Treasure
Inner Voice

To say Rori wasn’t happy was an understatement. She had been pumped, poked, prodded, given injections, and left her strapped to the gurney for hours. The doctors wouldn’t listen to her when she said this had happened before, and she just needed to take another dose of her medication.

Worst of all, they refused to let her call or talk to anyone. The Chapter must be going nuts; she could only hope that the bad men hadn’t hurt any of the others in the van. She couldn’t handle it if Mighty Elk got hurt. They took her Mom’s cellphone number, but wouldn’t tell her if they’d talked to her. Instead, she had been sedated and left strapped to a bed in an observation room. She had to beg them for a bedpan before she soiled herself.

She tried to relax and take inventory of her body as she lay there in the dim light of her room. Her left shoulder ached; it was bruised and protested any movement. She moved her head side to side slowly, feeling the stitches and the sharp pains in her neck. Her arms and legs felt strained like she’d overexerted herself in yoga. Overall, she’d had worse.

For a mental hospital, they didn’t do anything to help her cope with the boredom. No television, no radio, nothing on the walls- it was like they wanted her to retreat into her mind. She closed her eyes, going back to the drive from the airport. She’d only had a glance at the men, but she forced herself to concentrate, to see their faces, and commit them to memory. She was proud of herself for getting past the man by the door; she had taken the initiative from him. Their battle was short and decisive, proving what Taco had taught her last year. The weakness of a big man was in his knees.

“Trust me,” the voice had told her. Could she?

“You should. I am you, just as you are me. We need to work together,” the voice said.

“What are you?”

“I am what you dream of. When you are ready, we will meet.” The voice didn’t come back, and she was shocked to find the pain hadn’t occurred this time. Was it because she didn’t fight it? Or was it all the drugs they had pumped into her since she arrived?

She didn’t have time to think of more because she heard voices outside her door. Her sharp hearing picked up the conversation. “This one arrived on a seventy-two-hour psych hold last night. Police found her in an alley, naked and covered in blood, a half-eaten raccoon by her side. When she woke up, she had no idea what had happened.”

She knew some things. She didn’t know that the blood was from a raccoon. What the hell? “Dinner,” the voice said. She shuddered, suddenly thankful her stomach got pumped.

A new voice picked up, and she listened in on their talk. The voice of the student doctor made her quiver with how sexy it was. She filed away what they said about her age, and how a judge would have to extend a stay past seventy-two hours. They would try to talk her into it, but she wanted to get back to the Club. Hospitals weren’t safe.

“She’s lucky she wasn’t attacked or raped while she was out. The man who found her called the police.” She shuddered; they were right. She’d woken up helpless a few times before. It was a miracle no one had raped her.

She heard a key in the door, and four doctors filed into her room. “Let me go,” she said, but they talked about her instead of listening to her. The oldest one had seen her twice since she arrived; he was dismissive of her and arrogant. The student didn’t say much; he just stared at her.

She stared back.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome. His blonde hair cut short, military-style, and you could cut glass with that chin of his. His eyes were a clear, Artic blue, and they were staring into hers. ”MATE,” the voice in her head said. “MATE MATE MATE MATE!”

“Hello, I’m Doctor Nygaard,” the man said, his eyes never leaving hers. His voice made her melt.

“Mate? He doesn’t sound Australian!” Rori couldn’t take her eyes off him as he walked to her bedside. “No, he’s OUR mate,” the voice insisted.

He reached out and took her hand, sending tingles and warmth up her arm. She kept staring at his eyes, not understanding what was going on but not wanting it to stop. “Hi,” she said, cringing inside at how weak she sounded.

“I’ll be taking care of you overnight, Miss King,” he said as he checked the chart, finally over the shock of seeing that the person he had been studying for over a year was his mate. He couldn’t do anything with all these humans around, so he pushed his wolf back and put on his professional demeanor. “How are you feeling?”

“Sore and overly restrained,” she said sweetly. “My episode is over, I’ve taken my medication, why am I still like this?”

“It’s our policy when the patient has a history of violent outbursts,” the attending said dismissively.

“If you’d read my record properly, the violence was against a man who tried to molest me while I was sleeping,” she said. “And I bit his fingers off when I was restrained just like this.” Her anger started to build, but it all seemed to melt away when the Doctor touched her hand or forehead.

“We’ll have to discuss that,” Doctor Nygaard said. “Do you need anything right now? I’ll be back later to talk about what happened last night after I get these guys out of here.”

“Chick-fil-A spicy chicken sandwich with waffle fries and a vanilla shake?” She looked at him, hopefully.

“We both wish.”

“Let me make a call, and I’ll have it here in an hour,” she said hopefully.

“Sorry, no phone calls, it’s the rules. We’ll see what the kitchen is serving tonight.” He got up and smiled at her, and then they filed out. The door closed, the deadbolt slammed shut behind them.

She listened to Doctor Sexy talk about her again. “She seems lucid, are the restraints necessary now?” His voice did things to her, making her feel all warm inside.

“Let’s get through more of the evaluation, and contact her doctors in Florida,” a new man said. They moved on, leaving her to her thoughts.

Thoughts that soon went to the doctor with the light hair and blue eyes, and the voice that made her melt. His touch woke something in her that she hadn’t felt before. “What did you mean he is our mate,” she asked her alter ego.

