Chapter Fourteen

Caspian

The three of us waited outside the bedroom door while the doctor and his nurse examined Larissa. Much like the doctor himself, his no-nonsense nurse had ushered us out. We could still hear Rissa moaning. Ezra started forward, but I grabbed him by the arm, stopping him from going inside.

"Let the doctor work. He knows what he's doing," I told him. I reminded myself that Dr. Gooding was the best. I knew he was seventy-five years old and had seen a lot in his lifetime. He would know how to handle this. But still, I worried. "We would only be in the way." Fuck, I wanted to storm inside and demand answers. It was all I could do to hold back.

A few minutes later, the doctor gave us an update. He didn't look happy. "She's been through a lot. I've given her something to calm her down."

"What's wrong with her ears? They were bleeding?" Ezra asked.

"She has implants in them," the doctor said, then grimaced. "They create a loud noise. I think to control her."

I cursed under my breath. I would kill whoever had done this to her.

"I have some equipment coming so that I can remove the implants here without taking her to the hospital. There would be too many questions. It's a fairly simple procedure. I assume you don't want anyone to know she's here."

The doctor was an intelligent man. "You're right. It would be better if this goes unreported."

He nodded. "Send the equipment up as soon as it arrives." He looked at each one of us. "You can't do anything for her right now. Go downstairs and get yourselves a drink. This is going to take a while."

"Will she be okay?" Jude asked.

The doctor had his hand on the doorknob but stopped and looked back. "You said she was presumed dead for five years, and then she just showed up attempting to kill the three of you?"

"Yes," I confirmed what little we knew, but it wasn't much.

"I can get her through this. I would say she's been tortured and brainwashed. Anyone who could go through that for five years and still survive has a strong spirit, but I'm not sure if you'll be able to break through. It will take time and patience."

"You save her now. We'll take over from there," Ezra vowed.

"Just send the equipment up when it gets here." He turned and went back into the room.

I looked at my brothers. "He's right. There's nothing we can do now but wait. We'll go to the den."

We had just poured ourselves a drink when the doorbell rang. I answered, sending the two men with the equipment upstairs. Just like my brothers, I hated waiting.

"Should we call her father?" Jude's hands trembled.

"Not yet. Not until we know for sure it's really her."

His head jerked up. "You still don't think it's her. No, it's Rissa. I'm positive." He frowned. "How can you say it might not be her? I thought…"

"Caspian is right," Ezra stopped the start of Jude's tirade. "We must be absolutely sure it's her before we tell Johnathan. Think about it. What if you were told your daughter was dead, then you discover she's alive, but the truth comes out that it wasn't her at all? You would have to go through losing her all over again. It almost killed him when she died in the car wreck. He's finally got some normalcy in his life. We can't take that away from him. As soon as we know for sure, we'll tell him."

"It's her," Jude reaffirmed.

"I know we want it to be her, but even if it is, she's not the same Rissa we all loved. He might have destroyed that person forever." I hated to be the bearer of such harsh news, but Jude had to face reality.

He jumped to his feet. "No, I refuse to even think like that. We will get her back. And I don't need any more proof. That is Rissa." He pointed up the stairs.

I decided to drop the subject. I only hoped it was her. I didn't want him to be disappointed again. He probably took losing her harder than us. It wasn't that he loved her more, but he always loved so deeply. At least, he had until we thought she'd died. After that, he stopped loving anyone.

Ezra downed his drink. "And the man who did this to her? Fuck, he must've been planning it for a very long time and kidnapped her that night, then made it look like it was her in the car. But why Rissa?"

I shook my head. "I don't know."

"It must be one of our enemies. I don't think she had any, other than petty jealousy. She was popular in school."

"The set-up was too elaborate for it to have been someone jealous of Rissa."

"But she has nothing to do with our lifestyle." Jude sat back down. "She's an innocent in all of this."

I gripped my glass a little tighter. "Because they knew taking her would hurt us the most. We need to go back through all of our enemies and eliminate them one by one until we find the right one."

Jude rested his arms on his legs, his head dropped down. "We have a hell of a lot of enemies. More since we thought Rissa had died. We became colder, harder. As if she'd ripped out our hearts and taken them with her to the grave. It won't be easy finding the person responsible."

