“What?” He pulled back, his brown eyes speckled with spikes of green, shifted to the nurse beside us.
She stood up straighter, eyes wide. And his glance shifted down to her name tag. She noticed. Anyone would have noticed. He made it obvious, and in doing so, she quickly spoke up. “I’m sorry, Dr. Callahan, I didn’t realize he was family.” She looked over to me, and I just leaned on the counter. “If you had said that you were—”
“Ms. LeRoy,” Wyatt cut her off, speaking to the older nurse who only came to the desk to place a tablet back down. She looked to him. “I know you are busy. I apologize, but you get Nurse Alice here some help. She’s seems a little overwhelmed, and a line is forming.”
“Yes, doctor,” she replied, flashing a glare to the younger nurse before moving to speak to the doctor behind me.
“Let’s get brunch, Uncle,” Wyatt said to me, no longer paying attention to the nurse beside me. He’d discharged her without even acknowledging her, already moving away.
“I’m always in the mood for brunch,” I replied, taking only one step before leaning back to look at Nurse Alice, who looked to be having a mental break down. Tapping the flyer, I dropped it on the counter, getting her attention. “If you’re still positioned here later, you might want to talk to people about these flyers. I know it’s a new age and everything, but you still have to have information on them.”
“Uh…I’ll let them know.”
“She won’t be there later, Uncle, let’s go,” Wyatt replied aloud, not giving a shit if she heard him.
I followed him as he walked down the hall, taking the path of the purple hearts. He rolled his neck and yawned before asking, “How are you, Uncle? Is Aunt Mina with you?”
“I’m good as always. So is your aunt. She’s moving our stuff back into the mansion…which is shocking because Ethan made it clear that he needed space.”
“Ethan isn’t at home, so he still has space.”
I paused, my jaw locking in anger. “Because of Ivy.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yeah.”
“Fuck,” I muttered. Ethan was already distant by nature—the death of his mother made him cold. But becoming the Ceann Na Conairte so young only made him lock the rest of himself in ice. He became more dispassionate…the only breaks in his demeanor for his siblings. But all three of them were distant from each other. I’d hoped Ivy would at least warm him up some, be his fire. Now that she was gone, instead of a fire, she was like a shooting star in the North Pole. Pretty, unexpected, but fleeting and utterly useless. Ethan would most likely sink deeper inside himself, now…fuck…this isn’t what Liam wanted for him.
“He’s going to be back. And this time, we’re not going to let him have space. Space doesn’t apply to family.” He said seriously…making me look at him again.
“Who are you, and what did you do with my nephew?” I questioned, crossing my arms.
“I killed him,” he muttered under his breath, pausing to look to me. “I need you not to get caught up in who I was but who I am right now, because there is no learning curve on what we need to do.”
My eyebrow raised. “Learning? Kid, I remember teaching you how to scope.”
He laughed, pressing his badge on the panel near the double frosted doors labeled BCR.
“BCR?” I asked him.
“Burn Center Recovery,” he replied. “Where the last man who called me ‘kid’ is.”
Ignoring his latter statement, I grimaced at the former. “I thought we were getting brunch?”
“We are.” He grinned.
“You’re really going to depress my appetite before I eat?” I grumbled, followed inside to hell. No, not to hell, to those who’d barely escaped hell. That’s what it looked like. Everywhere, on the right and the left of me, were doctors tending to weeping, sobbing, or sleeping drugged burned victims. Children, women, men, but very few old people, all wrapped like mummies on beds. I noticed the names outside the glass rooms were either Irish or Italian.
“We were attacked?” I whispered to him.
“No.” He whispered back to me, pausing to look into one of the glass rooms. A brown-haired woman rested on a chair next to a small girl, who I could only assume was her daughter, trying to stay awake. Both of the older woman’s hands were wrapped in white bandages. But that looked less painful than the thick, cast-like bandages on her daughter’s arm. On the glass screen of the door was the name Mary Gore-Booth, her vitals appearing when Wyatt tapped the glass.
The woman looked up, and the moment she saw him, fear and rage—but mostly fear—spread across her face, engulfing her. She tensed up and sat straighter. It wasn’t the normal fear our family received, which was usually fear mixed with respect. No, the way Ms. Gore-Booth looked at him, you’d think it was a scene right out of a horror movie where the creature appears out of nowhere, staring right at you.
“No one was attacked, Uncle…they were just disciplined,” Wyatt whispered.
“You did this?” I said softly in disbelief.
He glanced up at me, and I knew why that look in his eyes felt so familiar. It was Melody. The look in his eyes, on his face, it was the same look I saw in his mother when she had done something….so ruthless that it would mentally shatter anyone who heard it.
“I hated having going to Bible study when I was a kid,” he admitted randomly. “In fact, I kinda thought God was a dick. Mom and Dad said we take care of our people. Then in the Bible I’d read how God would punish the Israelites, the ones he called ‘his people’ because of the actions of a few.” The corner of his lip turned up, and he shrugged. “I guess that’s because I was a kid. I
