by K. I. Lynn
I began to shake, Andrew had begun pacing, and Caroline was biting her fingernails. None of those were good signs.
“Can you ring up and see if she answers?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Thorne.”
He let it ring nine times before hanging up and shaking his head.
“We need your help. Lila didn’t show up to work, and her car is still here. We’re unable to reach her by phone, and we’re worried there’s something very wrong. We need to get into her apartment and make sure she’s okay; can you help us with that?”
“Well, we do have keys for emergencies,” he said, his voice shaking and his jaw tense, making it obvious he was now infected with the same worry that plagued us.
“This is definitely an emergency.” My voice cracked with the force of my emotions.
Something was wrong. I could feel it in my bones. My inner beast that had been silent, brooding, was whimpering and pacing.
Please, please, be all right.
Mike unlocked a hidden safe behind the desk and pulled out a bundle of brass keys. Andrew wouldn’t stop pushing the elevator button, all in hopes it would get there sooner, and when it finally did, we all rushed in.
The soft elevator music could not dissolve the building tension as we climbed up to the twelfth floor. Mike was out first, and we followed behind to Lila’s door, anxiously awaiting him to unlock it.
I was trembling, my stomach knotted. I felt like I was on edge and afraid of what we would find on the other side.
The door swung open, and we burst through, all of us calling out for her.
“Lila!” I rushed toward the family room. In my periphery, I watched Andrew head right toward the kitchen, and Caroline make straight for Lila’s bedroom.
I stared after Caroline, and a few seconds later, her voice broke the fear. “In here!”
I stood frozen, afraid of what I was about to see. It shattered when I watched Andrew run out of the kitchen.
I rushed after him, my eyes frantic in their search for her as I entered the threshold.
The sight before me caused my knees to go weak, my legs threatening to give out, and my balance shifted my weight backward into the door frame, my hands grasping it for support to keep me from falling.
No. No, no, no, no, no, no! No!
Please! Please, Lila, please!
No, no! Please be okay, please be okay!
My mind was frantic, begging for hope.
Lying on the floor near the foot of the bed was Lila; her hips were twisted, shoulders against the floor, arms splayed, head tilted to the side. She was naked, just as I had left her the night before.
Her pale skin showed the deep bruises of my body’s assault on hers. I had been too hard, too rough, too much. I was out of control, and I knew it.
The world stopped—everything stopped—when I reached her eyes. Her beautiful gray-green eyes were open, the lids unable to close. They were glazed over, empty, flat, void.
Images of a night years before, another set of eyes, flooded my mind.
Empty.
Void.
Dead.
My stomach turned, and I propelled my body to the adjoining bathroom to heave into the toilet. I hadn’t eaten, so only bile and acid were expelled; my stomach retched to purge my mind.
My ears were ringing, and I couldn’t hear anything that Caroline and Andrew had said from the moment I saw her lying on the ground.
Caroline’s voice erupted, breaking through. “Mike, call 911! Oh, Lila!”
“Is she breathing? Please say she’s breathing!” Andrew begged.
“She is! Lila? Can you hear me? Lila?”
I wiped my mouth and walked back into the bedroom where my Lila lay, alive but unresponsive.
“Goddamn son of a bitch!” Andrew roared before his fist collided with my jaw.
I stumbled back against the wall. His hand grabbed at my suit and brought me back up to face him.
“This is what you fucking said to her?” He held up the letter I’d left her. “I thought you understood her. I thought you cared for her. You fucking destroyed her!” He looked at me with absolute contempt, and his tone was murderous. “You fucking stay away from her. You don’t talk to her, you don’t fucking look at her.” For a moment, I got a reprieve from his animosity as he turned to look at Lila’s lifeless form. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“It’s better this way,” I whispered as Caroline covered her body.
“Like fucking hell it is! She was getting better, we could all see it. That was your doing. You were healing her. Now…she’s barely functioning.”
My stomach clenched again, my breath catching. “I warned her from the beginning. I begged her to go. I hurt her, Andrew.”
“You did this to her. She trusted you. You know what happened to her and you just confirmed everything they ever told her. You knew how broken she was, and you went and fucking crushed her. You were healing her, and now? She may not recover from this.” He was seething, glaring down at me, his nostrils flared.
The room remained quiet after Andrew stopped yelling at me. We waited on pins and needles for the paramedics to come and take her away. I couldn’t drive, and Andrew wanted nothing to do with me so he grabbed Lila’s keys and took her car, while Caroline shoved me into my car and drove us. We arrived at the hospital not long after the ambulance.
Since I wasn’t family, they wouldn’t tell me a thing no matter how many people I cursed, yelled, and spat at. It was a nightmare, one from which I was afraid I might never wake up.
Sometimes it was good when members of your family worked at a hospital, but sometimes it wasn’t. The times when you screwed up and destroyed a beautiful woman? There they were without invitation.
My mother looked at me with such pity, while my father looked disappointed.
We’d been there about an hour when a familiar form walked down the hall toward us.
“Darren?”
