Lover Unleashed - J. R. Ward [76]
But not everything was that “simple.” On a regular basis, the gray fog of maybe-this, maybe-that rolled in, and she had to stare into the cloudy and the murky—
Oh, who was she kidding.
The clinical side of this equation had reached its correct sum. She just didn’t want to believe the answer.
“Payne, let me go get Mary—”
“I did not wish to speak with the counseling female two nights ago, and I shan’t speak unto her now. This is over for me, healer. And as much as it pains me to call upon my twin, please go and get him. You are a good female and you should not be the one.”
Jane looked at her hands. She had never once used them to kill. Ever. It was antithetical not just to her calling and her commitment to her profession, but her as a person.
And yet as she thought about her hellren and the time they’d spent together when she’d woken up with him, she knew she couldn’t let him come here and do what Payne wanted him to: He’d taken a small step back from the precipice he’d been about to jump off of, and there was nothing Jane wouldn’t do to keep him from that ledge.
“I can’t go get him,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just won’t put him in that position.”
The moan that rose from Payne’s throat was despair from the heart given wings and released. “Healer, this is my choice. My life. Not yours. You wish to be a true savior, then make it look accidental, or get me a weapon and I’ll do it. But leave me not in this state. I cannot bear it, and you have done no good for your patient if I continue thus.”
On some level, Jane had known this was coming. She had seen it clear as the pale shadows in the dark X-rays, the ones that told her everything should be working right—and if it wasn’t, the spinal cord had been irreparably injured.
She stared at those legs that lay under the sheet so still and thought of the Hippocratic oath she had taken years ago: “Do no harm” was the first commandment.
It was hard not to see Payne as having been harmed if she were left like this—especially because she hadn’t wanted the procedure in the first place. Jane had been the one urging the salvation, pushing it on the female for her own reasons—and V had been the same.
“I shall find a way,” Payne said. “Somehow, I shall find a way.”
Hard not to believe that.
And there was a greater chance of safe success if Jane helped in some manner—Payne was weak, and any weapon in her hand would be a disaster waiting to happen.
“I don’t know if I can do this.” The words left Jane’s mouth slowly. “You’re his sister. I don’t know if he’d ever forgive me.”
“He need never know.”
God, what a bind. If she were stuck in that bed, she would feel exactly as Payne did, and she would want someone to help her execute her final wish. But the burden of keeping something like that from V? How could she do that?
Except . . . the only thing worse would be his not coming back from that dark side of himself. And killing his sister? Well, that was an express train right into that part of his neighborhood, wasn’t it.
The hand of her patient found her own. “Help me, Jane. Help me. . . .”
As Vishous left the nightly meeting with the Brotherhood and headed for the training center’s clinic, he was feeling more like himself—and not in a bad way. The sex with his shellan had been mission critical for them both, a kind of reboot that hadn’t just been physical.
God, it had felt good to be back with his female. Yeah, sure, there were problems still waiting for him . . . and, well, shit, the closer he got to the clinic, the more the mantle of stress returned, hitting his shoulders like a pair of cars: He had seen his sister at the beginning of every evening and then again at dawn. For the first few days, there had been a lot of hope, but now . . . that had mostly passed.
Whatever, though. She needed