“Why’d you switch to MI6?” Wesley asked, slinking down in the armchair slightly but still keeping his eyes glued to her fingers. His wrists were raw. Voss had covered them in some type of ointment and though they were healing, she hadn’t given them anything for the pain. Not a single Tylenol from the apparent doctor.
“To impress my mother,” Voss replied nonchalantly. “A PhD wasn’t enough for her.”
“I enlisted to impress my mom too,” Wesley said.
Voss stopped what she was doing to look at him, bandage stretched out between wrinkled fingers.
“And?” she questioned.
“And what?”
“Was she impressed?”
Wesley brought his eyebrows together and said, “I don’t know actually.”
With a quiet hmph, she placed the next bandage down, gently spreading it out across Dad’s burns. She wasn’t the cause of that—Dad’s infection. Wesley knew that. But she certainly hadn’t done anything to help it until now, and he had zero reason to trust her. That didn’t mean he couldn’t get her to trust him, though.
She was still tying them up at night when she left, and all he needed was one time that she didn’t. The stresses of their escape had caused a breakout of pimples across Wesley’s neck. It would have once been his biggest obstacle, getting over his own personal embarrassments. But he was so much more than that now. He was a soldier—a prisoner of war.
Underneath the desk, he saw a spider skitter across the carpet.
Wesley scratched at his neck.
“Don’t do that,” Amita said. Before Wesley could say anything, she had walked over to his armchair and pulled his face back by his hair. She examined the patch of acne. “No more scratching.”
Her dark purple boots thumped against the carpet as she went through her bag of medical supplies, pulling out a small white container. She slapped a generous amount of mystery ointment onto his neck.
“So you do care if we live or die?” Wesley asked, leaning his head to one side so she could rub the ointment in.
Looking down at him with sunken brown eyes, she said, “Well, I certainly don’t want you to die.”
“But it could have happened…” Wesley stated. “If you had left us in that bathroom much longer… Dad wouldn’t have made it—”
He pulled in a breath through his teeth as her nails scratched at one of the inflamed pimples.
“An unintended but realistic consequence,” Voss replied.
Wesley nodded, holding back. He couldn’t blow up now. His grip tightened around the fabric arms of the chair, his knuckles whitening. His mom probably would have already killed this lady, snapped her neck. Especially if she was the reason that Rex was dead. Mom, for a long time, pretended like she didn’t care what Dad did or said, but Wesley knew she cared almost as much for Rex as she did for him and his sister.
Looking at his dad though, it hurt. It hurt to see him like this.
“Is he going to be okay?” Wesley asked, pulling himself out of her grip. She yanked him back in, rubbing in the rest of the ointment more roughly now before smearing her hands together and going back to Dad.
“It’s hard to say,” Voss said. “He was septic. He’s on medication now to regulate it, but it will change from day to day.”
It may have been the longest strip of words that Wesley had heard her put together since the bathroom. He was trying to think back to his gym health class and the discussion of infections and sepsis. He couldn’t remember much aside from that sepsis was deadly. And that was clear from the fact that they had literally brought Dad back to life only a day ago.
Before she left for the day, Voss tied them to the armchairs, using more zip ties to keep their wrists flat against the fabric-covered wood. She gave Wesley an awkward look over her shoulder as she put her coat on, checked her phone and locked up the office door. Everything she could have done to keep them hidden away from her colleagues, she was doing. It was clear to Wesley that she was not doing this as an MI6 mission.
They heard her boots click, a muttered conversation to someone in the hall and then the ding of the elevator. After a few moments, the motion lights clicked off, leaving the office in darkness aside from the low dim coming from the power bar under the desk and the moonlight coming in through the window. The heavy click of the clock on the wall filled in the time as Wesley drifted in and out of sleep, his head lolling back against the back of the chair.
“It’s gone.”
The voice woke him up.
“It’s broken,” Dad muttered in his feverish sleep. “I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead.”
“Dad,” Wesley hissed.
“Diana,” Dad said. Then in a low, confusing growl, “Taras.”
“Dad!”
Wesley turned his head, the heaviness of sleep and exhaustion still weighing on his body. Dad was struggling against the chair and the ties, every muscle twitching and pulling in the light of the moon. Then, with one gasping breath, like he’d been brought back to life a second time, Dad’s eyes flashed open and his head snapped forward.
Two drops of sweat dripped off of his forehead, falling onto his torn suit pants.
“Dad,” Wesley whispered. “Are you okay?”
“Wesley…” Dad replied, slowly turning his head to him. The light in his blue eyes —it was the first sign, the first heart-squeezing symptom, that Dad was getting better. It was as if he was seeing him, looking at him, for the first time. Wesley almost cried, but he was pretty much dried out from the last couple of days.
And as soon as the light was there, it darkened. Not into the dying gaze he’d had, but into that type of intensity that Mom had when she was really focused on something. Scatters of silver moonlight caught along his unshaven stubble and clenched jaw as he said, “We’re getting out of here, champ.”
