“How was the patient overnight?” he asked as soon as he stepped foot in the door and proceeded to take himself up the stairs.
“Quiet. Caroline set up a drip and Kloe slept most of the night. She was feverish though, but I’m not sure if that was because she woke up screaming. A nightmare maybe.”
He nodded but didn’t offer me anything more.
Kloe lay, as yesterday, on her back, the arrangement of the sheet flat against her thin frame. Her hipbones stuck out and I had to look away. It did make me wonder what state I would have found her in if Terry had had her for longer than a week. I couldn’t believe the difference in her after just seven days, so longer would have been so much more torturous.
Doing his initial checks, Mike mumbled, “She does have a temperature. I’ll start her on some antibiotics just in case, and hopefully paracetamol will help.”
Every minute watching her like this broke my heart. I wanted to take away her pain, from both her wounds and her soul. I should have sought Terry out earlier. I should have seen to it before he even had a chance to realise I was back. He’d tormented Kloe well before I had found her again, killing her friend and her dog. He’d had no intentions of killing her, he just wanted to taunt her, play his sick fucking games with her.
Kloe had surprised me, though, with everything she had found out. A part of me had just wanted to take her into the lion’s den blind, walk her straight through Terry’s front door and take great delight in the sight of their joint shock. Except she’d discovered who Richard really was – Robert, Terry’s youngest son - and then found the connection between my father and her step-father. And exactly who I was.
It had taken me longer than Kloe. It hadn’t been until I had delved into Kloe’s life that I found out exactly who her step-father was. My shock had been devastating. Hank and Mary had often goaded me with the fact that I had been born solely for their sick and twisted entertainment. A part of me hadn’t wanted to believe it; I’d wanted to think it was another of their cruel ways. Yet deep down I had known, believed. And finding various newspaper articles that led right back to Kloe confirmed it.
I gathered Terry had seen all the media coverage when the Dawson’s had committed suicide and I had been brought out of the basement, and then that led to Kloe being the therapist who had been assigned to me. I imagined Terry’s shock had been as great as mine.
But then he’d have realised exactly what this could mean for him. His fake death could be uncovered, the heinous act of selling his own child would have come out into the open, and the imprisonment and abuse of his step-daughter exposed. All because fate had brought two broken souls together.
So, of course, he had to bring Kloe near, make her trust his son, Robert, just to see what she knew, what she disclosed to him, and whether I was in her life.
And then, when Robert had found me at Kloe’s, Terry knew he had to act quickly. But he wouldn’t have banked on me taking Kloe and hiding her out at mine. I presumed he knew exactly who I was and what I did to earn cash, so just trying to take me out had suddenly become harder than he initially thought, but he knew he needed to silence both me and Kloe before we revealed exactly what kind of man he really was.
I watched in silence as Mike set up the scanner. My heart was already in my stomach, my nerves frayed. There was a part deep down inside me that knew after what Kloe had gone through there was no way a baby had survived that. But, and this was a big but, my soul told me to trust, to hang on for just that moment longer before I accepted what my head was telling me.
My jaw ached as I watched Mike part Kloe’s legs. I wanted to punch the fucker for touching her, and I bit down my anger, blowing out a breath to calm my possessiveness.
Keeping my gaze on the small screen, refusing to torture myself any more with the face of another man between my woman’s legs, I gritted my teeth and prayed.
A phone rang somewhere in the house. The rain that had been beating down hard since the early hours tapped on the window. The wind howled, whistling through the trees and creating eerie silhouettes on the walls inside the room.
I didn’t see anything other than the flicker of the monitor. I didn’t hear anything, only the thud of my pulse in my ears.
Blurry images showed nothing but static, and my pulse, which I’d heard raging in my ears for the last few minutes, ceased. No baby appeared on the grainy image. There was nothing but white lines and grey mass and black vastness.
Mike seemed lost in his procedure, continuing to shift the probe around as my soul crumbled within me. I grew angry with him, the emotionlessness way he carried on regardless building the rage in me to a dangerous level.