Dearest Ivie

Hell no, she was not going to sit by and watch this male die. She had no clue what she was going to do, or how she was going to do it, but goddamn it, she was going to find a way to reverse this curse.

She didn’t care that Havers was in charge of the case. She didn’t give a crap that she was just a nurse and he was a full-fledged doctor. And p.s., this disease could really, totally go fuck itself.

There had to be something.

There just had to be a way out of this.

“What?” Silas prompted.

She shook herself. “I’m sorry?”

“You look like you’re thinking about something important.”

Ivie cleared her throat. “Listen, I’m sorry to bring this up. But you need some nutrition and hydration. So I’m going to have to get you hooked up to everything again.”

With a sudden clarity, she realized she had to make sure he was alive long enough for her to find the cure.

“Ivie, don’t you think it’s time we stopped all that.”

“No,” she said forcibly. “I do not.”

* * *

—

Silas insisted on working the feeding tube himself, and she gave him his dignity and independence by thinking up an excuse to go and tell housekeeping his sleep schedule. When she came back in, his eyes were closed, those features of his tight as if he were uncomfortable.

“I hate the pain,” he mumbled through pale lips.

“Let me help you.”

There was a long period of silence, and Ivie waited, praying that he would allow her to give him some relief. She respected him too much to push him, though. Patients like him, once they started on the morphine, did not get off of the drug and he knew this from what had had happened to his father—unfortunately, his sire had also suffered from Crane’s.

Except Silas was going to be different, damn it.

“All right,” he said in a low voice.

Ivie went over and programmed the morphine pump. After she double-checked it was ready, she gave him the clicker.

“You’re in control,” she said. “You decide when you need it.”

He smiled a little. “If I were really in control, we would be in a Jacuzzi.”

“I like the way you think.”

She brushed his hair back and kissed him on the forehead. And the nose. And then on the mouth.

“Help me,” he whispered.

She knew exactly what he meant. Placing her thumb over his, they depressed the button together.

He gasped a little. And then his eyes closed.

“Try and sleep, okay?” she said. “I’m not leaving the clinic, but I have to make some arrangements about my shifts.”

“All right…”

Ivie stayed with him as he drifted off, and then she got to her feet, straightened her uniform, and marched out of that suite like she was going to war.

Havers’s office and private quarters were located just outside of the VIP unit, and as she approached the paneled doors, she smoothed the flyaways from her ponytail and rechecked that her uniform was buttoned properly. Then she knocked.

The rule was that staff could approach him without an appointment between the hours of four and six a.m., and Ivie had certainly never bothered the male before. Then again, she had always discharged her duties appropriately, and if there were any questions or issues they had never been of the sort that she and her supervisor hadn’t been able to handle.

This was really frickin’ different.

“Come in.”

The voice was female, not male, and as Ivie entered what turned out to be a small anteroom, Havers’s private secretary looked up from her French desk with a professional smile.

“Hello, Ivie. How are you?”

How the female knew her from Adam, she hadn’t a clue, but she was going to go with it.

Returning that pleasant, open expression with one of her own, Ivie said, “Very well, thank you. I was wondering if I may please have a word with Havers?”

“But of course. He’s just in with someone now. If you’ll take a seat?”

“Thank you.”

Ivie went over to the nicely appointed chairs and lowered herself down. As she waited, she had to consciously still her bouncing heel and keep her fingers from tapping.

In her mind, she ran through Silas’s medical record again, forward and backward. Twice. There had to be something they could do. There just had to—

“Take care now,” Havers said as he opened an inner door and patted the departing male nurse on the shoulder. “You’re doing quite well, quite well, indeed.”

Ivie closed her eyes. That aristocratic accent of the healer’s reminded her of Silas. They both had the same intonation and beautiful diction.

“Ivie is here to see you, sire,” his assistant announced.

“Oh, yes, Ivie, how are you?”

Ivie jumped up out of the chair and did another smooth-thing with her hair. She had interacted with the clinic’s head in different kinds of medical situations, but she hadn’t been one-on-one with him since she’d had her job interview how many years ago?

“I am very well, sire, thank you.”

“Come right in. Do sit down.”

His office was really beautiful, paneled in rich wood on which oil paintings of formal rooms hung as if he wanted to be surrounded by the memory of a place he had once lived in and loved. And his desk was tremendous in size with all sorts of gilt curlicues on it, the piles of paperwork, files, and laptops all neatly arranged, nothing out of place.

As he sat down on the far side of the expanse, he looked like he was exactly where he belonged, his horn-rimmed glasses and his bow tie and his crisp white coat suddenly intimidating her.

“What may I do for you?” he asked.

Ivie ducked his eyes and focused on her twisting fingers. As her mind went blank and her heart thundered, she had an impulse to run out of the room.

But then an image changed her mind.

She saw her father, standing out in the cold from the night before, his feet planted in the snow, his huge muscled arms bare to the frigid night air, his head up and shoulders back as if he were prepared to bull’s rush anything and everything in his path.

That was her oak, that male.

And she was his daughter, damn it.

Ivie sat up straight and pegged Havers with a direct stare. “We need to do something for Silas, son of Mordachy. And I’m not talking about morphine and cans of liquid nutrition. I do not accept a terminal diagnosis. I refuse to accept it.”

Havers recoiled like she had dropped an f-bomb—and then followed that insult up by taking a cat out of her pocket and having the thing take a crap on his monogrammed blotter.

“I’m sorry to be so blunt.” No, she wasn’t. “I feel very strongly about this, however.”

The healer cleared his throat and steepled his hands. “Forgive me, but how we feel about patients doesn’t necessarily affect their outcome.”

“It will in this case.”

Havers pushed his specs up higher on his aristocratic nose. “Ivie, I have long admired your commitment to your patients, your compassion, your focus. You are an exceptional nurse, and that is why I suggested you go and see about the private position to offer him support in his decline.”

“I went through his medical file, and—”

“Except I understand that his retainer has some concerns about your presence?”

Oh. Right. Pritchard had already been by, hadn’t she. “It’s not her decision. And I don’t care that I offended her—”

“That is not a professional stance, Ivie. That is not the conduct or the attitude of a professional.”

She looked away. Shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

“I assured the retainer that if there had been some kind of a misunderstanding, you would do your utmost to ensure that the patient could move forward secure in the knowledge that his well-being was in the forefront of everyone’s mind. Indeed, I was going to seek you out at the end of my open hours to discuss just this matter. We must be engaged, but not immersed.”

As Havers continued to talk, his words drifted off into the background, Ivie’s mind churning over options. She had heard that the Black Dagger Brotherhood had private physicians and surgeons who worked for them. Maybe they could help? She could go to the Audience House first thing after sundown and see—