by C. L. Stone
The fact that he was asking Axel specifically was odd to me. “I’ll help.”
Axel didn’t hesitate. “No. I’ll go with you.”
I don’t know why, but I loved him more for that. Volunteering without a blink.
“What about us?” Corey said, meaning him and myself.
“Let us leave,” Blake said. “Wait a bit, then you go in another direction. Then have Kayli do the same with someone else.” He crossed the room close to Corey and put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t go alone. Don’t be alone right now. Always be with someone you trust.”
“What happened?” Corey said. “Who did you trust? Did that person take your phone?”
I wanted to know this too. It wasn’t like him to lose his phone, least of all to someone like Alice.
But she was tricky. Conniving. Who knew what she did to him.
Blake’s lips twitched and the gold flecks in his eyes seemed to dim. “I’ll tell you later.”
That broke me. Whatever it was, it was bad.
Blake released Corey and met my gaze. The tortured look he had before disappeared, and he flashed that foxlike smile, only it felt forced. “Don’t wait for us. Get yourselves out of town.” He turned away, and he and Axel rushed out together.
Alice was possibly on the way. Staying didn’t seem like the smart thing to do.
The nurse and one of the security guards left with Blake and Axel. The second guard stayed with us. “We should get out of this room,” he said. “We’ll make it look like you left on your own and we’re trying to find you. It’ll be more believable.”
Corey nodded and reached for my arm. “We have to go.”
“I should change clothes.”
“No time,” he said. “Let’s leave now.”
Corey had me follow him through a maze of hallways within the hospital. We found an empty hallway on the ground floor and waited to give Axel and Blake a chance to make some distance.
Corey used his phone quickly, making contact to bring the others in on Blake’s plan.
“This was exactly what Dr. Roberts was afraid of,” I said as Corey tapped at his phone.
Corey slowed his tapping a little as he spoke. “She’s not after you right now. She’s after Blake.”
“And he led her here.” I motioned to the hospital.
“She could have gotten to us at any time. We’ve been at our apartments at the Sargent Jasper.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Waiting.”
“You wanted her to come find you?”
“We’re ready if she shows up. We should leave, but we’ll be okay there, for now.” He finished what he was doing and focused on me. “We should go there.”
I wasn’t so sure this was a good idea, but it was a better idea than staying at the hospital and exposing the Academy further. “We shouldn’t make her wonder about the hospital and take a closer look.”
“She shouldn’t find anything unusual here,” he said but also put a hand over his chest, and his eyes flicked from me to the hall to one of the doors nearby and to other random locations. He was thinking deeply, planning.
We had to stop involving the Academy. They were innocent. “If they want to chase us, we have to let them for a while.”
“It can’t be too obvious.”
“Let’s show I’m leaving,” I said. “Let’s get security footage. Let’s show her…I don’t know. Let me get some random tests done. And then leave like this is a normal hospital.”
This seemed to spark an idea in him. “Let her break into the security office?”
“It’s what we’d do,” I said. “Having too secure a security office for a hospital would be noticeable. Let me go back to the room. I’ll get taken around for a few tests before I leave for the apartments. She’s chasing Blake, right? Have someone watch whoever breaks into the security room. Let’s just make it god-awful obvious.”
He brushed his palm across his chin. “You’re right. But…you should go. I’d need to set up something…”
“A computer thing?”
He smirked. “Sure. Computer things. That’s what I do.”
“And if you’re ready for her at the apartments, that’s where I should go.”
He nodded. “Take the long route around if you want, but get there. Brandon’s on his way for you. He should be here in a minute. I’ll still leave separately ahead of you.”
“With someone.”
“Marc’s nearly here,” he said. “We’ll mix it up. Make it harder to follow everyone just in case, but still stick together.” He paused and reached out for me.
His hug surrounded me, stilling my body. I hadn’t even noticed I was shaking until then.
My fingers curled into fists at his chest, gripping at his shirt, the material tightening between my fingertips. “It’s not our fault,” I said.
He sighed, and I felt the heat of his breath on my scalp. “It’s mine.”
“No,” I said and pulled back a bit so I could look at him. When he wouldn’t meet my eyes, I placed palms at his cheeks, feeling the coarse hair where he hadn’t shaved in a while. His hair was so blond I couldn’t tell before. He finally focused on me, his eyes, usually happy, now deep and sad like his brother’s were. “It’s hers. Alice. Whoever she is with. We’re not murderers. We’re not kidnappers.”
He sighed and nodded. “I just feel like if I hadn’t been…messing in that world…”
I thought he meant his criminal past, which is why Alice and old Mr. Murdock thought him valuable. It was why they tried to kidnap him, and how this all started. I lowered my hands to his shoulders. “You wouldn’t have found the Academy. You wouldn’t have found me.”
“You would be safe.”
“I’d be in jail,” I said. “And I wouldn’t have you.”
This seemed to perk him up a bit. He scanned my face, starting with my eyes and then down to my chin.
He stopped at my lips for a long time before he drifted up to my eyes again.
“I want…” he started to say but he stopped.
