Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
“Forsythe…”
“I’ll bring the car around immediately,” Forsythe promised, that deep, rolling voice soft with understanding.
“Thank you,” Ash repeated numbly.
Forsythe said nothing.
But at first he didn’t leave, either.
He only shifted that grip on Ash’s wrist to cover his hand, enveloping it in his own, resting there for a moment of reassurance as though that massive hand had the strength and surety to hold Ash’s crumbling world into place.
Then he stood and, with one lingering look, left Ash alone.
Alone and free to curl in his chair, burying his face in his thighs with a grieving, miserable keen.
HE’D MANAGED TO SPEND HIMSELF in dry sobs by the time Forsythe came back up for him; Ash refused to step outside for the brief few steps from the tower to the car with his face streaked with tears, not when he’d probably be giving a hovering reporter a feature shoot that would further embarrass his father’s name. He was grateful for Forsythe’s rather obvious shifts to place his body between Ash and any particularly open lines of sight, as he escorted him to the car.
And he was grateful to Forsythe for not expecting anything of him, not even a single word, as he drove them through New York City’s busy traffic and into the quieter, winding suburban roads leading out to Fairways Hospice Center.
Set against low, unassuming hills of well-tended green and made up of multiple private little cottages scattered around the main building, Fairways didn’t look like somewhere where people were dumped off to die in peace. Every last one of those cottages was just a cozy little mausoleum.
The bodies inside just didn’t yet know they were dead.
The gate guard waved them through after checking Ash’s ID. Forsythe parked in the main lot, let Ash out of the back of the car, then hung back, clearly waiting. Ash stared across the almost violently green grass—so offensively bright and alive—toward his father’s cottage, tucked away behind a few others. He’d only been here once, the first day after the collapse, and suddenly lawyers were talking about living wills and making decisions that flew over Ash’s head like a cloud of buzzing gnats while he watched his father be transferred from a gurney to a quilt-laden bed, unmoving and barely breathing, tubes shoved up his nose and down his throat.
Ash had wanted to scream at him, so much. Wanted to scream because his father had planned for this, so efficiently that the second he collapsed this machine kicked into place ejecting Calvin Harrington into this retirement home for the dead and kidnapping Ash into a kingship he’d never asked for, never wanted.
And right now, Ash didn’t trust that if he walked in there he wouldn’t start screaming anyway.
“Young Master,” Forsythe urged gently.
“I know,” Ash said around the lump in his throat. “I know. I just…need a second.”
“Of course.”
Ash stood there for long moments, staring across the grass, letting his eyes unfocus until he could only see the blue of sky and the dark hard line of trees seaming the earth to the clouds far distant. Like this, when the entire world was blurred, the wet film of tears masking his eyes didn’t have to be real.
It was just an illusion of the skyline, the strange dreaming curve of the world.
He stayed like that for several long breaths, until he could breathe without tasting salt and his chest didn’t feel like a hollow death’s rattle.
Then he set off across the paved walks cutting the grass into puzzle pieces, Forsythe an ever attentive shadow in his wake.
All was silent inside his father’s cottage, save for that awful wheeze of the respirator—the curtains drawn, the lights dimmed as if already in mourning, the room so tastefully and lushly appointed it looked like a funeral parlor with his father already laid out in state for the wake—if not for the slow, shallow, almost invisible rise and fall of his chest. A nurse in floral patterned scrubs hovered over the bed, adjusting Calvin Harrington’s breathing tube with gentle hands, but as Ash eased the door open and slipped into that terrible rotting death-smell mixed with the desperate scent of cleansers and fresh-cut flowers, she excused herself with an almost deferential nod.
Then the door closed, and it was only Ash, Forsythe…and the thin wisp of flesh in the bed that he used to call his father.
He almost didn’t recognize Calvin Harrington. His father had looked weak and frail when he’d seen him just a few days ago, but now…now he was almost nonexistent, so translucent Ash imagined he could see the rusty color of the sheets shining through his body. His bones were knobs threatening to punch through filmy parchment skin, his cheeks sunken in until the outlines of his teeth pressed against his flesh, his eyes recessed so deep they were just pits, shadows, in his skull.