“Nathan?” Darren Morgenson, my therapist and friend, wrapped his arms around me in a hug. “What are you doing here?”
“I fucked up.” The words slipped out, because that was all that was going through my head.
He pulled back and studied my face. “What are you talking about?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, diverting talk away from me. I didn’t think I had it in me to tell him I’d destroyed my own heart and an innocent one in the process.
“I got a call, one of my patients. Poor girl’s had a breakdown, it seems.” He shook his head. “I haven’t seen her in months, and now this. She’s so fragile; I always wondered when she’d break.”
My eyes widened, and my stomach dropped. “Lila Palmer?”
I begged to all the Gods that I wasn’t right, but I already knew I was. Darren was her therapist as well. I’d seen his name plastered all over her medications.
He blinked at me. “Yes. How did you know?”
“He’s the fucker who broke her,” Andrew said from behind me, sticking his hand out for Darren.
“Hey, Andrew, how are you doing?” Darren asked, trying to hide the momentary look of frustration toward me regarding my actions that caused all of the fuckery that was going on. His eyes shifted to Andrew.
I exhaled, and my shoulders rounded forward, crumpling in on myself. Every moment away from Lila made my bones ache and my muscles tense up. Yet, there I stood—rooted in place, helpless to do anything to change any of it.
Andrew’s lips were set in a thin line. “I’d be doing a lot better if Lila was at the office.”
Darren nodded in understanding. “I take it you know what happened.”
Andrew jerked his head in my direction. “Like I said, he’s responsible. You’ll need to ask him.”
I tried to meet Darren’s gaze, but I couldn’t. I was drowning in my shame.
“What is he talking about?” Darren turned to me. “Look at me, Nate. What the fuck is he saying?”
“I had to.” I managed to choke ou
t the words.
“He left her this.” Andrew handed Darren the note, and I cringed.
Darren gasped as he read it. My eyes flickered over to him, and I could tell he was furious.
He looked back at me, anger and pain in his expression. “You just undid six years of therapy in four sentences. Four fucking sentences!”
He stormed off down the hall to her room, leaving me to drown in my growing self-hatred.
It was not what I wanted.
We stayed for a few hours, but Lila never woke up.
Darren and her other doctors came out, looking for her family. None of us were, but Caroline lied and said she was her sister. Darren knew better, but he didn’t correct her. They were sisters in spirit.
Self-induced psychological coma, they told Caroline. Lila had retreated into her own mind, unable to take the pain and harsh new reality I’d created.
CHAPTER 28
Days passed, and Lila was still unresponsive, trapped in the recesses of her mind. For the second day in a row, I found myself leaving the office at five and rushing over to the hospital.
Work was utter hell. I hated being away from her.
Nothing changed in the ten hours since I’d last been there. I walked into the room with quiet steps up to the bed. She looked so peaceful, like an angel. The constant beeping of the machines, along with the low rise and fall of her chest, put to rest the creeping fear that she was gone. I clung to each breath and beat.
She was still there, alive, and she would return.
I hoped.
My hand reached out to move a stray strand of hair from her face, but I stopped myself. It was one thing to see her, to smell her, and to feel her presence. It was another thing entirely to touch her.
This is for the best, I reminded myself.
I turned and walked back out to the hall. Once there, I leaned on the wall and stared at the room across the hall. A shiver ran down my spine, and my body shuddered as memories flooded back to my mind.
I pushed them away and slid down the wall to sit on the floor. My mind turned over to the beeping of the machines that let me know my Lila was still with me. After a few minutes, my heart began to beat in time with hers.
I sat there listening, thinking, feeling, until after midnight when a nurse came by and told me I couldn’t stay any longer.
When I returned the next night, her door was closed, and through the small glass window I could see Darren and a few other doctors looking at the monitors and talking.
Taking my position again, I slid down the wall, coming to rest on the cold, hard floor. I closed my eyes, my head tilted back, and I listened to the steady beep of the machines.
I heard the door to her room swish open then click closed. I didn’t know if he saw me or not, but he knew I was there.
He sighed. “Why are you sitting out here? If you came this far, why don’t you go in and see her? She knows you’re here, after all.”
My head snapped up. “She’s awake?”
I watched Darren turn to look at me, a sad smile on his lips. “No, not yet.”
“Then how do you know she knows?”
“Her heart rate’s been steady all day. It picked up about fifteen minutes ago,” he said, then quirked his brow. “How long have you been sitting out here?”
I stared up at him in wide-eyed shock. “About fifteen minutes.”
“That’s what I thought.” Darren slid down to sit next to me. “What are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Here. Why are you here? You broke her, yet you come by every day and sit outside her room.”
I sighed. “I don’t know. I just… I feel such a pull to be near her. I hate that I did this to her…but it’s better this way.”
“Better than what? You may be saving her from the possibility of being harmed by Marconi, but what do you call that in there? Three fucking days she’s been unresponsive.” He hitched his thumb toward her room. “In that room, they’re talking about moving her to a facility I don’t want her to go to. She has no next of kin… Well, none that would come. She just has you and a small handful of friends. Friends who have lives. What do you have, Nathan?”