I didn’t wait for him to ask. I leaned up, and I kissed him.
I meant to do it once, because I was still unsure how he felt about me. On the ship, he said he was interested in me, like Axel, Brandon and the others.
But that one short kiss I meant to leave with him, he leaned into it. In a breathless moment, he roughly turned me, pressed me against the wall of the hallway and kissed hard against me.
It was like unleashing something that had been brewing for much too long.
It wasn’t the time, and we had to focus, but I couldn’t help it. I welcomed it, pressing my hands to the back of his neck like I needed more.
The scruff of hair around his mouth scratched at my skin as he deepened the kiss. He pressed his hands to my hips, holding me against the wall like that, with a thigh pressed between mine.
He pulled away first, stopping, swallowing air. “Been waiting to do that.”
“If I’d known, I would have done it sooner,” I said.
“I won’t wait next time,” he said, fishing his phone out of his pocket to check it. “Marc’s almost here. Can you find your way back?”
“Shouldn’t I not go back alone?”
He nodded and motioned. “I’ll walk with you as far as a lobby or nurses’ station, whatever place we find first with other people. Go find…maybe Dr. Roberts. Talk to him. Don’t deal with anyone you don’t recognize right now, even if they say they are Academy. Just…for now, no one you don’t recognize.”
I’d have to explore this new connection with him later. My relationship with him, his brother, Axel and the others—it was complicated. However, since they all knew what was going on now, something had changed in me. If they wanted me, I accepted it. I just needed to be sure they were aware they weren’t exclusive. At least not now. I wasn’t sure how open relationships worked, and I wanted to set some ground rules. But for the moment, survival came first.
♠♠♠♠♠♠
Corey left me when we hit an area where other people were. Once there, he took one hallway, I took another. Nurses and security, plus patients and doctors, were out in the hallway, making it look like a busy morning.
Trying to look normal.
Trying to appear to anyone coming in that this was a typical morning at your average hospital. Except I found security nearly everywhere and nurses in full force.
All because of us.
The guilt for being the cause of this panic grew.
I wound my way through the crowded hallways and found Dr. Roberts. I told him the plan.
He agreed. “Let’s get you into some testing. I’d feel better double checking to make sure you’re okay. We’ll keep some cameras on you. And we’ll have people edit the footage.”
“If she comes here, we’ll have to let her in.”
He nodded, grimly pressing his lips together as he did. It wasn’t his favorite idea, but it was the only way to appear this was just any other hospital. To allow the enemy in. To let her inside this protected space.
To lead her to me without any security or protection other than who Alice already knew I was friends with.
We were doing this alone now. We couldn’t ask them for any more.
I waited for several hours while my body was under a microscope, so to speak. It was a good thing Corey had brought steak and pie earlier, since there wasn’t a break for quite a while. I was prodded and given chalky stuff to drink so they could check me out in an MRI and then an x-ray, then later poked at again. I’d done it all before. They were looking for updates and also giving themselves footage to put together. I wasn’t sure it was all necessary.
Getting poisoned was what’d had me in the hospital so long. It had done something to my ovaries. My constant bleeding had eased up a lot after they’d given me birth control. It was like a light period that just wouldn’t go away for a bit and then disappeared completely. Still they wanted me in the hospital for long after.
“Sorry we’re out here in the hallway,” Dr. Roberts said after the last test. “My office is…occupied at the moment.”
I raised an eyebrow. I was in a robe in a patient waiting area just outside of a testing room. I’d gotten used to talking in low tones with Dr. Roberts without needing to walk all the way to one of his offices or back to the room again. “Something going on?”
“That little breach this morning has us needing extra security, and my office apparently is the best spot. And we’re a bit overcrowded today, taking in some extra patients from a nearby hospital.”
“Isn’t it a bad time?” I asked him. “To be bringing in extra people?”
He looked at me through his glasses with that odd twinkle in his gaze. “What do you mean? Hospitals take on extra patients all the time. We’re completely within normal operating procedures.”
Something in his tone told me this wasn’t the case, but it wasn’t a bad thing that extra patients were being loaded in
“Would she suspect that phone number to be anything special?”
“It’s not exactly a secured line. We’re not all secret, secured lines and mystery and voodoo. We are an actual, for real hospital, you know.” The way he said it, I sensed he was trying to make a joke.
I tried to smile but couldn’t fake it. “Oh.”
He sighed and looked at his clipboard. “But let’s focus on you. I think the birth control is working at least. It may give your ovaries time to heal after what they’d been subjected to.”
“You’re not going to take out my uterus or whatever?” I asked.
“Not unless we have to,” he said. “If the only thing we have to subject you to is birth control until menopause, I consider that better than risking other issues with invasive surgery.”
“So...” It was weird I was hesitating with the question. I didn’t hesitate normally, but a part of me was afraid to find out. “It basically just means I can’t have kids,” I said.
Dr. Roberts lifted his glasses off of his nose to look at me directly. “Should we reconsider this? Is this disappointing?”
“I just don’t like something else deciding what I can and can’t do.”
