J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [585]
There was a pause that vibrated with you-are-such-an-asshole. “Fine. She doesn’t work here anymore.”
Rehv’s breath sucked in on a hiss and his hand shot to the plastic Baggie full of penicillin he’d been keeping in his suit’s breast pocket. “Why?”
“That I will not disclose to you no matter what you do.”
There was a click as she hung up on him.
Ehlena sat upstairs at the crappy kitchen table, her father’s manuscript in front of her. She’d read it twice at his desk, then put him to bed and come up here, where she’d gone through it again.
The title was In the Rain Forest of the Monkey Mind.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, if she’d thought she had sympathy for the male before, now she had empathy for him. The three hundred handwritten pages were a guided tour through his mental illness, a vivid, walk-a-mile-in-his-shoes study of when the disease had started and where it had taken him.
She glanced over at the aluminum foil that covered the windows. The voices in his mind that tortured him came from a variety of sources, and one way was through radio waves beamed down from satellites orbiting the earth.
She knew all this.
But in the book, her father described the Reynolds Wrap as a tangible representation of the psychosis: Both the foil and the schizophrenia kept the real world away, both insulated him…and with both in place he was safer than if they weren’t around. The truth was, he loved his illness as much as he feared it.
Many, many years ago, after family had double-crossed him in business and ruined him in the eyes of the glymera, he no longer trusted his ability to read the intentions and motivations of others. He had put his faith in the wrong people and…it had cost him his shellan.
The thing was, Ehlena had figured her mother’s death wrong. Right after the great fall, her mother had turned to laudanum to help her cope, and the temporary relief had bloomed into a crutch as life as she’d known it had crumbled…money, position, homes, possessions leaving her like lovely doves scattering from a field, going somewhere safer.
And then Ehlena’s engagement had failed, the male distancing himself before publicly declaring that he was ending the relationship—because Ehlena had seduced him into her bed and taken advantage of him.
That had been her mother’s last straw.
What had been a joint decision between Ehlena and the male had been spun into Ehlena’s being a female without worth, a harlot hell-bent on corrupting a male who had had only the most honorable of intentions. With that known in the glymera, Ehlena would never marry, even if her family had had the station they’d lost.
The night the scandal had broken, Ehlena’s mother had gone into her bedroom and they’d found her dead hours later. Ehlena had always assumed it had been a laudanum overdose, but no. According to the manuscript, she had slit her wrists and bled out on the sheets.
Her father had started hearing voices as soon as he saw his female deceased on their mated bed, her pale body framed by a halo of dark red spilled life.
As his mental disease had progressed, he had retreated farther and farther into paranoia, but in a strange way he felt more secure there. Real life was fraught, in his mind, with people who might or might not betray him. The voices in his head, however, were all out to get him. With those crazy monkeys that flipped and tripped among the branches of the sickness’s forest, raining sticks and hard nubs of fruit at him in the form of thoughts, he knew his enemies. He could see and feel and know them for what they were, and his weapons to combat them were a well-ordered refrigerator and tin over the windows and rituals of words and his writings.
Out in the real world? He was helpless and lost, at the mercy of others, with no defenses to judge what was dangerous and what wasn’t. The illness, on the other hand, was where he wanted to be, because he knew, as he put it, the