Well. That was that, then. “Okay,” Marcus said.
Jax sighed.
Penelope stood next to Jax, staring down at the unconscious man who’d attacked her, a lab coat covering her ripped shirt. “His vitals are good, but he has several broken ribs, a broken arm, and fractures in his face.” She’d given up on medical jargon months ago.
“Is he a Ripper?” Jax asked.
She shrugged. “He certainly acted like one, but I can’t be sure until he awakens.” If he did. There was a good chance his brain was swelling against his skull, and she lacked the equipment to get images.
Jax swallowed. “How the hell did a Ripper get into inner territory?”
“I don’t know,” she mused.
A ruckus sounded at the back door, and heavy footsteps sounded. Dr. Harrington ran inside the room. He was around sixty-five with bushy gray hair and a beard that didn’t seem like it’d ever quit growing. “We have a problem.” He skidded to a stop near the bed. “Oh.”
Jax faced him. “I take it this is your problem?”
Harrington blew out air and nodded. “Yeah. This is Greg Nort, and he was bitten by a Ripper two nights ago while out scouting for food. I had him restrained at the inner hospital, but he somehow got loose.”
“Two nights ago?” Penelope looked closer. The guy should be awake and weakened. There was no fever in him right now. “Did you administer the correct amounts of B and morphine?”
“Yeah.” Harrington sighed. “He kept turning, though. I’ve kept him restrained, hoping he’d come back, but it hasn’t happened.”
Damn it. Even with the Vitamin B shots, the insanity still took a small number of people. “How far gone is he?” Penelope asked, her chest aching.
Harrington shook his head. “Nothing left that I could tell. He kept trying to bite anybody who came near, even though we had him flat on the bed.”
Jax’s face showed no expression. “Thanks, Doc. I’ll take care of it.”
Harrington’s chest sunk, and he nodded, patting Penelope on the arm. “Okay.” Then he looked around. “Where’s Marcus?”
“With the shrink,” Jax said, not looking away from the victim on the bed.
“Good,” Harrington muttered, turning away. “I’ll see you at the medical meeting later, Penelope. Good luck, Jax.” He shuffled back down the hallway, much slower than when he’d arrived.
“You need to leave, Penelope,” Jax said quietly. “The Ripper will be gone when you return.”
She swallowed. “No.” She’d taken an oath, and that meant something to her. “I’ll shoot him full of more B.”
“Won’t work, and you know it. There’s no returning from this kind of madness.” Jax didn’t raise his voice, but the thread of command held true. “Leave the infirmary, or I’ll have you removed.”
“You can’t,” she protested.
He turned then, the raw emotion in his tawny eyes a shock. “What are my options? I can’t let him loose outside territory to find other victims. I can’t shackle him here infinitely, because at some point, he will get free. And I can’t secure him in one of the cells, because he’ll self-harm until he dies. What are my options, Doctor?”
“At least let me try,” she whispered, knowing full-on that it was useless.
“Do you trust Harrington’s judgment?” Jax asked, going for the throat, as usual.
Penelope could only nod.
“Mine? Do you trust my judgment?”
She closed her eyes, but she nodded again.
“Good. Get out of here, Penny.”
It seemed everybody was going to call her by the nickname now. Before, she’d used her full name at school, and only her family called her Penny. This was her family now. She steeled her shoulders and opened her eyes. “No. I’m his doctor, Jax. I’ll take care of it.” She had enough morphine to make his death painless.
“Sorry, Doc. Drugs are precious, and I have a lot more bullets than sedatives.”
Bile rose in Penelope’s throat. “You can’t be serious.”
“He won’t suffer,” Jax said, a muscle ticking beneath his jaw.
Marcus appeared in the doorway, having moved silently. “The shrink isn’t quite ready for me. She’s having some sort of fight with her dead mother-in-law.” He said the words casually but then moved toward Penny as if sensing the tension in the room.
Penny planted her feet in place. The current president of the country had infected Vinnie with a bunch of drugs, and she’d possibly become schizophrenic a little bit. Or a lot. It was hard to tell. “We’re going to do this my way, Jax.” She’d use Marcus if she had to, but that made her want to puke even more.