His expression morphed into something like sympathy. “You’re a surprising person, Kayli Winchester.” He laid a gentle hand on my shoulder, showing some support. “Don’t give up on yourself. It’s a first step. And you’re still young. It might clear up in a couple of years and you can have loads of kids. I’ve seen it happen.”
“You’ve seen a girl who was kidnapped and given poisons until her ovaries tried to spit out all her eggs in one go have kids again?”
“Young lady, I’ve witnessed men being given a uterus and injections so they could have babies. The world is full of miracles. Anything can happen. Don’t give up on anything you want for yourself.”
I wished I could have been happy with his answer, and in a way, I was. He was right. Medically, a lot was possible now.
Without the Academy, could I ever afford such a thing?
That bugged me. Belonging with them, their safety net, it was a promise they dangled like a carrot, and in exchange…I didn’t know what they wanted. So far, I’d caused them trouble, not helped them. I wasn’t sure I deserved any of their help.
Which meant now I felt I should do what he wanted and get Axel and his team to as safe a place as could be.
But I still had loose ends. Wil, for one. My younger brother…
I wished I could talk to him.
Dr. Roberts wrote a prescription for continual pill birth control. He said we’d do it for three months to start so we could monitor, then change the type of birth control to an implant if I’d like later. Or whatever else I wanted to do for it.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I just didn’t want to die or be slowed down by this anymore.
I didn’t have the time or the patience for it. Not with Alice poking around.
A STRANGE REUNION
Brandon was waiting for me when I returned to my hospital room. Identical to Corey except for those sad, cerulean eyes that seem to pour the depths of sadness into my soul.
He blinked at me a few times and then his cheeks turned red. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because I was in the robe still from testing.
Not until I turned my head to the couch and found a man sitting there.
A man I didn’t recognize at first. It took several long moments for me to realize it was my own father.
Jack kept his eyes lowered.
He was drastically different from the last I’d seen him.
A few months ago, I’d been living in a hotel room with my brother and him. I worked desperately to keep us all out of the gutter while he drank away his life and the money that could have gone to a better house or food.
He was the reason Wil left. As long as my father got his government paycheck meant for taking care of Wil while he was unemployed, he didn’t care what happened to either of us.
I’d hated him until I tried to forget about him.
But here he was. His hair had grown out a bit, wet and combed back, like he’d just washed it. He’d shaved, put on a new crisp blue shirt and pants. He’d lost a bit of weight from the last time I’d seen him, too. He was sitting as quiet as could be, with hands folded in front of himself. Appearing almost humble even.
Dumbstruck by his appearance, I was left with several moments of silence, of waiting for someone to tell me this was either a dream or a mistake.
“What are you doing here, Jack?” I asked him, tentative.
“I brought him here,” Brandon said. “He asked to see you.”
Jack looked up at me and nodded shortly, saying nothing.
My lips parted, and I breathed slowly, in and out, unable to come to my own conclusion. “Why?”
“You’re his daughter. And we let him know you were in the hospital.” Brandon paused, gave me a look that told me to go along with this. Like part of a plan. He trailed from me to Jack and back at me. “He’s n
ot who you remember.”
I remembered a lot about my father. Even before he was a drunk, when he used to keep a job, not a great one, but he took care of my brother and myself, and my mother at the time. After my mother died, that was it. He gave up. He drank. He spent money on women. We lived in a hotel, and he used to come home and try to beat us up before passing out.
I wasn’t sure how we existed for so long in such a way. I couldn’t totally blame Wil for leaving, either. Everything I’d been doing to help him and Jack exist, it wasn’t enough. Wil walked out. After he was gone, so was I.
And the last time I saw Jack, I’d tried to attack him. I never wanted to see him again. Raven and Marc had pulled me out before I could do too much damage to his face.
I couldn’t be more baffled. “New clothes and a shower doesn’t make him changed,” I said, already feeling the bitterness and anger I’d thought I’d let go before. I was willing to forget he existed. Now, with him in front of me, it just bubbled to the surface. “And it isn’t a good time.”
Brandon presented a hand to me, holding it out in a stop motion. “Just hear him out, okay?”
I stepped back, folding my arms over my chest, as if to hold back all the words of outrage I wanted to spew at him. I’d give him a few minutes. For Brandon’s sake. Maybe this was more Brandon’s plan, screwed up as it may be. Didn’t he know Alice might be here at any minute?
Jack looked my way, but not directly at my eyes, like he didn’t dare. His cheeks were flushed. “I’m sorry about attacking you before. I was hung over and...”
Brandon coughed gently once, which broke Jack out of what he was saying.
Did they rehearse something?
Jack fiddled with his hands, folding them and unfolding them. “I heard you were in the hospital and had been asking to see you. I hope whatever is wrong, it isn’t...it’s not...”
“It’s not,” I said stiffly. I knew what he was asking. If it was cancer. Like my mother. It wasn’t.
It could have been worse if the hospital hadn’t detected the poison in my system so early on. But I didn’t want to tell Jack all of this.
He seemed relieved. “Right. Good... Good.” He fell silent again.
Awkward.
