“Lucas—”
My head whipped back up, my eyes already narrowed. “Don’t tell me to leave.” My tone was a mix of warning and plea, and it shocked my mentor.
His eyes traveled over to my blackbird. There was hesitation in the way he looked at her, as if he were suddenly afraid to. His gaze lingered on where I was now gripping her hand, and one eyebrow rose in disapproval. “I see.”
The doctor didn’t ask questions. He just checked her vitals, hurried to find a vein in Blackbird’s dehydrated body and started pumping her with fluids, then checked her vitals for a second time. The entire time murmuring things to himself that he needed to remember before he finally stopped to write it all down.
“When did she last eat or drink?” he asked suddenly.
“I have no idea. I’ve been trying to get her to do both for two days.”
He nodded to himself as he wrote. “Has she been sick?”
I ground my jaw. “No.”
The doctor continued nodding, then pointed to her with his pen. “New one?”
“Yes,” William responded for me.
“Then we wait,” the doctor said as he turned to check the speed of the IV. “Her body is in shock. A few more hours, she would have slipped into a coma.”
I rubbed my hand over my face, then rested my elbow on my knee and my mouth on my fist. My eyes shut and my stomach churned when I thought about how close I had been to leaving her for the night.
“Lucas.”
I opened my eyes and slowly slid my gaze over to William.
He shook his head subtly. I didn’t need his words to know what he meant.
I shouldn’t be reacting this way. Even though only William was present—doctors like this one were the best around, and were paid to keep quiet . . . be invisible—I shouldn’t show this kind of emotion over a girl. It showed weakness.
The women could become attached, but the men never did. The men never showed that they cared at all, not outside private times in the bedroom at least.
William was one to talk.
“Leave,” I demanded quietly.
He didn’t, and I went back to ignoring him as the doctor set up a machine to track Blackbird’s vitals.
The doctor stayed until the girl had shown enough improvement for him to feel optimistic. I let William walk him out since he’d brought him in, and I still wasn’t ready to leave Blackbird’s side even with the improvements.
She had woken briefly before falling back asleep, but her heart rate was slower and stronger, her blood pressure was higher, and she was on her third bag of fluids—this one dripping much slower than the first two had—so at least my worry had eased. Slightly.
“We must talk.”
“I don’t see a reason to,” I said when William came back into the room. “You can leave. I needed the doctor, not you. Now I have his number for future reference.”
William sat with a huff in the chair he had dragged into the room earlier. “You came back to her before you should have. Eight hours, Lucas, and you didn’t even last two.”
I gave him a dark look as I reminded him, “And she would have been in a coma if I’d listened to you.”
He waved off my words. “That’s beside the point. Clearly she’s going to be fine.” He slapped his hand onto his leg when I huffed. “You were not ready for this.”
A muscle in my jaw popped from the force I was putting on it, but this time I wondered if he was right. Instead of threats or dark warnings, I admitted, “She was the first.”
“What?” he asked, having not heard my soft words.
“She was the first,” I said louder, then clarified, “at the auction.”
He scoffed. “Child. You are a child, and you think this is a game. This is my life. This is their lives,” he said, gesturing to the wall, as if dozens of men would suddenly be standing there. “This is how we—”
“This is my life, too,” I argued. “The moment I saw her face I knew I needed her.” William’s expression fell, but I continued talking. “I turned my back on her, I ignored her. But then she—” I broke off quickly, not wanting to tell him about her singing. I shrugged helplessly. “I hated the thought of someone touching what was mine. I owned her before I ever bought her, and there was no way I wasn’t buying her—first or not.”
“Lucas, who owns who?” I’d never seen my mentor as disappointed as I did then.
“I do,” I growled. “As I proved tonight.”
William shook his head. “You have to let her go.”
Shock and anger tore through me, freezing me in place.
“This isn’t acceptable this early in. You are going against everything I have taught you. Buying a first, showing that you care, not being able to follow through with the entire lesson . . .” He searched for something to say, and finally settled on, “You can’t keep her.”
“Take her from me,” I challenged darkly, knowing full well he wouldn’t if he valued his life. “You wanted me to finally begin, and I have. I have my first girl. Yes, I didn’t leave her alone after a lesson, but there was reason for that. I was already worried about her lack of eating and drinking, and then I put her through a lesson. She fought me—”
“As you should expect them to in the beginning.”
My right hand fisted, and I forced myself not to punch the smirk off my mentor’s face. “She used energy she didn’t have to fight me. She exerted herself. All of this might not be happening if I wouldn’t have tried to teach her a lesson tonight, do you understand that? Can you understand why I feel guilty and don’t want to leave her side?”
“Whether you feel that or not—which you should not—you do not let it show as you have tonight. If she saw you, she would know she had you in the palm of her hand.”
Although I felt drawn to, I refused to look down at my blackbird. I kept my gaze on William’s, and asked, “Did she?” When confusion covered his face, I said, “Your fourth . . .” I let the word hang in the air. “Did she ever see you show the emotion that you fail to hide in front of the rest of us?”
Rage quickly replaced the confusion on William’s face, and I knew I had him. But just as fast as the rage had come, it was gone and his expression was calm and indifferent. “If this is how you repay me for finally allowing you to play this game, I clearly trusted you with too much and let you move through your training far too quickly.”
“Allowed me?” I asked darkly, and hurried to turn it around on him. I hadn’t done all I had in the last few years for him to doubt me now. “You chose me. You trained me. You urged me to buy into your company and then you pushed me to buy my way into this life. And when I came home six months ago without a girl, you nearly lost your mind. But now I have an equal claim in our company, and I’m finally in the world you so desperately wanted me to be in. I think the real issue here isn’t how I’m handling the girl I now have, it’s that you’re panicking because you’ve realized your mistake.”