Black Dagger Brotherhood 21: Dearest Ivie by J.R. Ward

Author:J.R. Ward [Ward, J.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

Nothing.

As Ivie’s second break ground to an end, her phone was still a wasteland of no-comment, no-call, and she was about as twitchy as an addict without their fix. And that was seriously alarming.

Sitting alone in the break room, with nothing but the hum of the staff refrigerator and the whisper of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling to keep her company, she missed Rubes. Well, sort of missed the female. With her cousin having transitioned over to the VIP wing, it turned out that the two of them weren’t on the same break schedule, and one thing about Rubes was that she was a cheerful distraction. That being said, however, chances were her cousin would just be prattling on about true love and romance and how all of this was going to work out.

So yes, it was hard to know whether it was better to be alone with her head or in the company of the kind of optimism that Ivie certainly wasn’t feeling at the moment.

Probably best she was by herself. Her mood was getting worse, and the nurse clinician in her was not helping by providing a commentary on the sudden dopamine and serotonin imbalance that occurs in the vampire brain when pleasure is replaced by stress and hurt. For example, that sense of an ache behind the sternum? There was an actual physiological reason for it. Romantics, like Rubes, put a name on the pain, but “heartbreak” was actually nothing more than a combination of stress hormones, blood pressure variants, and unconscious muscle tension. And just like the cold or the flu, eventually it would pass.

Too bad you couldn’t take Mucinex for it—

The staff room door burst open and a colleague of hers leaned in. “Ivie, your patient in eight is coding again.”

Ivie jumped up and tossed the sandwich she hadn’t eaten in the trash. “Damn it, I thought he’d finally stabilized…”

The rest of the shift was spent dealing with a death that everyone in the family and on the staff had known was coming. The patient had been upward of six hundred years old, which for a commoner who had lived a hard life was considered advanced age, and yet when his heart had stopped for the fourth and what turned out to be the final time, it had nonetheless been a surprise.

But that was the nature of death, Ivie had come to learn. No matter when it happened or how expected it was, there was always a shock to the loss.

And because of that, she took special care with the family, holding their hands and letting them ask as many questions as they needed to. Ultimately, though, there was no response she could offer that would give them the relief they were seeking. Only time could bring them over the difficult road out of the pain, the mourning process the sole thing that would heal the wound of the loss.

When they finally departed the facility, she still had thirty minutes

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