"Nothing is ever easy." I refilled my drink and sat back down in the chair. "Whoever this person is, we will destroy him."

"Slowly. I want the satisfaction of him knowing he lost. Then I want to torture him like he did her, and us." Ezra barely contained his fury.

"It might not have been someone jealous of Rissa, but it could still be a woman."

"She referred to him a few times. Still, we won't leave any stone unturned."

The doctor had said it was a relatively simple procedure, but the day stretched into evening. We went to the dining room, but none of us had an appetite. We finally gave up and went back to the den to wait.

When my patience had begun to run thin, the doctor started downstairs, talking with his nurse as he descended the staircase. When they reached the bottom, he gave her final instructions, and then she went back upstairs. He looked up and saw me.

"We're in the den. Can I fix your drink? Or maybe you would like something to eat?" I offered.

He shook his head as we walked toward the den. "My wife has dinner waiting for me at home. She's a good woman to put up with all my late hours. But thank you for the offer. I'll go over everything I found and return in the morning to check on the patient. The nurse will stay the night and call me if anything changes. I gave her something to help her sleep. I don't think she'll awaken until morning."

Ezra and Jude came to their feet when the doctor entered, but he motioned them to sit back down and then took a chair himself. I sat down as well. I had a feeling what he would tell us wouldn't be good.

"Physically, she'll recover. The implants weren't too deep, and I doubt a professional inserted them. They did, however, cause her to be in agony whenever they were turned on."

"Son of a bitch," Jude muttered, then swallowed half his drink.

"Back when I was a young man and interning, I was drafted into the Army. It was during the end of the Vietnam War." He hesitated briefly. "Some of the men coming back who were prisoners of war had the same things inserted into their ears. It didn't matter what their beliefs were when they went in. By the time I got them, they would've killed their own mother if the enemy ordered them."

"When she tells us who did this, I'll fucking end them." Ezra stood, walking over to the bar. He splashed whiskey into a glass, then downed it. "I will fucking end them."

The doctor was shaking his head. "I'm not sure she will. The kind of person who would do something like this is evil. He more than likely implanted into her brain that he was her protector the whole time he was torturing her."

Jude's face turned pale. "How was she tortured?"

"There are different ways to make someone bend to your will. Mind control, for one, which is apparently what she has gone through for the last five years. She mumbled something about you three being the bad guys. That's why she tried to kill you."

"She tried to kill herself, too, after we caught her," Ezra said.

"That's probably what someone ordered her to do. Maybe she was warned that if you three caught her, she would suffer unimaginable pain."

"I don't understand. If he was torturing her, she was already in pain." It confused the fuck out of me.

"That's part of mind control. It would help if you convinced her you're not the bad guys, but it won't happen overnight. You'll have to take it slow until she trusts you. For now, she needs to rest." He hesitated.

"What else is there, Doctor?" I sensed he wanted to say more but held back. Maybe he knew we were on the edge of losing it ourselves.

"She has marks on her back," he finally said.

My gaze narrowed. "What kind of marks?"

He sighed deeply. "Someone used a whip on her. The scars are old, so it happened probably within the first year of being kidnapped." He came to his feet. "I know this is hard. You can bring her back to the world she left behind, but it won't be easy, and she might not be the same, but it can be done. I'm going home now." He sighed deeply. "If anything should happen during the night, my nurse will notify me, and I'll come back out, but I think she'll be okay until morning."

I came to my feet and walked him to the door. "Thank you for coming as soon as we called."

"Don't think anything about it. I'll send you my bill." He smiled at his joke but immediately sobered. "You might think about making sure she won't be able to break any windows. You'll have to watch her closely so she doesn't run away. Escape will be foremost in her mind."

"But she's safe here."

"Not to her way of thinking. Remember, you three are the bad guys. You'll have to watch her very closely. Now, get some sleep tonight. I think you're going to need it."

I saw the doctor out, then came back inside. When I returned to the den, I related his warning about watching Larissa. As we went up to our rooms, I couldn't help but wonder what tomorrow would bring.