“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “How long was I out?”
“Ten hours,” he snarled. “Ten hours, but your heart and respiration stayed even, and there was brain activity.” He motioned to another device on the nightstand. Our room had been transformed into a medical bay. I hated it. But I’d remove it all after I soothed him. “You were definitely dehydrated. I washed you up, set up the IVs. You’ve killed six of them.”
Six?
I stared at the large liter sized bags. That would risk water intoxication, but the bags also contained electrolytes and sodium. As if reminded of how much fluid I’d had pumped into me, my bladder protested.
“I saw Hatch,” I told him. I remembered that much, and Andreas nodded slowly.
“And you ranted a lot of information,” he confirmed before reaching out and pulling over a journal. It was one of mine. But there were three pages of new notes in his distinct script. “I wrote it all down.”
“I love you…”
“Valda,” he scolded as I freed the IV and then pushed the blankets back. I was as weak as a kitten again, but energy surged through me. I needed to pee and to shower. Then I needed to work.
Cupping his face, I kissed him gently. “Have faith in me, please?”
“Always.”
We had an advantage, and I planned to use it.
“Come shower with me, and I’ll tell you what I want to do.”
Still frowning, he helped me up and then followed me. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”
I waited until we were both naked and he was buried deep inside me as we shook from our mutual orgasms before I answered.
Because no, he wouldn’t like this at all.
Chapter 7
“Veritis nunquam perit.” - Seneca
OZ
The monitors gave him plenty of details on the vital signs of his patients. Malnourished. Dehydrated. High blood pressure. Too fast heat rates. They were in pain, though their stony silence betrayed nothing.
The scans though, they told the rest of the very ugly tale, the truth of it. The sadistic fucking bastards had been torturing them. They were also no closer to their desired level of information than they’d been when they started. At this point, it couldn’t be about information.
It was all about punishment.
“You’re here to make the process work,” Smithson reminded him as Oz moved from Dirk’s hospital bed to Hatch’s. Both men were still heavily secured, despite his attempts. The drugs had knocked them out in the short-term to move them from the chamber of horror that stank of blood, piss, and other unmentionables to the actual infirmary. They’d shackled both, hand and foot, not taking any chances with them.
They’d also refused Oz access to remove them, and he hadn’t pressed. No one at Blossom Foundry trusted him. Nor should they. But he was here, he was close to them, and he had a plan. The trick was to make sure it all went down before Valda got here. What the hell Andreas was thinking allowing her to even head in this direction, he couldn’t begin to fathom.
Smithson had taken the communication with Valda alone. Oz hadn’t laid eyes on her since he left the compound. Lying to her had been a choice he would have to live with and make up for, most likely for the rest of his life, if he could save these two and get them out of here. Bringing them back to her might earn her forgiveness.
“I’m aware of why I’m here,” he said smoothly to the man who had invaded their lives and apparently wanted to take possession of Valda like she was some object to be owned.
No, he corrected mentally, not just her—her mind. He wanted what she held inside the beautiful brilliance of her brain. Who she was, the woman beneath, mattered less to him than her intellect and knowledge.
From the first demand they’d received, Smithson made it clear he would accept nothing less than her full surrender over the intellectual property Hatch had acquired that helped them save her life.
The goddamned memoriam.
Oz had never found himself hating something as much as he did that single piece of technology. A blessing and a curse.
“Then why are they here and not plugged in?”
Sparing Smithson the barest of glances, Oz checked the IV he’d inserted into Hatch. The contusions around his right eye and along his jaw were older than the rest of his injuries. Setting aside a pad, he moved to checking his skull. The x-rays showed a linear skull fracture. They’d done a real number on him. Dirk had taken far more body blows, but they’d done some serious damage to Hatch.
“Let’s start with the intercranial hematoma he is suffering from and work our way out from there,” Oz informed him in a quiet, clipped, if professional tone. He had to drain any caring out of it whatsoever. A diagnosis. Nothing more. “The linear skull fracture, the bruising on the brain itself. This rather inelegant butchering of the skin of his scalp.” A couple of lesions from where they’d nicked him while shaving his head had become infected. Oz had already started him on broad-spectrum antibiotics, in addition to the pain meds he’d begun to work into the fusions of fluids.
“I could also detail the other injuries including sprains, contusions, fractures to his ribs, bruising to others. Kidney damage. Should I go on?”
With each ticked off verbal check mark, Smithson’s frown grew more severe. “You said you could get them into the memoriam. That you understood what needed to be done.”
Hatch flicked a look at him. Hostility etched his expression, but neither he nor Dirk had spoken a word since Oz re-entered the infirmary. They had been talking. He’d caught the tail end of some discussion, but neither man would speak to him. Their gazes had been blank and unfriendly, but not openly hostile.
At least not until Smithson walked into the room. Dirk was better at schooling his features than Hatch. But then Hatch loved to push people’s buttons, and it was probably physically paining him to keep quiet at the moment.
If the situation weren’t so precarious, it might almost be funny.
“What I said was through much trial and error, we learned all the ways jacking into the memoriam didn’t work.”
Only the barest twitch of Hatch’s eyelid betrayed what was happening behind Oz. A weapon pressed against his skull, but he didn’t respond to the cool feel of metal as he finished his examination. Having worked under the tensest and harshest conditions, he didn’t react to the threat.
It was also not the first time someone had put a weapon to his head. Unperturbed, he finished his exam, then reached for the tablet to add to his notations. The barest twitch of Hatch’s eyelid told Oz the former smuggler—well, maybe not former, but that was neither here nor there—tracked Smithson’s every move.
“What I said was I had an understanding of the conditions required and that the science was not precise.”
Turning, he ignored the scrape of the gun’s muzzle as it skated over his skin until face to face with the psychopathic lunatic in charge of this asylum and the gun rested against the center of his forehead. While he had a good inch in height on the other man and it forced him to reach up to keep the gun angled correctly, Oz suppressed his reactions.
“I have work to do if you want these men in shape to do anything…”