Jax sighed. “The Ripper has to go, Marcus. Either I do it, or Penny does it, and I vote for me.”
“Me, too,” Marcus said quietly.
“No.” Penny held up a hand. “I need your help. Get your brother out of here, please.” She kept her gaze on the prone man.
Marcus didn’t move.
“Marcus?” Penny asked, partially turning to look at him.
Jax cleared his throat. “Her job is to save people, and she won’t live very well with what has to happen here. Get her out of here, Marcus.”
Marcus looked at her, at his brother, and then back at her. “I’m sorry, Penny.” Before he’d finished the last word, he ducked his head and tossed her over his shoulder.
Her stomach impacted and the air whooshed out of her lungs. She struggled, and he clamped an iron-hard arm across her legs, effectively immobilizing her as he strode out of the room. “Marcus,” she hissed, her mouth against his back.
For the first time since they’d met, he’d ignored her request.
Completely.
7
If we don’t take the time to live, what’s the point of surviving the pandemic?
—Dr. Penelope Kim, Journal
The soldiers in Vanguard-Merc territory were a wise bunch, because not one of them tried to stop Marcus as he carried Penny through the cafeteria and up the stairs to her apartment, where he dumped her onto her sofa. “Stay here.” He was halfway back to the door when she answered.
“No.”
He turned to see her pushing upright, her hair flying in every direction and fury in her deep brown eyes.
“Yes.” When it came to safety, and only then, he was in charge. Other than that, she could totally direct their lives.
She gathered herself, her chin lowering and making her look like an adorable kitten about to charge. “You will never do that again. Got it?”
An odd feeling ticked through him—heated and real. What was that? Anger? He hadn’t felt anything in so long that the sensation grounded him in place.
She slapped her hands on her hips. “Marcus? Do you understand? Never do that?”
“What?” he asked. “Be a lapdog that disobeys?” Yeah. That was definitely anger. Interesting. Was he starting to feel things again? That could be good or really bad. For the moment, he zeroed his focus in on the woman spitting her own fury at him.
“You’re not a lapdog,” she countered.
“It’s good you realize that,” he said.
She huffed out air and looked beyond him to the open doorway.
“You won’t make it.” It was only fair to give her the truth. Sometimes she just got stubborn, and he was starting to see that maybe it wasn’t always a good thing.
“What is wrong with you?” She threw her hands up in the air.
Wrong with him? God, there wasn’t enough time in the day for him to really answer that question. “I’m going to help Jax, and then I’ll be back to escort you to the infirmary.” Apparently she needed a guard on her all day, if there were Rippers just wandering around the territory.
“Absolutely not.” She took three unwise steps toward him. “Get out of my way. It’s my job, and I’m going to do it.” At the words, she paled beneath her smooth skin.
“You wanted me to learn things here and grow,” he reminded her.
She stilled. “So?”
“So? I learned that sometimes you’re an idiot.”
She reared back. “Excuse me?”
He blanched. “I may have phrased that wrong. Sorry about that. I’m saying that I’ve followed your lead since we got here because I trusted you to do the right thing. Or at least to know what the right thing is.” His mind had been so muddled that he wasn’t sure what to do or say most of the time.
“That’s changed?” She frowned.
“Well, kind of.” It was nice that the fog was finally clearing, but she could’ve been hurt earlier, and she didn’t seem to care. “It’s not your fault the Ripper found you and attacked.”
She blinked. Once and then again. “I know that.”
Oh. Good. “It is your fault that when Raze came in, you didn’t run for safety.” It would’ve been best if she would’ve run for him, but he’d gotten there soon enough. “It was also your fault that you tried to stop Jax from choking me out. You could’ve been seriously harmed.” He’d been out of his mind, and he owed Raze gratitude for putting her butt on the counter and away from the fight.
“Those were my decisions,” she spat.
