Broken (39 page)

The shock of his words stabs into my own heart and beats the air out of my lungs. An unbidden image flashes behind my eyes: Alex, pale, lifeless in a coffin. My heart stumbles, and the pain flares wider. The thought of losing Alex hurts worse than any ache I thought I ever suffered. The truth he’s insisted on since his dad exposed the crimes stitched into his body finally hits me. Daniel’s heart
is
Alex’s, his memories are, too. It doesn’t matter who the guys were before. Alex is alive and loves me. And I love him.

“Oh God, no Alex.” I push the folder and formula back into the bag and shove it to the floor. “I don’t want to live without you.”

“I mean it, Emma.” He pulls me to him, chest to chest, eyes searching my face. “My heart is yours. I am yours.”

I brush my fingers over his cheek, and into his hair. “And I’m yours,” I whisper.

I feel the groan in his chest when he hooks an arm around me and crushes me to him. The electricity races my nerves to my heart.

“We’ll have to turn my dad in,” he whispers. “It’s the only way to be safe. I’m sure my grandparents will let me stay here.”

“I want to be with you.” The weeks at school without him echo like a hollow ache. I don’t ever want to live like that again.

“You are,” he says, voice husky. “And I’m not letting you go. Ever.”

I don’t want him to let go. I want to live forever in this moment. A nervous kind of anticipation floods me when he guides my knees and presses me back on the pillows. Renfield sniffs indignantly and pads to the other end of the bed. Energy slicks my skin in waves when Alex kisses me. Not hesitant or awkward. Firm, claiming me, claiming us.

He gasps a little when I press his mouth open and nip his bottom lip. A tremor having nothing to do with the blizzard rides the length of his body.

I slide my hand between us, and press him up. Light pours over his lean muscles, shines on his scars, an invitation, and a mapway to learn who Alex has become. I trail my fingers down the lines in his neck, following the feather light strokes with kisses, then across his chest to their intersection over his pounding heart. I place my palm there, thinking,
It beats for me.

“My turn,” he whispers.

Shivers chase the tingles over my skin when he brushes his fingertips along the hem of the baseball jersey. The tingles turn to surges of heat when his fingers brush my ribs and his lips find my neck. His fingers stray further, sweeping curves where my bra should be. Breath hitches in my throat, and escapes in a sigh.

“Want me to stop?” he asks, his words warm on the skin of my collarbone where he’s tugged my neckline down.

It’s my turn to groan. “No.”

The warmth he’s brought to my body and back to my soul spreads when he slides his fingertips down my stomach, and glides them along the waist of my borrowed flannel pants. His mouth leaves a tingly path down my stomach. I melt beneath his lips when they brush the skin below my belly button.

“Did you mean what you said?” His lips brush over my bare skin. “Are you mine?”

“Yes.”

Words die. I drown in Alex’s touch. He places kisses everywhere, our clothing hitting the floor to do it. I’m amazed he thought to bring protection, then conscious thoughts go the way of words. His touch is electric, his kisses like fire. I’m more alive in his arms than any moment in my life. Being with Alex is all sensation and emotion, building and building, taking everything fractured between us and burning it into something pure and singular.

“I love you,” I whisper, before pulling on his t-shirt and the blankets.

“Always yours,” he promises, his jeans rubbing my legs when he curls around my back after shutting off the lights.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The bed lurches and hurls me into consciousness. I reach for Alex, and find only empty sheets. Wrong abrades my drowsy nerves, fills the air and smells like fancy cologne and car exhaust. Blinking, I try to scrub sleep from my eyes. The light is all wrong, choppy and moving as shapes twist and struggle in front of the windows.

Worry seizes like a cramp behind my ribs.

“Alex?” Where is he?

“Emma, run!”

Run? What is he talking about? I pray for my sleep foggy brain to wake up.

“Hold still, damn you,” a familiar voice growls.

“No!” shouts Alex, and then, “Stay away from her, you asshole!”

Who needs to stay away from me?

