Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,16
he really needed to go inside before he turned into a Popsicle.
Instead, the endless replay started again, and, as it always did, the sights, the smells, the sounds, eclipsed the world that was before him, sure as if they called his name in a command he had to follow.
The Brotherhood’s training center had a clinical area, one that was dedicated to helping the fighters and members of the household through everything from cuts to concussions, birth to broken bones. They’d never handled a case of the Arrest before Selena. Then again, the disease was not only very rare; it was only found among the Chosen, those sacred females who served the Scribe Virgin. Selena had been well aware she suffered from it, and she had watched a couple of her sisters die from being turned into figurative stone. She had also known it was terminal and there was nothing to be done. Her body was going to fall into a rigid paralysis state that was incompatible with life.
She had been out of time long before he’d ever met her.
There were a lot of things about his life he would change. Meeting her was not one of them, however, even with all the pain that had come.
At the end of it all, when he’d been sitting beside her and holding her hand, he could remember thinking that he would have traded places with her in a heartbeat. He had always wanted to be the one to suffer instead of her, and after she was gone? He’d realized his wish had been granted. Her agony was over—either because the bullshit Fade actually existed or because she was just plain dead.
And his was permanent.
So he’d gotten what he’d prayed for.
Rubbing his eyes, he tried to pull out of the suck zone. He failed. He always failed. He didn’t know why he bothered to fight it, other than the fact that each time he went back to that moment in his life, in hers, it hurt every bit as much as when it had happened.
He could picture the exam room like he was standing in it, the table in the center, the stainless steel shelves, the chair he’d been given. After the medical folks had turned the monitors off, he’d asked his queen if it was time, if she was ready to go, if she needed help. She had blinked twice at all of it. Yes. Still, he’d had to ask her again, just to make sure. It was the kind of thing he needed to get right. When he was sure of what she wanted, Dr. Manello had done the duty with the syringes, giving her the drugs that would ease her as death came and claimed her. Trez didn’t understand then, and couldn’t fathom now, what it was like to have all your mental faculties intact, but be locked into your body, unable to move, unable to communicate, unable to do anything but wait as your breathing and your heart rate slowed… and then stopped. The terrifying thing was that Selena’s version of paralysis had not been like that of a quadriplegic, where the person felt nothing. With the Arrest, bastard disease that it was, all her nerves had functioned properly and continually. She felt everything, all the pain, all the suffocation, all the repercussions of the organ failures.
Before things had gotten acute, they had talked about what she wanted. His queen had said when it was time, she wanted help. She wanted the drugs that would bring the end a little faster and easier. He had made sure she had received them.
And then he had held her hand as his brother had held his, and he had repeated, over and over again, “I love you forever.”
Over and over and over again.
He had known the instant her soul had left its broken corporeal host. He still had no clue how he’d known, but he’d felt it in his gut. And quick on her essence’s departure had come unto him a crippling, shattering pain, the likes of which he had never felt before.
Selena had come to visit him once since then. Or at least his brain had coughed up a pretty damn good illusion of her, one that had basically told him everything he would have wanted to hear from her after her death. And he supposed he had gotten a measure of temporary peace from that. But it wasn’t the same as having her back. Nothing was the same.