“They were the wrong ones,” he said calmly. “The third wrong decision was in telling Jax you’d put down the Ripper. You’re a doctor, and you’re a kind one, and you are supposed to save people. It’s not on you to finish them.”
“It is.” Her voice trembled, but she didn’t back down.
Sometimes he forgot how strong she really was, considering she was half his size. “So, strike three, I guess.” His brother had said he used to play baseball.
“What does that mean?”
Maybe she didn’t play baseball as a kid. “It means you make the wrong decisions when it comes to your safety.” He couldn’t even go into the fact that she’d hinted they could be more than friends the night before. That had to have been a side-effect of the bourbon, and even so, it had given him dreams he’d like to dive right into and never escape. “So this little partnership we have going on just changed.” That sounded so much better than obsession.
Her chin lifted and challenge, a whole boatload of it, filled her eyes. “Oh yeah?”
His blood started to thrum, warm and fast, through his body. “Yeah. You’re totally in charge of where we live and what we do, as well as how we relate to anybody else. I’m in charge of your safety. I’ll continue to follow your lead in every area but that, and you fucking obey me when I give a very rare order.” Huh. He’d just thrown out the f-word like he did it every day. So this is what anger felt like. He still felt kind of numb beneath it, but maybe that’d go away, too.
“Obey?” Her voice shook and her lips turned white.
“It’s what you expect from me. Right?” He cocked his head.
She swallowed. “It hasn’t been like that.” She took a step back. “All right. I may have gotten used to you doing as I asked, but that’s on you as much as me.”
“Fair enough.”
She hesitated and focused only on him, apparently forgetting about the open doorway. “If I don’t agree?”
It was an honest question and a good one. He had lived among the somewhat civilized people in Vanguard-Merc territory long enough to realize that the obsession was his problem and not hers. “I’ll leave.” It would hurt like hell, and he’d probably walk head first into a Ripper fight to end it all, but if she wanted him gone, he’d go.
“I don’t want you to leave,” she whispered, the color returning to her face.
“Then it’s my way,” he said.
She shook her head. “I don’t like ultimatums.”
“It’s a fact and not a challenge,” he said, the idea hurting that he’d have to leave. “It’s the only way I can stay and keep working on everything.”
She grabbed the statement like she would a lifeline. “Okay. Temporarily, while you work with Vinnie and start remembering and hopefully get rid of the obsession.”
Well, it was a start. “Stay here until I come get you.”
She started to argue and then rolled her eyes.
He gave her two hours before she changed her mind, and he’d have to leave.
Penelope finished counting heartbeats, her fingers on Maureen Shadow’s wrist. She made a notation and stepped back, smiling at her friend on the examination table. “All is well, Moe. The morning sickness should pass in a couple of weeks, but I can’t guarantee it.”
Maureen let out the breath she’d been holding, her blue eyes shining. They were a shade lighter than her brother’s, and while Raze had black hair, hers was more mahogany. “Thank goodness. Every time I throw up, Greyson looks at me like I’m about to fall apart. I know I’m only a few months along, but I can’t help be scared every day that it’s the last day I’ll be pregnant.” Her smile slid away. “Any news on a cure?”
“No.” Penny tried to soften the truth. “But Marcus is on board for being hypnotized, and he’s been to other Bunkers, so I’m hopeful he’ll remember where they are.” What exactly had she agreed to earlier with him? He’d always been a solid wall of protection, and this was the first time he’d turned his impressive will against her.
“What’s up?” Moe asked, swinging her jean clad legs at the edge of the smaller examination table.
Penny sighed. “Well, I don’t think we should talk girl talk since I’m acting as your doctor right now.”
Maureen snorted. “I’m fairly certain nobody will turn you in to the medical board. In fact, I’m pretty sure there isn’t a medical board any longer—in any state.” Her grin brightened her pale face. “We’re friends, and that doesn’t change whether or not you have a stethoscope in your hand. What’s going on?”
Penelope set the clipboard and records on the torn counter. “Marcus is driving me nuts. All of a sudden, he’s getting bossy and demanding.”
“So?” Moe asked, straightening her shirt. “He’s always been a bear, insisting on protecting you. What’s new?”
