1
BISHOP
The familiar antiseptic scent that desperately tries to cover that of sickness and death fills my lungs. Each breath becomes increasingly harder to take the longer I wait, as if the tainted air is slowly killing me as much as the uncertainty and worry threatens to.
It doesn’t help that there’s no escaping the cacophony of sounds that always overwhelms the hospital.
Beeping of machines…
Squeak of shoes on tile…
Cries of pain and loss…
All of it permeates my head, making a dull ache form at my temples. I’d also love to blame all of it for the way my stomach roils, but it isn’t the smell or the sounds making me feel like I’m being eaten alive from the inside out…
It’s guilt.
Plain and simple.
Because this shouldn’t all be so familiar.
It shouldn’t be someplace I’m constantly finding myself.
If I were doing my job properly…it wouldn’t be.
That’s what it comes down to—if I were actually capable of protecting the people I love the way I’m supposed to, we wouldn’t have to be in this hospital.
Again.
But I’ve failed.
Over and over.
And there is no denying it’s why we are here right now…
This is all my fault.
I stand in the hallway peeking into the room where both Jack and Allegra lie in their beds. While Allegra looks far better now than she did at the club, and Jack appears more annoyed than ill, the fact is, they’re still here. They’re still in danger. There are still too many unknowns around what made them so sick.
Isaac and Coen fawn all over them while they await results from the battery of tests Aunt Nora and Pope have run, their distress creating a palpable tension that vibrates through me.
Because I share it.
That feeling that something is just wrong.
Since the moment Coen came rushing out of the bathroom at the club with Allegra in his arms and told me she was sick and so was Jack, I knew, deep in my gut, that it wasn’t a coincidence.
It can’t be.
I haven’t believed in those in a very long time, and I’m confident this is somehow connected to Satriano and the diabolical plans he loves to set in motion when it comes to the Hawkes.
A man like him doesn’t simply give up the kind of vendetta he’s held against us for so long.
That isn’t something you just let go.
It doesn’t matter that Allegra is his daughter. She may share his blood; she may have been raised by the man; but she made her choice. A very dangerous one. She crossed the invisible line drawn between Satriano and us that is somehow still very real to the other side—to the Hawke side.
She betrayed her father.
