Free Savage Delight by Sara Wolf Page A

world shakes and I am human. I am not untouchable. I can be shaken.
    By Isis Blake.
    As I walk into the hospital room more familiar to me than home, Naomi walks out of it, her hair frazzled and her nurse scrubs wrinkled. A scratch mark mars her arm from her elbow to her wrist. It isn’t deep, but it’s red and angry and very noticeable.
    “That bad?”I ask.
    Naomi shakes her head. “I have no idea why she….she hasn’t done this for an entire month, and now –”
    “Something must have triggered her,” I say, and try to push past her into the room. “Let me talk to her.”
    “She’s sleeping. Trisha administered a tranq.”
    The elation from knowing Isis remembers me drains away. I feel a dark fury start to broil over me, but Naomi backtracks. 
    “Jack, listen. Listen to me. It was the only thing we could do. She was threatening to hurt herself with a pair of scissors.”
    “How did she get –” My own anger chokes me off. “Why did you let her have those?”
    “I didn’t! You know me better than that, for christ’s sake! I don’t know where she got them, or how, but she had them and all we could do was stop her before she could do any real harm to herself.”
    Dread replaces the anger, layering over it like a sickening cake. I can barely open my mouth to speak, but the words somehow escape.
    “She must have been triggered. She’s gotten so much better. You know she wouldn’t do this unless someone said something that upset her.”
    Naomi waves a tired hand towards the sleeping Sophia in the bed, tucked under the white covers too-perfectly. Too peacefully.
    “You’re welcome to talk to her when she wakes up. But my shift is over in five minutes.”
    I instantly spot the fine wrinkles under her eyes, the weary bags that all nurses get sometime in their long and stress-ridden careers. She’s so tired. She’s been Sophia’s best nurse, the only one she really likes and trusts.
    “I’m sorry,” I mutter.
    Naomi’s eyebrows shoot up into her hairline. “Excuse me? What was that strange word I just heard you say?”
    “Don’t make me say it twice.”
    I push into the room and close the door behind me. I watch Naomi leave through the frosted glass of the room’s divider, her smirk evident even through the opacity.
    The room is dim and quiet, save for the beeping of the monitors that staccato out her vital signs in too-cheery chirps. Every bouquet I’ve given her this year is still in the room – wilted and browning and not enticing in the slightest. But she keeps them all. She keeps each vase full of water, and all the vases in chronological order.
    It’s then the guilt hits me like a steel maul to my chest. I haven’t visited for two weeks. There’s a two-week gap she’s carefully left in the line of flowers, two empty vases waiting for me to bring them the blooms they need to serve their purpose.
    I let my guilt at not being able to save Isis override my duty to Sophia. And that’s unforgivable. 
    How can I be so excited about a girl remembering a kiss when the girl who needs me is suffering?
    Selfish bastard.
    I sit on the end of her bed gingerly. The white blankets fold like snow under my weight, and contour gently around her outline. She’s so much thinner than I remember. Her every bone sticks out like a bird’s – frail and hollow-looking. Her cheekbones are sharp and evident. There’s no trace of the rosy bloom I’d gotten so used to seeing growing up. That went away after that night long ago.
    “I really am a bad prince,” I murmur.
    I smooth hair away from her forehead. She mumbles softly and rolls over.
    “ Tallie …”
    My fists clench in the sheets, and the molten spike of feverish regret bakes my insides, starting in my heart, working its way to my lungs and stomach and everything in-between.
    Tallie.
    Our Tallie.    
    ‘You’ve hurt a lot of people, haven’t you?’ 
       
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    -5-
     
    3 Years
    26 Weeks
    0 Days
     
    Dr.