Chapter 10: Discrepancies

 Kaelen

My chest pulsed with a blinding ache, but as the metallic taste of copper hit my tongue, I didn’t lose consciousness.

A tranquilizer dart.

The chemical moved through my bloodstream like liquid lead, but my mind fought through the fog. I slumped against the stone frame of the secret passage, playing dead long enough for Martha to step into the light.

Her eyes remained fixed on Wren. Her weapon was steady.

“Lady Beatrix sends her regards,” Martha whispered, her sweet servant voice completely gone.

Wren didn’t scream. She didn’t flinch. Even with a gun pointed at her forehead, her dark eyes remained terrifyingly still.

Something primal stirred inside me. An intoxicating spark I had no business feeling for a woman I was supposed to be analyzing.

Before Martha could pull the trigger, I lunged.

I grabbed her wrist and slammed her arm against the stone jamb. The silenced pistol clattered onto the flagstones.

Martha gasped.

Wren moved like a shadow.

She snatched the iron poker from the hearth and drove the flat end into Martha’s temple.

The servant dropped unconscious.

Silence swallowed the room.

“You’re alive,” Wren breathed, rushing toward me.

Her hands gripped my shoulders as she inspected the dart protruding from my chest.

“Tranquilizer,” I gritted out, catching her wrist. “Concentrated. Designed to drop an ox.”

“Then why are you still awake?”

“Because my heart is beating too fast to let the chemical settle.” My thumb brushed the frantic pulse in her wrist. “And because I’m not leaving you here.”

For a moment, her walls cracked.

Her eyes softened with a vulnerability that tightened my chest more than the drug ever could.

“We can’t use the catacombs now,” she said, glancing at Martha. “Julian and Beatrix have compromised every servant in this wing.”

“No.” I forced myself upright. “We stay here. They expect us to flee. Which means this room is the safest place for the next hour.”

I crossed to my leather satchel and pulled out the medical ledger Julian had given me when I arrived.

“What are you doing?” Wren asked, standing beside the fire. “They’ll be back at dawn, Kaelen!”

“I need to understand what they’ve been doing to you.” I opened the ledger. “If I’m going to protect you from Beatrix’s legal war, I need facts. Not Julian’s lies.”

Wren stepped closer.

“It’s just pages of madness, Doctor. Pages of a crazy girl’s chart.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

I scanned the clinical entries.

Subject administered 50mg Thorazine daily.

Dosage increased to 150mg Chlorpromazine, combined with heavy lithium salts.

Subject suffers from chronic auditory hallucinations, extreme paranoia, and catatonia.

I stopped.

My fingers froze against the yellowed paper.

I studied the dates. The dosages. The chemical combinations recorded across thirty-six consecutive months.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I muttered.

Wren frowned. “What doesn’t make sense?”

“The math.”

I looked up at her.

“At these dosages, combined with the lithium levels recorded here, your central nervous system should have shut down years ago. You should be in an irreversible coma. You shouldn’t be able to stand, speak, or fool a room full of asylum wardens.”

The firelight flickered across her pale face.

“Maybe I’m stronger than they thought.”

“No.” I rose and crossed toward her. “Pharmacology doesn’t care about willpower, little bird. Chemistry is absolute.”

I took her hand.

She tried to pull away, but I gently turned it over, revealing faint scars along her inner wrist.

“You haven’t been taking the medication, have you?”

Her eyes flickered.

“Every night for three years, you found a way to fake it. You palmed the pills. You spit them out.”

A tear slipped down her soot-stained cheek.

“If I took them, I would have died,” she whispered. “I had to stay sharp. I had to remember my father’s voice. I had to survive.”

Her confession shattered the last piece of professional distance I had left.

I lifted my hand and wiped away the tear.

For one brief second, she leaned into my touch.

Trust.

The realization struck harder than the tranquilizer.

“You’re brilliant,” I whispered. “You’re the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met.”

Her breath caught.

Her hand rose to my chest, resting over my racing heart.

“Kaelen…”

“But that brings me to the real discrepancy.”

The warmth between us disappeared beneath a sudden chill.

“What discrepancy?” she asked.

I looked back at the ledger.

“Julian bought these drugs from the Zurich pharmaceutical exchange. He paid thousands of sovereigns for thirty-six months of lethal-grade neuroleptics.”

I turned toward her.

“If you were spitting the pills out, Wren…”

Her face tightened.

“…then who was replacing them with harmless sugar tablets before they ever reached your mouth?”

She went completely still.

The color drained from her face.

Before she could answer, a soft knock echoed from the hidden passage behind us.

I turned.

A smooth, familiar voice drifted from the darkness.

“I did, my sweet girl.”

Wren froze.

Her hand clutched my shirt so tightly I heard the linen tear.

A figure stepped from the black staircase.

Tall.

Imposing.

Draped in a heavy velvet cloak.

Wren’s breath caught.

I stared at the man emerging from the shadows, my mind refusing to accept what my eyes were seeing.

The man was supposed to have died three years ago.

But he was standing in front of us.

Alive.

It was Wren’s father.