Another blink and scrub of my eyes and my vision clears. Alex’s father and Alex are all tangled up and wrestling by the window. The older Franks has his son in a headlock. Panic screams from every line of Alex’s body. He jerks and writhes, his bare skin flashing dawn light around the room. He rams his head backward into his father’s jaw, to no avail.

“Let me go!”

“Oh no, son.” His father’s voice drips icy sarcasm. “I did and look where it got me.” He wrenches Alex around so he’s pointed at me. “I gave you the perfect life, the perfect future wife. But, no, you’re so blind in love with that pathetic girl you can’t see straight. You want to be with her so badly, fine. I’ll make it permanent.”

I gasp in horror when he pulls a syringe from his pocket, jabs it into the vein in Alex’s neck and depresses the plunger.

“No,” Alex mouths. A pull batters my insides when his hands reach for me.

The fight leaves Alex. His eyes widen, and tears shine above his lashes. One fat drop rolls down his cheek, dragging his body’s strength with it. Gravity claims his hands and then Alex hangs like a rag doll from his father’s arm. Doctor Franks bends at the waist and opens his arms, letting his son’s body pour to the floor. Abdomen, chest, and then cheek, the carpet claims him.

His eyes stay fixed on me until he can’t keep them open anymore.

The boy I’d given my heart, and myself to, lays silent on the floor.

My pain finds a voice. “You killed him!”

“Don’t be stupid,” the arrogant man scoffs. “After everything I did to make him live again? You’re not worth that much. Now,” his father says, gesturing to me with a gloved hand. “Take care of that, will you?”

Take care of me?

Motion behind sends chills rocketing up my spine. I spin, yanking the quilt back up around my bare legs. He’s there, lurking at the foot of the bed like a monster in a horror flick. Ugly red hair, a twisted grin.

“Josh?”

“I guess all my cracks about you being a whore weren’t far off…”

Stars explode in my vision when he lunges forward and backhands me. Pain flares in my jaw and the side of my head. A slung glare makes sick dizziness whoosh in my skull like water.

“Really,” Doctor Franks sniffs. “I’m not paying you to beat her.”

“Call it creative license,” Josh says, then pounces on the bed.

I drive my knee up, hit his thigh instead of what I’m aiming for. Josh shakes his head, starts to
tsk
through his teeth, and I stop the mocking noise by clawing his face with my left hand. His eyebrows crash together over his nose, matching the speed of red welling in the scratch marks. I notice the shiny color right before Josh smacks me again.

The hit drives the pain from my jaw into my head. Ringing pierces my ears, and the bed spins in dizzy lurches. I slump to my elbows, head bobbing and blood wetting my lips.

“Shoulda done that a long time ago,” he says, his words doubling like echoes in my ears.

“You should,” Alex’s father says, “do what I hired you for. Inject her.”

“Happy to.”

Then Josh straddles me, pinning my arms down with his knees. He takes a loaded syringe from his pocket, pulls off the cap.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” he says in a ridiculously conversational tone. “If you could’ve just learned to like me. But, no…”

A sharp jab in my neck leads to a burning pressure. The heat spreads, into my head to muddle the pain, through my shoulders and into my body singeing my veins. I want to fight, want to throw Josh off me, but my limbs are full of warm sand. My respirations slow, panic flutters in my chest, but the drug slows that down too.

“What didya give them?” Josh asks.

“Fentanyl.” The doctor crosses his arms and watches me with clinical interest. “A narcotic a hundred times stronger than morphine.”

“Sounds like fun…”

“It’s not recreational.”

Before my eyes slip closed Josh leans over me, close enough to smell the toothpaste and coffee on his breath. My eyes struggle to focus. Hate seethes so hot for him it might gag me. Glaring back doesn’t work, my eyelids are so heavy.

“I didn’t just let Daniel fall, bitch. I pushed him.”

Monster!
I shriek in my mind.

Then my eyes sag closed. My hearing is the last to go.

“Tie them up,” Doctor Franks orders, “And we’ll take them back to the lab.”

