Chapter 311: We have tried everything

"We have tried everything." The doctor’s voice was careful and quiet. "Every medication we have. Every protocol. We have been unable to steady her heart rate. It rises, and it falls, and it will not hold. Each time we correct it, it slips again."

Viktor’s hand came down from his mouth.

"We need to admit her to a hospital," the doctor said. "A proper one. With the right equipment. We must run more tests and find out why her heart is failing."

The joy was gone.

It did not fade. It was simply cut off, like a rope pulled out of his hands. What came in behind it was cold and heavy and familiar, and he knew it better than he knew his own name.

He took a step toward the doctor. "Is it the pregnancy?"

"Mr. Kessler..."

"She has a heart condition. She has had it all her life." His voice was low and shaking. His eyes were red-rimmed and wild. "Is it because of the baby? Is the baby doing this?"

"We cannot say yet."

"If it is," Viktor said, "if it is the pregnancy, then end it."

The hall went silent.

He heard what he had said. He did not take it back. Every part of him hurt as he said it, a deep, tearing pain, like a man cutting off his own hand. But he stood very straight and held the doctor’s gaze.

"End it. You must save her life. Do you understand me? I do not care about anything else."

"I understand," the doctor said gently.

"Then do it."

"We cannot conclude that yet." The older man shook his head. "I would not do it on a guess. If it is the pregnancy, then yes, we will have a hard conversation. But since we know she already has a heart condition, there are many other things it could be. We must run more tests. We will find answers, Mr. Kessler. I promise you that."

He lifted the clipboard.

"I have already called an ambulance. It is waiting outside. With your permission, we would like to move her tonight." Viktor opened his mouth.

"To the Grouga hospital." It was Aria who said it.

She had stood up from the stairs. Her face was pale and fierce, and her fists were clenched at her sides. She did not wait to be asked. She walked straight to the doctor and planted herself in front of him.

"Grouga," she said. "On the north road."

"Miss..."

"They have a cardiologist there. Dr. Lydia." She spoke fast. "She has worked on Sienna’s case before. She knows her history. Sienna trusts her." She took a breath. "And she is good with traditional medicine. The old ways. The needles and the herbs. That is what Sienna will want when she wakes."

The doctor looked at her. He looked at Viktor. "If your wife is conscious, would she agree?"

"Yes," Viktor said. He did not hesitate.

It was not about the hospital. He did not know the hospital, or the doctor, or the road. But Aria had said when she woke, and those words rang in his head like a bell. If it meant getting her awake, if it meant seeing her open her eyes, then he would have said yes to anything. He would have said yes to a witch in a cave.

Even if it meant putting away the piece of news that had made him grin so wide, only moments ago, after hours of horror. He folded it up, and he held it very carefully, and he did not let himself look at it.

He nodded. "Take her."

They carried her down on a stretcher.

Four men did it, in white coats, with a nurse running beside them holding a bag of clear fluid above her head. The wheels clicked on the marble. Sienna lay under a blue blanket with a mask over her mouth and nose, and her face was so pale and small that she looked like a child. Her hair was spread across the pillow. One hand hung over the edge of the stretcher, with the fingers curled.

Viktor walked beside it.

He held her hand. He did not remember taking it. It was cold and light, like something carved from soap. He walked with his head bent and his thumb pressed against the inside of her wrist, where her pulse lived.

It fluttered under his skin. They were halfway across the hall when the front doors opened.

A man came through them at a run.

He was tall and thin, in a rumpled gray suit, with his collar open and his hair standing up. He had a bag over one shoulder. He had clearly been driving for hours. His face was white and sweaty, and his eyes were wild, and he came to a halt in the middle of the floor like a man who had run into a wall.

"Mother?" It was Marcel. He stood very still, with his chest heaving. His eyes went along the hall, past the doctors, past the stretcher, past the tall man and the girl at the window. They stopped on the corner.

On the thin gray figure sitting in the wooden chair.

She had lifted her head. She was looking at him, with her hands pressed to her mouth, and her eyes were so large in her thin face that they seemed to take up the whole of it. She did not speak. She tried to stand. Her legs would not let her.

"Mother," he said again, his voice broken. He crossed the floor in four steps.

He dropped to his knees in front of her chair and threw his arms around her. His bag fell and spilled across the marble. He did not look at it. He pulled her against his chest and held her as hard as he could, and his whole body shook.

He was crying.

It was a loud, ugly, helpless kind of crying, the kind that comes from the stomach. It poured out of him in great gulps. He buried his face in her shoulder, his fingers curling into the rough gray fabric of her dress, and he rocked her back and forth like a child.

Elena had gone rigid.

For a moment she did not move. Then, slowly, her arms came up. They were thin and trembling. They closed around her son’s back, and she lowered her face into his hair, and a small, hoarse sound escaped her. It was the first sound she had made since the garden.

"What did they do to you?" Marcel said.