The Black Dagger Brotherhood

by J. R. Ward

And . . . standing there.

  Eventually, T.W cleared his throat and decided that if there was going to be trouble, it would have happened already. “No, there’s no problem. I’m going to sit down. Now.”

  He planted it in the desk’s chair and bent to the side, pulling open a refrigerated drawer that had a variety of sparkling waters in it. “May I offer you anything to drink?”

  When they both said no, he cracked open a Perrier with lemon and downed half of it like it was Scotch.

  “Right. I’ll need to take a medical history.”

  The wife took a seat and the husband loomed over her, eyes locked on T.W Odd, though. They were holding hands and T.W got the impression that the wife was the husband’s tether in some way.

  Calling on his training, he took out his Waterman pen and asked the usual questions. The wife did the answering: No known allergies. No surgical procedures. No health problems.

  “Ah . . . where are the tattoos?” Please, God, let them not be below the waist.

  “On his wrists and his neck.” She looked up at her husband, her eyes luminous. “Show him, darling.”

  The man reached to one side and pulled up his sleeve. T.W frowned, medical curiosity taking over. The black band was incredibly dense, and though he wasn’t an expert on tattooing by a long shot, he could safely say he’d never seen such deep coloration before.

  “That is very dark,” he said, leaning in. Something told him not to touch the man unless he had to, and he followed the instinct, keeping his hands to himself. “That is very, very dark.”

  They were almost like shackles, he thought.

  T.W eased back into the chair. “I’m not sure whether you’re a good candidate for laser removal. The ink appears to be so dense that at a minimum it’s going to require multiple sessions to make even a dent in the pigmentation.”

  “Will you try, though?” the wife asked. “Please?”

  T.W’s eyebrows popped. Please was not a word in the vocabulary of most of the patients down here. And her tone was equally foreign to the locale, its quiet desperation more what you would find in families of patients treated upstairs—those with medical issues that affected their lives, not just their crow’s-feet and laugh lines.

  “I can try,” he said, well aware that if she used that tone on him again, she could get him to eat his own legs just to please her.

  He looked at the husband. “Would you remove your shirt and get up on the table?”

  The wife squeezed the big hand in hers. “It’s okay.”

  The husband’s hollow-cheeked, hard-jawed face turned to her, and he seemed to draw tangible strength from her eyes. After a moment he went over to the table, got his huge body up on the thing, and removed his turtleneck.

  T.W left his chair and walked around—

  He froze. The man’s back was covered with scars. Scars . . . that looked like they had been left by whips.

  In his entire medical career he had seen nothing even resembling this—and knew it must have been left by some kind of torture.

  “My tats, Doc,” the husband said in a nasty tone. “You’re supposed to be eyeballing my tats, thank you very much.”

  As T.W blinked, the husband shook his head. “This isn’t going to work—”

  The wife rushed forward. “No, it will. It—”

  “Let’s find someone else.”

  T.W came around to face the man, blocking the way to the door. And then he deliberately took his left hand out of his pocket. That black stare dipped down and fixated on the mottled skin and the ruined pinkie.

  The patient looked up in surprise; then his eyes narrowed like he was wondering how far up the burn went.

  “All the way to my shoulder and down my back,” T.W said. “House fire when I was ten. Got trapped in my room. I was conscious while I was burned . . . the entire time. Spent eight weeks in the hospital afterward. Have had seventeen surgeries.”

  There was a beat of silence, as if the husband were running through the implications in his head: If you were conscious, you’d have smelled the flesh cook and felt every lick of pain. And the hospital time . . . the surgeries . . .

  Abruptly the man’s whole body eased up, the tension flowing out of him as if a valve had been released.

  T.W had seen it happen time and time again with his burn patients. If your doctor knew what it was like to be where you were, not because they had been taught about it at medical school but because they had lived it, you felt safer with them: The two of you were members of the same exclusive hard-core club.

