Chapter 6 - No Anesthesia
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The interior of the limousine smelled of rich leather, cedar, and safety. Nathaniel didn't bombard me with questions. He didn't demand explanations. He simply ripped open a first-aid kit and pressed sterile gauze to the worst of the deep lacerations on my back while his driver sped toward the heavily fortified, hidden Whitaker estate in the Hudson Valley.
"Which hospital?" Nathaniel asked, his jaw locked in fury.
"No public records," I rasped, holding Maisie tight. "Bring Dr. Mercer directly to the estate underground."
His eyes darkened. "Done."
Within ninety minutes, I was lying face-down beneath blinding surgical lights in a state-of-the-art private medical suite located three floors beneath my family’s ancestral manor. Dr. Mercer, our discreet family physician, was carefully cutting away the blood-soaked silk fused to my skin.
When the fabric came off, the attending nurse gasped aloud and had to look away.
Nathaniel was standing behind the soundproof glass observation wall. I saw him slam his fist into the reinforced glass so hard the metal frame groaned.
"Thirty lashes," Dr. Mercer said tightly, his professional demeanor slipping. "Several are extremely deep. A few are already showing signs of rapid infection from the cellar dirt. You need dozens of sutures, Evelyn."
"Do it," I said.
"I’ll prep the general anesthesia," the nurse said, rushing toward a cabinet.
"No," I commanded, my voice echoing in the sterile room.
Everyone stopped and stared at me. I turned my head, locking eyes with my brother through the thick glass.
"I want to feel it," I said, my voice hollow but resolute. "I want to remember exactly what I survived. Don't numb me."
Dr. Mercer swallowed hard, but he didn't argue again.
The chemical cleaning felt like being burned alive on a pyre. Saline. Iodine. The piercing bite of the curved surgical needle. The tight pull of the thick medical thread. I bit down on a roll of gauze until my gums bled, and with every single stitch that closed my flesh, I saw Grant’s arrogant face.
Not because I missed him. Not because I was mourning my marriage. Because every pull of the doctor's needle was permanently sewing my old, pathetic delusions shut.
When the agonizing process was finally over, Maisie was asleep in the adjoining luxury recovery room with a clean, professional bandage and an IV drip pumping antibiotics into her system. Her dangerous fever had finally broken.
I sat beside her bed, draped in one of my late mother’s heavy cashmere robes, watching her chest rise and fall.
Nathaniel entered the room silently near midnight. He didn't bring flowers or sympathy. He brought a thick, black leather folder.
"Grant’s company is scheduled to begin its massive NASDAQ roadshow in exactly three weeks," Nathaniel said, sitting across from me. "Hawthorne Capital is heavily overleveraged. Bridge loans. Sketchy pledged assets. Highly aggressive valuation guarantees."
I looked at the folder. "That company is his god, Nate."
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"Yes. It is."
"Then we don’t kill him physically," I said, my voice turning to ice. "We take his god."
