Все главы His Forbidden Guard : Глава 71 - Глава 80

"Okay," he said quietly.Dr. Chen nodded once, no triumph in it, just acknowledgment. "I'm going to start you on IV fluids now. I have what I need here. It'll take about an hour, and then we'll go over the medication, the restrictions, what bed rest actually means in practical terms.""I know what bed rest means.""You think you do," Dr. Chen said, already moving to the cabinet. "But for most of my patients it means lying down between activities. For you, it means genuinely stopping. Which is going to be harder for you than the vomiting.""That's probably accurate," Victoria said from near the door, and something in her voice was dry enough that Daveson almost, almost smiled.Dr. Chen set up the IV with the same quiet efficiency she brought to everything. The needle was a small, cold sting in the back of his hand, and then the slow cool flow of fluids moving into him, and Daveson sat there and let it happen, which was its own kind of work.Victoria pulled her chair closer to the table

The IV had taken an hour and twelve minutes.Daveson knew because he'd watched the clock on the wall of the examination room with the particular attention of a person who has decided that if they track time precisely enough, they can keep it from doing anything unexpected. It hadn't worked, obviously. Time had done what it wanted regardless, the way it always did, moving at its own pace with complete indifference to whoever was sitting beneath it trying to hold things still.Dr. Chen had gone over the medications with him three times. Not because he wasn't listening. Because she wanted to be certain the information was landing in a body that had enough hydration in it to actually retain things, which was, she said, a reasonable clinical concern. She'd given him printed instructions. A small paper bag with the first week's supply. A follow-up appointment card for Friday. She'd looked at him over her glasses when he stood to leave and said: If anything changes before Friday, you call me

Usually when he couldn't sleep it was because his mind was running logistics. The next step, the contingency for the next step, the contingency for the contingency. The architecture of a plan held in constant tension to keep it from collapsing. He'd spent years mistaking that for anxiety and eventually understood it was something closer to the way certain people couldn't stop doing arithmetic, not because something was wrong but because the mind had found the thing it knew how to do and did it continuously whether asked to or not.Tonight the architecture wasn't running.Tonight it was Raymond Drake's face in the window of a black car on Fifth Avenue, and the particular cadence of three days, and the careful gentleness with which a man who had known his father had looked at him and said I know everything about the baby in the same tone you'd use to say I know you take your coffee black.He lay on his side in the gray dark and breathed and let the medication do its work on the nausea a

He came back at two in the afternoon.Daveson knew the time because he'd been watching the light move across the floor since sometime around eleven, tracking the particular slow arc of it the way he'd tracked the IV clock at Dr. Chen's clinic, with the attention of a person who has determined that if they monitor something precisely enough they can keep it from becoming something else. It hadn't worked at the clinic. It didn't work now. The light moved regardless, with its characteristic indifference to whoever was sitting beneath it waiting for things to resolve.He had not left the room.This was not, he had told himself through the morning, avoidance. He had medications to take at specific intervals. He had crackers to eat. He had a follow-up appointment on Friday that required him to remain functional in the intervening days, which was itself a kind of argument for staying horizontal when the alternative was walking the hallways of a house that had become, overnight, a different k

"And when you met me."Daveson said nothing.He said nothing because there was nothing to say that wasn't the truth and the truth was that when he had shaken Leonard Heyden's hand across a table in a corner of Armando's fourteen months ago, he had been in the middle of a mission, and Leonard had been incidental to it, and the specific quality of Leonard's attention in those three minutes — the way he had actually looked at Daveson, the way he had asked a question and then listened to the answer as though the answer mattered independently of what it gave him — had been noted somewhere in Daveson's mind and filed under something he hadn't labeled carefully enough to see what it actually was.He had known, when he applied for the position six weeks later, that Leonard lived in the house.He had told himself this was a logistical fact. That it changed nothing. That the mission was the mission."Look at me," Leonard said.Daveson looked at him.Leonard was sitting very still in the chair a