What was new? Penelope leaned back against the counter. “We drank bourbon together last night.”
Moe’s head jerked up. “Is that a fact?” She leaned forward. “Aaannnnd?” she drawled.
Penelope frowned. “And nothing. It’s time we moved on to friendship, and I suggested it.”
Moe’s gaze glimmered. “Just friendship? Come on. He’s hot. Like seriously hot.” She fanned her face. “Not as sexy as Greyson, of course. But definitely sexy.”
Penelope’s mouth dropped open. “I thought everyone was afraid of him.”
“Isn’t that good protection for you?” Maureen asked. “Name one soldier in this place who isn’t terrifying. We’re in the middle of the Apocalypse, girlfriend. Scary wins the day right now.” She rubbed her nose. “Sexy is just an added cherry on top.”
Penelope’s mouth opened and then closed. She bit her lip. Maureen had given her an opening, and not that she was thinking of Marcus as anything more than a friend, but his strong devotion was a little tempting. “All right. Greyson kidnapped you, and here you are in love with him and pregnant with his child. How exactly did you make that leap?”
Maureen sat back, stretching her neck. “That’s a fair question. I guess, when Greyson Storm kidnapped me, I wasn’t scared of him. Not really. He was gentle and protective, and even when I tried to stab him, he only took the knife away and made sure not to hurt me. Plus…I already mentioned I like sexy men.”
Yeah, Storm was a hottie, in a killer type of way.
Penelope mulled over the situation. “So you were fine with the kidnapping?”
“No. Once I found out his motives, that he just wanted to blackmail my brother into turning over Vinnie Wellington for information, I guess I kind of forgave him.”
Penelope couldn’t help but laugh. Life had gotten way too weird. “Has your brother forgiven Grey for kidnapping you and blackmailing him into turning over the woman he loves?”
“I think so, especially since Raze never turned Vinnie over. The
jury is out on knocking me up, though.” Maureen chuckled.
“Well, you were kidnapped. There’s an issue there,” Penelope reminded her.
“Nope. We had sex after I’d returned home to Vanguard and then gone willingly back to Merc territory—when there was Merc territory,” Moe said. The Mercs had held a stretch of land in Santa Barbara that had burned down, and then they’d combined with Vanguard to join forces. “To be honest, I took advantage of him, I think. Well, we were both drunk and he was concussed, and I wanted him. Bad.”
All right. Enough with the girl talk. “It worked out perfectly. Tell him you’re fine.” Penelope smiled. For now, anyway. She really needed more information from those Bunkers and hopefully a cure.
Moe looked up, losing all mirth. “Life is short, Penny. Yeah, Marcus is screwed up, but who isn’t after the pandemic? If you have a chance at something good, even if it’s fun for just a little while, why not take it?”
“Obsession aside, I don’t think Marcus is a casual kind of guy,” Penny murmured. She’d lost everybody she’d ever loved to the bacteria, and the idea of taking a chance again was just too much. Being a doctor and taking care of people was enough for her, although she wouldn’t mind a casual fling in this crazy world. But not with Marcus dogging her every move and looking so ripped, dangerous, and sexy all the time.
“You like that he stood up to you,” Maureen said softly.
Penelope straightened her spine. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Maureen chuckled again. “Feel free to lie to me, but it’s a mistake to lie to yourself.”
Penelope only gave her a look. Sometimes friends were a pain in the butt. However, she did have feelings for Marcus, whether they made sense or not.
Gunfire echoed, and Maureen stiffened, looking toward the door. No other sounds of a fight entered, and she subsided. “See what I mean? Life is short.”
“Somebody is just target practicing,” Penelope said, her heart rate picking up anyway.
“Maybe, but there’s a schedule, and practicing isn’t on there. My guess is a Ripper got too close—or a member of the Twenty gang, no doubt still working for the president.” Maureen pressed a hand over her stomach. “The president hasn’t attacked us for almost two months. You know he’s gearing up.”
Knight Awakening (The Scorpius Syndrome Book 6) Page 5