Within These Walls (Within These Walls #1)(39)

My self-imposed exile had stripped me of everything I once was. I’d left my family, friends, and home.

Isn’t that enough?

I am still here. I am still alive.

Thirty minutes after giving up on sleep, I was showered, dressed, and driving my piece-of-shit car back to the hospital.

When I’d said I left my old life behind, I wasn’t kidding.

My parents had figured out fairly quickly that I had an affinity for numbers. I wasn’t like the guy in Rain Man or anything. I couldn’t solve equations in my sleep. I was more like the guy in the casino who gets accused of cheating at the slots, but they can’t prove anything because he was just really damn good. I was one of those. I saw patterns and simplicity while others saw chaos. I was always two steps ahead of the market, seeing trends and pitfalls before anyone else did. Ever since this little discovery, all my father could see were dollar signs. There was no soccer or swim team for Jude. Instead, I’d gotten to sit in on board meetings and listen to hour-long conference calls.

It’s good training, my father would say.

He hadn’t seemed to realize that I was also smart enough to see through his shit. I’d known exactly what he was planning. I’d managed to get away for college, but he’d still had his claws digging into my back, blowing up my phone whenever he’d needed something or flying me home when it had been too important.

I’d managed to keep most of it from Megan, but she’d known that life after we graduated would be different. I would be different. I’d spent every night of our last vacation awake, watching her sleep while worrying about what would happen when my father took over again.

Leave, a voice in my head had said. Just run away with her, it had pleaded.

But I hadn’t done that because I’d felt obligated to my family. They were my blood, and I’d thought I owed it to the company and the people who worked for us to ensure the survival of the business.

That all had ended the night Roman visited, begging me to come back. He hadn’t given a f**k about Megan or what I was going through.

Dollar signs—that’s all I was but not anymore.

I’d resisted every inclination to invest any extra change I had leftover month to month. Instead, I’d put some away, managing to save a meager couple hundred to cover a month of rent if needed. I was poor, dirt f**king poor.

If only Daddy could see me now…

My clunker of a car pulled into the parking lot behind the hospital, and I looked up at the building that had served as my refuge since moving to California. This was where I worked, but it was also where I could feel Megan—in the hallways, walking through the ER, in the tears of the mourning families.

It was my living monument to her, and I was the groundskeeper.

I moved across the parking lot and looked up to Lailah’s window on the cardiology floor as if it were a bright white beacon steering me to shore.

The hospital couldn’t just be a memorial anymore. It had to be more.

I had to be more—for her.

As soon as I approached the nurses’ station, I knew there was something amiss. Nurses on this floor moved at a slower pace than the ER. They would normally chat about their lives and gossip in the hallway.

Today, they were in hyper mode.

The nurses on duty were buzzing around, agitated and on alert, like they’d been spooked. Something had happened, and they were still working their way down from the adrenaline high. I’d seen it before a dozen times in the ER. Each and every person on this floor—hell, in this hospital—was trained for an emergency, but it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t scare the shit out of someone when the time finally came.

And in a place like this, it always did.

I looked around, trying to find someone I recognized. Day-shift people were mostly unknown to me as we would only see each other in passing, and since I wasn’t the most social person on the staff, I knew even less people.

But I did know one person.

Snow White.

Where is she?

I scanned the floor and finally saw her appearing from Lailah’s room. A mask was covering her face as she briskly walked to the nurses’ station. She glanced up at me from across the counter, and that was all it took. Her eyes told me everything I didn’t want to know.

I took off running down the short distance of the hall toward Lailah’s room, but I was stopped short when I was grabbed from behind. My fist came up, and I turned to swing at whoever was keeping me from entering that room.

“What the f**k, Marcus?” I growled.

“She’s sleeping and stable now.”

“Now? Now! What the hell does that mean?”

The grip he had on my arm lessened.

“The virus she’d caught got worse. Her fever skyrocketed in a short time, and her body went into distress. We were able to stabilize her and bring down the fever. Now, she’s resting.”

While he was talking, all I could think of was that I wasn’t here. She could have died, and I wasn’t here. She could have slipped away from this earth, and I would have never seen her smile again, never felt the joy of her tenderness. I’d known this girl for only a short time.

How did she come to matter so much to me?

“Can I see her?” I swallowed down the lump of emotions I felt welling up in my throat.

“Yeah, but first, I think we need to talk.”