  “So can you do anything for these things, Doc?” the man asked, laying his forearms out on his thighs.

  “Is it okay to touch you?”

  The man’s scarred lip lifted slightly, as if he’d just given T.W another point in the good category. “Yup.”

  T.W deliberately used both his hands on the patient’s wrists so the guy could have plenty of time to look at the scars of his doctor and relax even more.

  When he was through, he stepped back.

  “Well, I’m not sure how this is going to go, but let’s give it a shot—” T.W looked up and stopped. The man’s irises . . . were yellow now. Not black anymore.

  “Don’t you worry ’bout my eyes, Doc.”

  From out of nowhere, the idea that everything was fine with what he’d seen flooded into his brain. Right. No. Big. Deal. “Where was I . . . Oh, yes. Well, let’s give the laser a shot.” He turned to the wife. “Perhaps you’d like to pull up a chair and hold his hand? I think he’ll feel more comfortable that way. I’m going to start on one wrist and we’ll see how it goes.”

  “Do I have to lie down?” the patient said darkly. “’Cause I don’t think . . . yeah, I might not be cool with that.”

  “Not at all. You can stay sitting up, even when we do the neck, and for that part I’ll get you a mirror so you can watch me. At all times I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing, what you’re likely to feel, and we can always stop. You just say the word and it’s over. This is your body. You are in control. Okay?”

  There was a moment of silence as both of them stared at him. And then the wife said in a broken tone, “You, Dr. Franklin, are a total peach.”

  The patient had an incredible pain tolerance, T.W thought an hour later as he tapped the floor toggle and the laser snapped out yet another thin red beam onto the inked skin of that thick wrist. An incredible pain tolerance. Each zap was like getting hit with a rubber band, which was not a big deal if it was done only once or twice. But after a couple of minutes of those strikes, most patients needed to rest. This guy? Never flinched, not even once. So T.W just kept going and going. . . .

  Of course, with his nipples pierced as they were and his gauge and all his scars, he’d obviously been intimately familiar with agony, both by choice and without it.

  Unfortunately his tattoos were utterly resistant to the laser.

  T.W let out his breath on a curse and shook his right hand, which was getting tired.

  “It’s okay, Doc,” the patient said softly. “You gave it your best shot.”

  “I just don’t understand.” He whipped off his eye protection and glanced over at the machine. For a moment he wondered whether the thing was working properly. But he’d seen the laser. “There’s no change in coloration at all.”

  “Doc, for real, it’s cool.” The patient took off his goggles and smiled a little. “I appreciate your taking this as seriously as you have.”

  “Goddamn it.” T.W sat back on his stool and glared at the ink.

  From out of nowhere words jumped out of his mouth, even though they were arguably unprofessional. “You didn’t volunteer for those, did you.”

  The wife fidgeted as if she were worried about the answer. But the husband just shook his head. “No, Doc. I didn’t.”

  “Goddamn it.” He crossed his arms and refiled through his encyclopedic knowledge of the human skin. “I just don’t understand why . . . and I’m trying to think of other options. I don’t th
ink a chemical removal would be any more efficacious. I mean, you took everything that laser could give you.”

  The husband ran his curiously elegant fingers over his wrist. “Could we cut them out?”

  The wife shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “She’s right,” T.W murmured. He leaned forward and prodded at the dermis. “You have excellent elasticity, but then again, as you’re in your mid-twenties, that’s expected. I mean, it would have to be done in strips and the skin stitched closed. You’d get scarring. And I wouldn’t recommend it around the neck. Too many risks with the arteries.”

  “What if scarring wasn’t a problem?”

  He wasn’t going to touch that question. Scarring was obviously an issue, given the man’s back. “I couldn’t recommend it.”

  There was a long silence while he continued to think things over and they gave him space. When he got to the end of all the options, he just stared at the two of them. The gorgeous wife was seated next to the scary-looking husband, one hand on his free arm, the other on his mutilated back, stroking.

