settled into the back seat of the car. Matthias looked over at me.
“What do you mean?”
I rubbed 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 trailed off, twisting my hands in my lap. “Maybe there is another player we don’t know about? Or—”
“Ava.” Matthias stilled my hands, bringing them up to his mouth and kissing them gently. “No one other than Elias was paying the clinic,” he assured 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 whooshed out. I hadn’t even known I’d been holding it in.
Matthias smiled. Jesus, he was all smiles and gentle whispers nowadays. As much as it made me swoon and made my panties dampen, his surly, growly demeanor had me wetter than a Texas whorehouse.
“Mark has been digging into everything since the night of your mother’smurder,” he relayed. “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 remembered that, in her journal, Libby said that she had overheard the conversation between Remus and Elias.
“I sent the woman to deal with your obsession years ago…”
I relayed what I had read to Matthias.
“I’ll have Mark track Elias’s movements on the days leading up to the event,” he assured me. “I wonder if he followed her, waited for her to leave, and then stepped in. That would also explain why it took them so long to find you.”
I furrowed my brow. “What do you mean?”
“From your own memories, it sounded like everything was practically cleaned up by the time that officer found you in your hiding spot,” Matthias pointed out. I didn’t see how that mattered, and I told him so. “You said the officer told you the phrase your mother taught you to listen to. Correct?”
I nodded.A chroi.Heart. It had been our codeword for as long as I could recall.
