Page 50 of A Man of Prestige

“Fuck!” Ella looks around, grabs her purse, dunks it in a nearby fountain, and douses the bench and then my hands. “We need soap. Get me soap and water.”

“Chuck…” I whisper.

Conner leans over the edge. “Fucking hell. I tried to text you. We figured it out…well, Alexis, Viv, and Ella figured it out. We tried to warn you.”

My phone buzzing.

Ella leans down, tears in her eyes. “Lie still. An ambulance is on its way.”

“Are there others?” I ask.

They shake their heads. “He took care of them all, except for Vance, Adam, Jared, and Damien,” Sebastian says as he drops to his knees by my head. “We were the last ones standing in his way. He was going to wipe the slate clean. Start fresh.”

“I know. He’s…was insane. He had connections all over the world. He was running multiple countries.”

“We know. We know. Rest. Where would he have kept the solution?” Ella asks, her doctor brain working in overdrive.

I hear an ambulance in the distance.

“Do not die on me! You hear me! We didn’t just go through all of that for you to fucking die on me,” Ella yells. I open my eyes and see tears streaming down hers. I want so badly to take them away.

“I’m sorry, star,” I manage to whisper.

“Fuck no, don’t even say that. You are not going to apologize. And you are not going to die,” she says, her bossy tone making me want to laugh, which is absurd because I feel horrible.

I can hear men shouting. I know the ambulance is here.

She leans down and kisses my forehead. “I love you, you pain in the ass.”

“I love you, too,” I whisper before she is forced out of the way as medics work on me. I stay awake the entire way to the hospital, but at some point, with Ella sitting by my side, I lose consciousness.

They say death is peaceful, and I believe that. I don’t have a care in the world. I feel like I’m floating through a black void. It’s warm and dark. It’s like getting a decade worth of rest all at once.

Until I hear the beeping. It’s far away at first, but the closer it gets, the more annoying it is. I don’t want to hear it. Then, the light starts to appear. I try to retreat back into the dark void, but I can’t run or move. The light is rushing toward me and then…I take a breath, my eyelids opening. I look around. I’m in the hospital. A private room. I look to my left. Ella is curled into a ball in a chair, her hand reaching over and touching my arm. She’s fast asleep. I don’t want to wake her.

I look across the room. There are more chairs. Conner is sleeping in one, Vivienne next to him. And then Sebastian is on some sort of pull-out chair with Alexis curled up on his lap. I look past them to a window. It looks to be early morning. The sun is still low in the sky, lighting it up with oranges and pinks.

As I look at my brothers, memories flash like fireworks in my brain. The first time we met at college. Knowing how strange it was that we hadn’t met before that because our fathers had been brothers. Making the vow to each other. The night we found Tina on the trail. And a million mundane nights in between those moments and after. All the evening drinks we’ve shared. All the ball games we’ve gone to. All the laughter, pain, and love between us. Things we’d never speak to one another, yet feel so strongly that it invades every fiber of our being. We are more than just friends, more than just brothers. It’s almost like we are one entity, breathing and moving together. We can have entire conversations without speaking a word. We can share experiences and never revisit them, yet know the other remembers them just as you do. It’s visceral. It’s human.

My mother once told me something when I was young. At the time, it didn’t stick with me, but later, I remembered it. I played it over and over in my mind as one of our final “good” talks together.

She had visited so many places in the world and seen suffering and joy and every human emotion in between, and she said to me that it all boiled down to one thing. Happiness. She said we may all divide each other into groups, but at the end of the day, if you break down the human experience, we all just want one single thing, which is to be happy. For most people, happiness means they and their loved ones are healthy and happy, but what happiness means varies greatly amongst people, and we live in those differences when we should be living in the commonality of our existence.

There are so many emotions being portrayed at this moment that will live with me forever, fear, sorrow, and even happiness. But what stands out the most is we’re free. For the first time in our entire lives, we are the captains of our own ships. We make the rules. We get to decide our fates. We are no longer slaves to the system that we didn’t create but were forced to be part of for many years.

For the first time in my life, I take a deep breath and feel freedom, real, true freedom. Is this what life feels like? The weight of my entire life bearing down on me is gone with the end of others’ lives. It makes no sense. As a doctor, I shouldn’t feel this way. Every human loss should weigh heavily upon me. I’ve sworn an oath to try to save every human I can, yet I haven’t, I’ve done the exact opposite.

“Aiden,” Ella cries out, her voice breaking my thoughts. Suddenly, everyone is awake and surrounding me. Ella’s face is in front of mine. I can see the tearstains on her cheeks, and I hate that.

“I guess I’m gonna make it,” I say as I look down at the IV in my arm.

“Thank God!” she says and leans down and hugs me as she cries. “They said if you made it through today, you would be alright.”

“I have a feeling whatever he dosed me with wasn’t going to kill me. He didn’t think it would. He probably made it himself,” I say.

“What do you mean?” Conner asks.

I tell them what happened, everything Chuck said, and how he died.

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