“He was made just for us. Doctor Nygaard is our soul mate,” the voice responded. The voice didn’t come back, leaving her there to think about what it meant. Was there such a thing? What did it mean? She fell asleep pondering the question, her inner voice no longer wanting to talk to her.

--

Wolfman sat in the IHOP booth with Mighty Elk, Possum, and Roadkill. “I can’t believe they won’t let you visit your daughter,” he said as he poked at his pancakes.

“There is no visitation during a psych hold,” Donna said. She was cutting into her chicken-friend steak with some latent aggression. “I’m going to try and talk to the doctors again tonight, see if I can get it ended.”

“Can you do that,” Mighty Elk asked.

“It’s possible,” Roadkill said. “The 72-hour hold happened without a judge’s order; they have to file a petition in court to keep her without her consent beyond then, and show cause. The kicker is that they aren’t supposed to keep her unless she is in danger of harming herself or others. Her blackout is over, and she’s on her meds. They’ve shown before to regulate her behavior. We’re going to ask them to release her to her mother before the period is up.”

“If they don’t, what do you do?”

“That depends on whether they file for a 14-day hold,” he said. “If they do, we fight it in court. What happened here is nothing new for her, and drug therapy has been effective. We argue that she went off her normal medication schedule on the trip, and that caused the relapse.”

They showed up at the hospital at eight PM, but only Donna was allowed to talk to the doctors since the others were not next of kin. Even Roadkill, now her stepfather, could not get in as Rori was now an adult and hadn’t authorized him to receive her health information.

She entered the room where two Doctors greeted her. “I’m Doctor Thompson, the attending physician tonight, and this is Doctor Nygaard, a Resident. Welcome to Seattle,” he said as they sat. Over the next half hour, they discussed her history, then walked her out. As he walked out with her, Chase passed her a note. “Read it when you are alone,” he whispered. She put it in her jacket pocket and left without looking back.

“Did they agree to release her,” Wolfman said as she came back to the waiting room.

“Not yet, but they promised to consider it. A lot depends on what they see of her in the next day,” she said. “I liked Dr. Nygaard; he said she was lucid and aware of what was going on.”

“Good, I want to take her home,” Roadkill said. “She can’t stay here, not when those people might still be around, and she needs her Mom and friends around her.”

“I have to agree, as sad as it makes me,” Wolfman said. “We didn’t protect her, and we can’t find the guys who tried. She needs to be safe and far from here.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Donna said as she put her hand on his. “I don’t blame you.”

“I do,” he said. He threw some money on the table to cover the bill. “Come on, let’s get you some rest. Do you want to stay at the clubhouse or our home?”

“Clubhouse,” Roadkill said. “If anything goes down, I want my brothers around.”

It was hours later, as Possum got ready for bed while Roadkill was in the shower, that she pulled out the note and read it. “Not everyone who is after Rori is bad, but not all can be trusted. If you want to know who is after her and why you’ll have to trust me. Tell no one of this. -Chase 206-555-8783.”

--

The Council called in by videoconference, and Beta Carlson’s brief was short and illuminating. “My team failed, and that is my responsibility alone. I underestimated both her and her wolf and ended up risking exposure to humans at the same time I failed to bring her back.”

“You know where she is.”

“Yes, she’s on a psychiatric hold at a mental hospital east of Seattle. Our tech guy picked up the 911 call, and confirmed it was her by talking with the ambulance driver who took her from the emergency room to Kirkland.”

“Wait, isn’t that where Beta Nygaard’s brother is doing his residency?” Councilman Forrest made it a point to talk to his staff about what was going on in their lives. Chase had worked for him for eight weeks before returning to his Pack.

“I can check with Coral,” Beta Carlson said. “She’s on vacation now, recuperating from her wounds.”

Doctor Phillips moved into the camera; he had been sitting near his Alpha. “He might be able to talk to her, but he’s a student doctor. He doesn’t have the authority to do anything without his supervisor signing off on it. I will talk to him and see what he has learned about her mental state.”

The members contemplated what to do next. They’d come so close, but now she was spooked, and her family and friends were going to be even more protective of her. Her contacts within the Steel Brotherhood seemed endless, and they were fiercely loyal to each other. The Club could move and hide her in over a hundred chapters, and they kept their mouths shut.

“We have to change course,” Councilman Forrest said. “Trying to grab her hasn’t worked, it’s only driven her further underground and risked us getting exposed to the humans. We can’t get to her in the hospital, and they’ll have her protected like the President when she is released. They’ll disappear her again.”

“What do you suggest,” Chairman Gruber asked.

“What does a child, abandoned and adopted as a baby, really want to know?” Councilman Waterman looked smug as he challenged the others.

“Who she is,” Forrest said. He smacked the table with his hand. “Charles and Martin.”

“Correct. They are Rori’s only living relatives, her uncle, and her grandfather. She’s afraid of them right now, but if she stops to think about it, they never did anything they can’t explain. They need to gather photographs, birth certificates, letters, anything that can prove her heritage. Hell, supply her with their DNA. Let her run tests against hers, proving Charles is her grandfather. When she gets the results back, she’ll come to us with her questions.” DNA testing wasn’t a problem for human labs. Being a Werewolf was the result of a curse passed down the bloodline, not the DNA itself.

“That still doesn’t tell us where she is,” Chairman Gruber said.

“True, but we know where her mother is. We give the information to her and ask her to pass it on. Let her know that the estate remains in limbo, as no one found her body. It’s her birthright, after all.”

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