  It was obvious that his scars didn’t affect his worth in her eyes. He was whole and beautiful to her in spite of the condition of his skin.

  T.W thought of his own wife. Who was just like that.

  “Out of ideas, Doc?” the husband asked.

  “I am so sorry.” He shifted his eyes around, hating how helpless he felt. As a doctor he was trained to do something. As a human with a heart, he needed to do something. “I am so very sorry.”

  The husband smiled that little smile of his again. “You treat a lot of people with burns, don’t you.”

  “It’s my specialty. Kids, mostly. You know, because of . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. Betcha you’re good to them.”

  “How could I not be?”

  The patient leaned forward and put his huge hand on T.W’s shoulder. “We’re going to take off now, Doc. But my shellan’s going to leave the payment on the desk over there.”

  T.W glanced at the wife, who was bent over a checkbook, then shook his head. “Why don’t we just call it even. This really didn’t help you.”

  “Nah, we took your time. We’ll pay.”

  T.W cursed under his breath a couple of times. Then just spat out, “Damn it.”

  “Doc? Look at me now?”

  T.W glanced up at the guy. Man, that yellow stare was positively hypnotic. “Wow. You have incredible eyes.”

  The patient smiled more widely, flashing teeth that were . . . not normal. “Thank you, Doc. Now listen up. You’re probably going to have dreams about this, and I want you to remember I left here tight, ’kay?”

  T.W frowned. “Why would I dream—”

  “Just remember, I’m okay with what happened. Knowing you, that’s what’s going to bother you most.”

  “I still don’t understand why I would h—”

  T.W blinked and looked around the examination room. He was sitting on the little rolling stool he used when he treated patients, and there was a chair pulled over next to the patient table, and he had his eye protection in his hand . . . except there was no one in the room but him.

  Odd. He could have sworn he was just talking to the most amazing—

  As a headache came on he rubbed his temples and became suddenly exhausted . . . exhausted and curiously depressed, as if he’d failed at something that had been important to him.

  And worried. Worried about a m—

  The headache got worse, and with a groan he stood up and went over to the desk. There was an envelope on it, a plain creamy envelope with flowing cursive script that read, In gratitude to T.W. Franklin, M.D. , to be applied at his direction in favor of his department’s good works.

  He turned it over, ripped open the flap, and took out a check.

  His jaw hit the floor.

  One hundred thousand dollars. Made out to the Department of Dermatology, St. Francis Hospital.

  The name of the person listed was Fritz Perlmutter, and there was no address at the upper left, just a discreet notation: Caldwell National Bank, Private Client Group.

  One hundred thousand dollars.

  An image of a scarred husband and a gorgeous wife flickered in his mind, then was buried by his headache.

  T.W. took the check and slipped it inside his shirt pocket, then shut down the laser machine and the computer and made his way to the back clinic exit, turning lights off as he went.

  On his way home he found himself thinking of his wife, of the way she’d been when she’d first seen him after the fire all those decades ago. She’d been eleven and had come to visit him with her parents. He’d been absolutely mortified when she’d walked through the door because he’d already had a crush on her at that point, and there he’d been, stuck in a hospital bed, one side of him covered with bandages.

  She’d smiled at him and taken his good hand and told him no matter what his arm looked like, she still wanted to be his friend.

  She’d meant it. And then, proved it over and over again.

  Even liked him as more than a friend.

  Sometimes, T.W. thought, the fact that the one you cared about didn’t care how you looked was the best healing there was.

  As he drove along, he passed by a jewelry store that was locked up tight for the night, and then a florist and then an antique shop that he knew his wife liked to browse in.

  She’d given him three children. Nearly twenty years of marriage. And space to work this career of his.

  He’d given her a lot of lonely nights. Dinners with just the kids. Vacations that were limited to a day or two tacked onto dermatology conferences.

  And a Volvo.

