Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #9) - J. R. Ward Page 0,65

then doing a hand-pass through his hair to neaten it up.

Clearing his throat, he braced himself, stepped inside, and—

The eighty-year-old man in the bed was asleep, but not at rest, tubes going in and out of him like he was a car in the process of being jump-started.

Dull pain thumped in Manny’s head as he stood there staring at the guy.

“Dr. Manello?”

Goldberg’s voice from behind him was a relief, because it gave him something concrete to grab onto . . . the lip of the pool, so to speak.

He turned around. “Hey. Good morning.”

The guy’s brows popped and then he frowned. “Ah . . . what are you doing here?”

“What do you think. Checking on a patient.” Jesus, maybe everyone was losing their minds.

“I thought you were going to take a week off.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s . . . ah . . . that’s what you told me when you left this morning. After we . . . found you in here.”

“What are you talking about?” But then Manny waved a hand in dismissal. “Listen, let me get some breakfast first—”

“It’s dinnertime, Dr. Manello. Six o’clock at night? You left here twelve hours ago.”

The flush that had heated him up whirlpooled out of him and was instantly replaced by a cold wash of something he never, ever felt.

Icy fear bowled him over and sent his pins spinning.

The awkward silence that followed was broken by the hustle and bustle out in the corridor, people rushing by in soft-soled shoes, hurrying to patients or rolling bins of laundry along or taking meals . . . dinner, natch . . . from room to room.

“I’m . . . going to go home now,” Manny said.

His voice was still as strong as ever, but the expression on his colleague’s face revealed the truth in and around him: No matter what he told himself about feeling better, he was not what he once had been. He looked the same. He sounded the same. He walked the same.

He even tried to convince himself he was the same.

But something had changed that weekend, and he feared that there was no going back from it.

“Would you like someone to drive you?” Goldberg asked tentatively.

“No. I’m fine.”

It took all the pride he had not to start running as he turned to leave: By force of will, he kicked back his head and straightened his spine and put one foot calmly in front of the other.

Oddly, as he went out the way he’d come in, he thought of his old surgery professor . . . the one who’d been “retired” by the school admin when he’d turned seventy. Manny had been a second-year med student at the time.

Dr. Theodore Benedict Standford III.

The guy had been a straight-up hard-ass prick in class, the kind of fucker who liked it best when the students gave the wrong answer, because it provided him with an opportunity to dress people down. When the school had announced his departure at the end of the year, Manny and his classmates had thrown a going-away party for the sorry bastard, all of them getting drunk in celebration that they were the last generation to be subjected to his bullshit.

Manny had been working as a custodian at the school that summer for cash, and he’d been mopping the hallway when the last of the movers had taken the final boxes from Standford’s office . . . and then the old man himself had turned the corner and wing-tipped it out for the last time.

He’d left with his head high, walking down the marble stairs and leaving through the majestic front entrance with his chin up.

Manny had laughed at the arrogance of the man, undying even in the face of age and obsolescence.

Now, walking that same way, he wondered if that had been true.

More likely, Standford had felt as Manny did now.

Discarded.

SEVENTEEN

Jane heard the tearing sound all the way down in the training center’s office. The ripping woke her up, yanking her head off the pillow of her forearms and snapping her spine straight from its curl over the desk.

Ripping . . . and flapping . . .

At first, she thought it was a gust of wind, but then her brain clicked on. No windows here underground. And it would take a damn thunderstorm to create that much of a disturbance.

Bolting up from the chair and scrambling around the desk, she hit the corridor outside in a run as she gunned for Payne’s room. All doors were open for precisely this