Chapter 280

Hannah

The doctor looked like he was about to be sick when he turned to face us. His skin had gone pale, his eyes wide as saucers, his face drawn as if he’d just seen a ghost.

“Kill us?” I sat up a little more with some effort, my arms trembling beneath my weight. Viona moved to support me, but I waved her away. “Who? Marcus?”

Doctor Patel looked back and forth between all of us. His mouth kept opening and closing like a fish out of water. There was clearly something he had to tell us, and yet it seemed he was genuinely torn between spilling it or making a run for the hills.

Most of all, there was fear in his eyes.

“If I tell you,” he said hesitantly, “you have to promise not to tell him.”

Noah and I looked at each other in astonishment. “What—”

“Promise me,” the aging doctor insisted, his cheeks trembling with the words. “Please.”

Noah, despite Drake’s resistance, stood on slightly shaking legs—the poison still weakened him, although not as much as me. “Whatever you have to tell us, Doctor Patel, your secret is safe here.”

But that wasn’t good enough. Doctor Patel’s eyes flicked to the doors and windows, terror etching his features.

With a sigh, I nodded to Viona, who moved around the house quickly to secure the entrances. Once we were certain that everything was locked and the curtains were tightly shut, Doctor Patel seemed to deflate with some modicum of relief. He sank down onto an armchair and hung his head in his hands, wringing his hair with his fingers.

“Spit it out,” Noah finally said, growing impatient. “Whatever you have to say, now’s your chance.”

The doctor flinched, but nodded. “V-Very well. You see… Goddess, I shouldn’t even be saying this… He swore to kill me if I told a soul…”

Noah, Drake, Viona and I all looked at each other with shock but remained silent, waiting for whatever it was he had to confess.

Finally, Doctor Patel continued his story. “It started about eight years ago… shortly after you two got married.” He glanced up at me and Noah. “Your father, Marcus, came to me with a proposition; he asked me to ensure that you two didn’t conceive. Told me that there was a horrible defect in your bloodline, Hannah, that he didn’t want to pass on to his grandchild.”

He swallowed hard. “So I told Alpha Noah that you were too frail for intercourse. When Alpha Noah insisted that Nightcrest needed an heir, I gave him a false date for your ovulation. I told him to try and conceive right after your menstruation, when you are the least fertile. Since you had been starving yourself at that point and lost your period, you two were none the wiser.”

“So you lied to us,” Noah growled, folding his arms tightly across his chest.

The doctor shot Noah a wide-eyed look. “I wanted to tell you, truly. And I almost did. It never felt… right to do that to you, to try and take away your choice to conceive. But when I told Marcus that we should tell you the truth, and that I didn’t believe that Hannah had any defects in her blood, he threatened to kill me. Not just me, but my family.”

Doctor Patel hung his head in his hands again. “After that, I’m not sure exactly what Marcus was doing to keep you from getting pregnant, Hannah. Occasionally, he would have me do strange things—like claim that you had a UTI or some other infection to keep you from sleeping together.”

I frowned as I recalled those days. There had been a period of about a year when things had been relatively good between me and Noah, and we’d been more attracted to one another. But we couldn’t have sex because the doctor kept claiming that I had infections and needed to rest.

But I hadn’t, apparently. It was all some sort of scheme of Marcus’s to keep me from getting pregnant. And it had worked, for a while at least.

“Was he really so keen on keeping me from getting pregnant because of a… defect in my bloodline?” I asked, glancing at Noah. “Why not just talk to me about it? Talk to my family?”

Doctor Patel shrugged. “I wish I knew. He was very private about his motivations. All I knew was that it was important enough to him that my family’s lives would have been in danger if I hadn’t obeyed.”

Drake shook his head, struggling to process all of this. “And that’s all you did?” he asked. “Made up little lies to keep them from conceiving?”

The doctor nodded.

But Noah and I knew better. There was more to this than the doctor was letting on. Frowning, I told Viona to get my purse, and when she returned, I rifled through it and withdrew the plane ticket I’d swiped last week.

I tossed it at Doctor Patel’s feet.

“And as for this?” I asked through clenched teeth. “Surely you have some sort of explanation.”

Doctor Patel’s face paled even more when he saw the ticket lying on the carpet. “You… How did you…”

“I knew something was off last week,” I said, my voice hardly more than a whisper. “I saw this on your desk, and I took it. Sorry, but not sorry.”

Drake chuckled wryly. Viona sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, shaking her head at my thievery. Noah, however, just stared angrily at the doctor—at the man who he was supposed to trust all these years.

“You were on holiday for months last year, and apparently my father—who supposedly threatened to kill you—funded the entire thing?” Noah hissed.

“N-No, he didn’t—”

“Keep lying, and you’ll lose more than just your license to practice medicine tonight,” Noah threatened.

With a trembling hand, the doctor slowly picked the ticket up off the floor and studied it for a few moments.

The room was silent, the air taut with tension. Noah looked fit to burst, his chest heaving. If I’d had the strength to get up, I would have been right there with him.

“I…” Doctor Patel’s throat bobbed. “Marcus came to me last year with this ticket. Initially, he told me that it was a gift to make up for all the trouble he put me through. But I soon learned that it was more than that.”

The doctor glanced at me, then at Noah. “He told me to bring a suitcase to a random address in the tropics,” he explained. “It was locked, the entire thing made of metal. Whatever was inside, I couldn’t get to it. And if I tried to open it, he would have killed me and my family—he made that part very clear. So I obeyed.”

My stomach bottomed out at the thought. An impromptu visit to the tropics, a strange suitcase, a random location…

I knew someone else who loved the tropics. Who practically lived there, having one night stands with foreign women and getting involved in general debauchery.

“Where… Where did you take the suitcase?” I whispered. I hated how small and shaky my voice sounded at that moment, but I couldn’t help it. The pieces were starting to come together in my mind, and the puzzle was turning out to be a nightmare-inducing image.

“You think I worked alone? You really are just as dumb as you look if that’s what you really think!”

The trial had been months ago, but I remembered those words like it was yesterday.

Doctor Patel slowly lifted his gaze. When he did, the look in his eyes was enough to nearly make my heart stop in my chest. And when he uttered those next words, I was pretty certain that it did.

“I took it to your cousin,” Doctor Patel whispered. “Alvin.”