  It took T.W. twenty minutes to get to a Hannaford that was open all night, and he jogged into the supermarket even though there was no closing time to worry about.

  The flower section was to the left, just as he walked in through the automatic doors. As he saw the roses and the chrysanthemums and the lilies, he thought about backing up his Lexus and filling the trunk with bouquets. And the backseat.

  In the end though, he chose one single flower, and he held it carefully between his thumb and forefinger all the way home.

  He parked in the garage, but didn’t go in through the kitchen. Instead he went to the front door and rang the bell.

  His wife’s familiar, lovely face peeked out of the long, thin windows that framed their colonial’s entryway. She looked confused as she opened the door.

  “Did you forget your—”

  T.W. held the flower out in his burned hand.

  It was a lowly little daisy. Exactly the kind she’d brought to him once a week in the hospital. For two months straight.

  “I don’t say thank-you enough,” T.W. murmured. “Or I love you. Or that I still think you’re as beautiful as the day I married you.”

  His wife’s hand trembled as she took the flower. “T.W. . . . are you okay?”

  “God . . . the fact that you have to ask that just because I bring you a flower . . .” He shook his head and hugged her into his arms, holding her tight. “I’m sorry.”

  Their teenage daughter walked by them and rolled her eyes before heading up the stairs. “Get a room.”

  T.W. pulled back and tucked his wife’s salt-and-pepper hair back behind her ears. “I think we should take her advice, what do you say? And by the way, we’re going somewhere for our anniversary—and not to a conference.”

  His wife smiled and then outright beamed. “What has gotten into you?”

  “I saw this patient and his wife tonight. . . .” He winced and rubbed his temple. “I mean . . . what was I saying?”

  “How about dinner?” his wife said, fitting herself into his side. “And then we’ll see about that room?”

  T.W. leaned into his wife as he shut the door. As they went down the hall to the kitchen together, he kissed her. “That sounds perfect. Just perfect.”

  TEN

  Back at the Brotherhood’s mansio
n, Z stood at one of the windows in his and Bella’s bedroom and looked down over the terrace and the back gardens. His wrist burned from where the laser had been applied, but the pain wasn’t bad.

  “I’m not surprised by the whole thing,” he said. “Well, other than the fact that I liked the doc.”

  Bella came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. “He was a good guy, wasn’t he.”

  As they stood together, there was a whole lot of what-now floating around the room. Unfortunately he didn’t have any answers. He’d kind of banked on the bands being removed, like that would somehow make everything better.

  Although it wasn’t as if there weren’t still scars on his face.

  From the nursery Nalla let out a burble and then a hiccup. A cry was next.

  “I just fed her and changed her,” Bella said, pulling away. “I’m not sure what this is about—”

  “Let me go to her,” he said in a tight voice. “Let me see if I can . . .”

  Bella’s eyebrows lifted, but then she nodded. “Okay. I’ll stay here.”

  “I won’t drop her. I promise.”

  “I know you won’t. Just make sure you support her head.”

  “Right. Got it.”

  Z felt like he was going unarmed into a field of lessers when he walked into the nursery.

  As if sensing him, Nalla let out a whiffle.

  “It’s your father. Dad. Papa.” What would she call him?

  He went over and peered down at his daughter. She was dressed in a Red Sox onesie, no doubt a gift from V and/or Butch, and her lower lip was quivering like it wanted to leap off the tip of her chin but was afraid of the drop.

  “Why are you crying, little one?” he said softly.

  When she lifted her arms up to him, he checked the doorway. Bella wasn’t in it, and he was glad. He didn’t want anyone seeing how awkward he was as he reached into the crib and . . .

  Nalla fit between his hands perfectly, her butt in one of his palms, her head cradled in the other. As he straightened and brought her up, she was surprisingly sturdy and warm and—

  She grabbed onto his turtleneck and pulled into him, demanding closeness . . . and obliging her seemed shockingly easy. As he held her against his chest, she settled immediately, turning herself flush into his body.