The light in the room is soft, muted, but it still feels like a needle in my brain. I’m in a private room, all beige walls and bland furniture. Tubes snake from my arms. I’m cocooned in bandages, a mummy in a prison of gauze and my own ruined flesh.
A man in a white coat enters, followed by the nurse. He has the weary, condescending demeanour of someone who believes his authority is absolutewithin these four walls. He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. No one here does.
“Mr Macrae,” he says, his voice a practised baritone of reassurance. “I’m Dr Evans. It’s good to see you conscious.
I try to speak, but my throat seizes. The nurse steps forward with a plastic cup of water, a straw angled towards my cracked lips. The water is lukewarm, but it’s a balm. It allows me to find my voice, though it comes out as a sandpaper rasp.
“How long?”
“You’ve been in a medically induced coma for two weeks,” Dr Evans says, consulting a chart. “You’ve already undergone extensive surgery to debride the burned tissue. You suffered severe second and third-degree burns on your face, arms, back, and chest. You are a very lucky man. It’s a miracle you survived. We were able to successfully graft some skin from your thigh, and we’re using a new synthetic dermal matrix to encourage regeneration. But it’s a delicate process.”
Lucky. He thinks I’m lucky.
He sees a patient who cheated death, when I see a King who was nearly dethroned by an act of treachery. My mind is already racing, clawing its way through the drug-haze to the stark, brutal realities. Two weeks. I’ve been gone from my empire for two weeks. That’s as good as an eternity. Chaos breeds in a vacuum, and I have left the mother of all vacuums.
“The road to recovery will be long,” he continues, oblivious to the storm brewing behind my one good eye. “There will be significant pain, physiotherapy, and of course, the psychological impact…”
“I don’t have time,” I snarl. The effort sends a fresh wave of fire across my back.
Dr Evans blinks, taken aback by the venom in my voice. “Mr Macrae, you need to calm down. Your body has been through an incredible trauma. Stress will only impede your healing. You need to rest.”
“I need to get the fuck out of this bed,” I grind out. “I don’t have time for a long road.”
Even now our enemies could be moving against us. Hell, they could be right outside the door as I speak. Long roads are for nobodies, people of noconsequence. I have no such luxuries when I know such action will almost certainly lead to my death and the downfall of the entire Brethren.
“You need to lie down,” he says, a firm edge entering his voice. He places a hand on my shoulder, a gesture meant to be soothing. It feels like a brand. It is an act of control, and I do not tolerate being controlled.
“Take your hand off me,” I whisper, the quiet tone more dangerous than any shout. “And get out.”
He hesitates, his mouth opening to deliver another platitude but he’s saved by the door swinging open.
Mateus fills the doorway. Of course, it’s Mateus. Tall, impeccably dressed in a dark suit that looks absurdly out of place here, his face a granite mask of loyalty. His eyes, cold and assessing, sweep the room, dismissing the doctor and nurse in an instant before settling on me. There is no shock in his gaze, only a grim acknowledgement.
“Give us the room,” My brother says to the doctor. It isn’t a request.
Dr Evans puffs up, ready to assert his authority. “I am this man’s physician…”
“And I am the man who decides whether you continue to be a physician,” Mateus replies, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. “The room. Now.”
The doctor looks at me, at the barely-contained violence in Mateus’s posture, and something in his face fractures. He’s a man who deals in broken bodies, but this is a different kind of breakage, one he doesn’t understand. He nods stiffly to the nurse and they both leave, closing the door behind them.
The silence they leave is heavy, charged. Mateus pulls the visitor’s chair close to the bed and sits, his movements economical and precise. He doesn’t offer false sympathy. That’s why I trust him.
“The doctor’s right about one thing,” Mateus says, his voice low. “You should rest.”
“How the fuck is that the case?” I spit out, the pain making me vicious. “Two weeks, Mateus. Tell me everything is not on fire.”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees. “It’s contained. The official story is you’re overseeing a sensitive, extended negotiation in the Middle East. A communications blackout. None of the Chapters are aware of this incident.No one has realised you are here. I am acting as your voice, and everything is proceeding as you would wish.”
The web of lies is a fragile one but Mateus is a master weaver, he learned from the best, after all. Still, it’s a stopgap. A King cannot rule through a proxy for long. Rumours are a cancer, and they have had two weeks to metastasize.
I shift, trying to find a position that doesn’t feel like I’m lying on a bed of hot coals. “Marco?”
Mateus’s jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. “Alive, but only just. He’s in a coma two floors down. The doctors aren’t sure if he’ll wake up. He took the brunt of the blast. He’s, he’s far more burnt than you were.”
The image flashes in my mind. His hand shoving me backward a crucial half-second before the world erupted. That shove might have saved my life, even as it condemned his. A cold knot tightens in my gut. It wasn’t Marco. I know it in my bones. He would have died for me, and he very nearly did.
“Everyone else?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