I sat there, staring at the room on the other side of the hallway.
He answered for me. “Nothing. You have nothing. You had her. A beautiful, broken woman who would have done anything for you. A woman who loves you, and you were selfish.”
“Selfish?” My voice rose in indignation, my head snapping to look at him.
“Selfish. You did this for your protection more than hers. The thought of losing her the same way you lost your wife crushes you, doesn’t it?”
“I… How do you know she loves me?”
“Way to deflect there, Nathan. Don’t worry, I won’t forget. And I know, because if she didn’t love you, she wouldn’t be in her current state. And if you didn’t love her, you wouldn’t be sitting out here in your expensive suit, on the floor, outside her door in a hospital.”
I cringed at the word, just as he probably knew I would.
After spending months in a hospital after the accident, I hated them. The smell alone made me sick. Especially there, in that wing, sitting across the hall from the room that had once been my home.
There was a sudden shrieking plea that rang out from her room. Lila was screaming, begging. Darren jumped to his feet and threw the door open, rushing into the room.
I turned, my fists slamming on the wall while her screams echoed around the hall. My eyes were screwed tight, but the tears leaked through as I listened to my Lila cry out.
Her screams and pleas cut through me, tearing me. I wanted to run in and take her in my arms and never let her go. I wanted to chase away her fears and self-doubts. Declare my undying love, want, need, and support.
“No one wants me!” she wailed.
My heart splintered. “I want you,” I whispered into the wall. I held my body tight and tense to keep me from running to her, to keep my heart from ruling.
I felt a warm hand on my fist, and I looked up through bleary, tear-filled-eyes to find my mother staring down at me with a sad expression on her face.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Nathan.”
“Yes, it does. She’s safe this way…without me in her life.”
I continued to listen to her pleas and sobs as Darren worked on calming her. It was my punishment. I had done that to her. I needed to hear it. Every cry and sob I created. I broke her.
My chest tightened, constricting my breathing.
It’s better this way.
She’s better off without me.
I repeated those words over and over in my head, trying to convince myself that I had done what was best for her in the long run. A mantra, as I remained in the hall, listening to everything that poured out of her. My heart broke more the longer I listened, but it was my punishment. I had to hear her pain, because she was what mattered most.
But if I walked through that door and saw her, I might shatter. I’d much rather sit outside, listening to her scream, and let her be comforted by Darren. He knew what to do. He always did. I couldn’t offer her any solace; I didn’t have it in me anymore.
All my fucking fault. All of it.
They released Lila the next day, and I was left without any outlet to her. At least in the hospital I could be near her, but it was much better that she wasn’t there any longer. However, I was not better.
The beast within me paced, and I grew restless. Sleep evaded me, and I was lucky to be getting three or four hours a night. It was never in one shot either; forty-five minutes here, thirty there.
When Monday rolled around, I was anxious yet elated. I would see her again, and maybe that would soothe me some. I was happy she was returning to work because that meant she was awake. Over the previous few days, I found out just how much I’d grown used to always being around her, how much I was addicted to her.
I arrived at the office early, as insomnia had me up before five,
and anxiously awaited her arrival. I was a nervous wreck and had no clue what to do or how to act. I just knew I was miserable, and I guessed that she was worse.
Worse was an understatement when she arrived a little while later. What walked through the door and into our office was not the Lila I knew. My heart ripped again. She looked…different. Almost as if she’d reverted back to that time in the parking lot. Her eyes were directed to the floor, hair down. She didn’t look my way. She didn’t acknowledge my presence.
It was difficult to look at her, knowing I’d done that to my Lila, but it had to be that way. Didn’t it?
I could smell her, and a calm spread through my every nerve. She was there. She was alive. That was what mattered.
Alive.
She continued to avoid looking at me while booting up her computer and sorting through the piles on her desk. Still no acknowledgement.
“Good morning, Lila,” I said. I was going to say more, but refrained when she cringed. My chest burned, the knife twisting deeper.
It was better that way.
The days passed just the same, silence prevailing between us. I hated it. Every moment was torture, and not just on me. Lila wasn’t even trying to hide the pain, her façade blown away. Stuffing herself into work to avoid thinking, perhaps?
I knew that was what I was doing. Distracting myself with contract after contract.
On her fourth day back, it was so busy I didn’t even take a lunch break. I ran to the lobby, picked up a quick deli sandwich from one of the vendors that occupied the first floor, and ate at my desk. I almost picked up Lila’s favorite, but I had a suspicion it was a bad idea.
She never left her desk, other than to get more coffee or some water. She drank her coffee black, so I knew she wasn’t getting any calories there, and I hadn’t seen her eat anything.
I glanced over at her and cringed. She’d lost weight over the last week. Not a lot, but noticeable. I knew I was to blame.
She’s in love with you!
Caroline’s words rang through, interrupting my thoughts.
There were only two hours left before she was to leave, Jack making sure she didn’t overdo it, and I had a feeling she wasn’t eating at home.