I can’t scream, can’t move, can’t fight them at all, and then the blackfinallywins…

#

The room spins, or I’m spinning. I’m not sure. Light comes from every angle, highlighting the veins in my eyelids, making the vertigo worse. Sharp medicinal smells fill the chilly air. Where am I? I’d been in bed with Alex, then his father and Josh drugged us…

Hard planes at my back refuse movement, and I know instinctively Alex is not beside me. Edgy panic razes my nerves, my racing heart flings the tang of fear through my body. It tastes sour and slick in the back of my throat. My eyelids drag like sandpaper when I force them up. Ceiling, walls, floors—everything is white or metal. Wires and tubes, lights and machines everywhere.

An operating room.

Oh my God. Fight or flight reactions kick in, jerking me up against pain and bonds I can’t see. I’m trapped. Tied to a operating table. An ache thrums in my shoulders and arms, my left hand feels like a ball of puffy heat. I cannot separate them—someone must’ve tied my hands back and beneath a cold metal operating table.

I can’t move enough to gauge where I am, or what’s going on. I catch a shadow of something, or someone past me where I’m able to turn my head. Then my racing heart stumbles. Alex, pale as death, lies on another table a few feet away.
Oh, Alex, no!
He’s unconscious, a mask over his face, electrodes taped to his temples, chest barely rising only to fall again, monitor leads and IVs in his arm. Shiny wet brown iodine covers his chest.

“Alex!” I scream.

No response.

I wrench against the ropes on my wrists. Heat saws into my skin, the knot gives a little.

“You’re probably wondering where you are,” comes the infuriatingly calm voice of Doctor Franks from over my shoulder. He strides into view, wearing surgical scrubs and gloves and wheeling a cart loaded with wicked-looking instruments. “What do those signs say? ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’? Well, consider this your punishment for weaseling your way into our lives.”

Punishment?
This isn’t my fault. He brought this on us all when he got in the way of Daniel’s love for me. Twisting my left hand around, I get a grip on the cords tying my hands. If I could just keep him talking, I can untie myself.

“Why are you doing this?” Damn my voice for shaking like Imterrified.

“Why?” His eyebrow hardly rches. A sneer curls his upper lip. “To get my son back, to restore him into the life I planned for him. Med school, a brilliant wife, eventually his own practice.”

He runs his fingers over the tray of tools, and eyes me critically. The rope gives a little. I need so much more time.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“Conscious donors are so chatty.” He says, like we’re old friends. “What am I going to do? I’m going to eliminate the one thing standing in the way of all that.”

Conscious donor? The fear sharpens, turning a nauseous sour in my gut. Loops in the knot loosen, but I can’t get my fingers hooked in to pull it. My heartbeat echoes in my ears when the psychopath walks the few paces to his son.
Don’t hurt him,
I plead,
kill me, just
please God,
don’t hurt
Alex
anymore.

“Since Alex woke up, he hasn’t been right. Wanting nothing to do with the girl I picked for him, more obstinate, more opinionated …”

“Sounds just like Daniel,” I sling at his dad, and work at the ropes on my hands.

“And
obsessed
.” His jaw clenches, any friendliness gone. “Going on and on about some girl in his dreams.”

“Daniel loved me.” I say, exploiting his weak spot, and working a loop of the knot loose. “Bet you didn’t expect that.”

The jibe works, his face darkens, he paces back and forth. And I pry another section of the knot free.

“Love,” he says, “is not science. It’s not measurable. Not real.” And then he turns to me, face impassive again. “But it
is
symbolic. I’m going to take the biggest symbol. I’m going to take your heart, Emma Gentry, and give it to my son. Then Alex’ll stop pining after you.”

“He’ll hate you!” My voice is steady despite the fear poisoning me. If my emotions—soul—reside in my flesh, Alex will hate his father forever.

My fingers slip and I lose my grip on the ropes. Despair threatens to engulf me. Then a fire sparks inside. I lost myself to that darkness once. I won’t do it again, not as long as there’s a chance at hope and Alex is alive. I track Doctor Franks’ movements as he fills a syringe with Alex’s formula, types a code on a laptop, and flips a switch.

“What son doesn’t hate his father?
That
,” he stresses, “is real. And perfectly natural.”

“Nothing in this place is natural.” My voice is level, my mind spins with images of the reanimated animals and the crimes this man committed, against people and nature.