Chapter 192 CXCII

Chapter 192 CXCII
Levi's POV

She was bleeding when I picked her up. It was not the active bleed of a fresh wound. Dried blood under her nose, on her upper lip, on the collar of the institutional clothing they had put her in, the evidence of something that had happened before we got to her and had stopped on its own without anyone cleaning it properly.

But as I lifted her into the vehicle and the movement shifted her position, the bleeding started again. Slow, from her left nostril, the kind of bleed that came from damaged internal tissue rather than a surface wound.

I pressed the inside of my wrist against her nose with the pressure that would help without hurting her and held her against me in the back seat while my driver got us moving.

She was unconscious and her skin was cold in the specific way of someone whose system had been depleted rather than the cold of injury, the flat cold of a body that had been running on insufficient resources for several days.

I kept my hand on her face and my eyes on her chest, watching it rise and fall, counting the rhythm of her breathing. It was there, shallow but present consistent.

She was alive and she was with me and her breathing was present. I held onto those three things for the entire drive. My driver covered the forty-three minutes in thirty-one. I did not tell him to drive fast. He had been in enough operational situations to understand what the person in his back seat needed without being told.

Marcus had called ahead. Dr. Fenwick was waiting at the pack apartment building when we arrived, standing in the car park with his bag already open, having driven directly from his check on Aria.

He looked at Isabell when I carried her out of the vehicle and his face did the thing it did when he was assessing severity, a rapid clinical calculation that he had made thousands of times.

"How long has she been unconscious?" he said, already moving.

"About forty minutes," I said.

"Any seizure activity in the vehicle?"

"No, she went down clean."

"Any known injuries besides the nasal bleeding?"

"She told me they used neurological stimulation equipment on her," I said, going through the door he was holding. "Forced memory recovery attempt. It caused the bleeding."

Fenwick's expression tightened. "How long was the procedure?"

"I don't know four days of captivity at least one procedure, possibly more."

He was already ahead of me on the stairs, going up fast for a man his age. "Get her on the bed," he said. "I need light."

I got her on the bed. What followed was two hours of controlled crisis management that I watched from the chair beside the bed where Fenwick had put me firmly after the third time I moved to assist and interfered with what he was doing.

He worked systematically. IV line established immediately, fluids running, a different compound than the clear fluid they had been giving her at the facility, something from Fenwick's bag that he prepared with the specific care of something that needed to be exactly right.

He monitored her neurological responses with equipment from his bag that was more sophisticated than I had expected a house-call kit to contain, and the readings he was getting made him work with increasing speed for the first forty-five minutes.

"The stimulation caused inflammation in the neural pathways," he told me, not stopping his work while he talked, because Fenwick talked to explain and explaining helped him think. 

"The bleed is from vascular disruption in the nasal passages, which are close to several of the pathways that would have been targeted. It's also a good sign in a specific way because it means the bleeding went outward rather than inward."

"Meaning?" I said.

"Meaning her brain is not bleeding," he said. 

"The pressure found an exit route. The risk is the inflammation itself, which needs to be reduced before she regains consciousness, because if she comes back to consciousness with the current level of neural inflammation she will be in significant pain and at risk of another event."

"Another event," I said. "Like a seizure."

"Yes," he said.

I looked at her face at the blood that had been cleaned away from her nose and lip now, the skin underneath it pale and still, her eyes closed, her breathing the shallow pattern that had been consistent since the vehicle.

"Make it not happen," I said.

"That is what I am doing," Fenwick said, without taking his eyes off what he was doing.

The second hour was slower, the acute phase had been addressed and the monitoring phase began, the equipment beside the bed producing readings that Fenwick checked every ten minutes and noted into a small notebook he kept in his coat pocket.

The readings improved dramatically ; it was not in the way of recovery films where a person went from critical to alert in a single scene. 

In the incremental, careful way that actual neural recovery happened, each reading marginally better than the last, each increment small enough that you could doubt it until you put it beside the first reading and saw the distance traveled.

At the two-hour mark, the bleed had not restarted. At the two and a half hour mark, Isabell's breathing deepened slightly, the shallow pattern giving way to something with more volume behind it.

At three hours, she was not waking, not conscious, but the involuntary movement of a body reasserting itself, her right hand shifting on the sheet, her head turning a fraction.

Fenwick stood back from the bed and looked at his readings and then at her and said, "She's stable. She will regain consciousness on her own timeline from here. The inflammation is reducing. When she wakes, she will be weak and she may have a significant headache. She needs water and rest and no stimulation of any kind for at least forty-eight hours."

"Thank you," I said.

"I will be back in the morning," he said, packing his bag. 

"Call me immediately if the bleeding resumes or if she shows any signs of confusion on waking. Don't let her try to get up on her own."

He left and I sat in the chair beside the bed.

My shirt was stained with her blood, the front of it dark where I had held her in the vehicle with her face against my chest. I had not noticed it while Fenwick was working. 

I noticed it now, and I did not change the shirt, because changing the shirt required leaving the chair beside the bed and that was not something I was prepared to do.