Chapter 4

The arms around me went rigid.

"You don't love me?"

"I waited five years for you to wake up. How can you be so cruel, telling me you don't love me?"

Patrick's kiss came at me, hard and vicious.

It only made me sick, and I bit down on his lip.

He let go with a hiss of pain, wiping the blood welling at the corner of his mouth, and let out a cold laugh.

"Irma, don't you forget."

"For five years I've been paying for your treatment and your mother's."

"Leave me, and what will you use to treat your mother?"

I stared at him, unable to believe it.

When we first started the company, we were lovers and partners both.

Right after I woke, he'd used the company's growth as his reason and talked me into signing away my shares.

My complete trust had become the tool he used to threaten me.

I unclenched my bitten lips and snarled at him, grief and fury breaking through.

"What exactly do you want?"

He looked at me, careless.

"Irma, I want you..."

"...to be my mistress..."

My mind went off like a blast.

I couldn't believe what I'd just heard.

While I stood there stunned, the ward door opened.

Lucy came in, surrounded by everyone.

The laughter and chatter cut off the instant they saw our tangled bodies.

Barbara sneered coldly.

"I warned you at the wedding not to be the mistress, and here you are, still shameless enough to throw yourself at him."

The disgust in Rodney's eyes only deepened.

"Lucy just gave birth and came straight to see your mother, and you seduce her husband right in front of your own mother?"

"Irma, you really are beyond shame."

My face went white before I could get a word out.

It was Patrick whose face turned cold.

"Enough!"

"I just got Irma calmed down. Don't come stirring up more trouble."

Hearing Patrick defend me, Lucy shot me a look of pure hatred.

It was gone in a flash, and she walked in first, a smile on her face.

"Irma, it was my recklessness that hurt you back then, after all."

"From now on let's be sisters, one heart, and take care of Patrick together, all right?"

"From now on your mother is my mother too. I'll help you look after her."

As she spoke, she made a show of going to check on my mother.

But the moment everyone's eyes were fixed on me, she yanked the ventilator plug out of the socket.

The moment the monitor stopped beeping, horror seized me, and I shoved Patrick off with everything I had.

I stumbled to my mother's bedside, grabbed the plug, and had just pushed it back in when Lucy knocked over the water pitcher on the table, sending the water splashing squarely onto the socket and the outlet.

In an instant the whole ward shorted out.

The monitor, which had beeped twice, went dead.

My mother drew a few quick breaths, and her chest never rose again...

I called out softly, refusing to believe it.

"Mom..."

"It's me, it's Irma. Open your eyes and look at me..."

But the woman who had once said she would protect me with her life, who couldn't close her eyes until she saw me happy, would never answer me again.

"Lucy, I'm going to kill you!"

A raw, wretched wail tore out of me, and I threw myself at her like a madwoman.

But a solid wall of flesh blocked my way.

Patrick gripped my arms, the veins standing out on them, and patiently made excuses for Lucy.

"Lucy only meant well and it went wrong. Nobody wanted this!"

"She just gave birth. She can't take you tearing at her."

"Get out of my way!"

I fought with everything in me, screaming myself raw.

Blood surged up in me, and I bit down hard on his arm.

He let out a low, muffled sound.

Lucy, hiding behind him, gave a frightened warning.

"Honey, could Irma have inherited her mother's mental illness?"

"Maybe we should send her to the same psychiatric hospital her mother was in, for treatment?"

Barbara and Rodney looked at me with disgust and chimed in, one after another.

Patrick watched me tear at everything like something possessed and hesitated a moment.

In the end he nodded.

As they hauled me away, my eyes were shot through with red, the taste of ground-up blood in my mouth.

"Patrick, Lucy, you'd better pray I don't live."

"Because if I do, even if I burn in hell forever, I will never let you go!"

A week later, Patrick came to see me with the wedding ring from five years ago.

The doctor spoke, puzzled.

"Irma Gilbert?"

"Our hospital never admitted that patient."

Patrick froze on the spot.