Four hours later, Moriarty had yet to move. He just sat there, staring at either the floor or the corridor which led to Katherine. He was a man possessed.
It was approaching 11pm when the door finally opened and outstepped Swanson. He was covered in blood, head to toe. More than he should have been given the placement of the gunshot wound and level of work. Nothing called for that. It was very rare that Moriarty felt sick but in that moment, he could have killed the man right then and there on the spot die to how he made his stomach twist.
"Mr Moriarty." The man had the audacity to smile. "She's resting." Surprising everyone of his men who had been witness to his mood the entire evening, Jim didn't move. Until a moments time, when he snapped his fingers and gave one simple order.
"Restrain him." Before Doctor Swanson knew what was happening, two of his men had him pinned to a wall.
"Depending on what I see in there..." Jim pointed to the unknown room and then into the eyes of the man who had an unknown amount of time left to live. "You either die with your face worthy of an open casket, or unidentifiable." There was no other choices. That man died tonight. No discussion.
The man was smart and he stayed silent as Jim carried on his way. One of his men followed a few feet behind should he be needed, but for the most part, Jim was on his own. A large part of him didn't want to enter the room, but that was soon pushed aside when he saw the edge of her bed creep into view.
She could have been dead. Katherine's body wasn't placed like all the others were in all the movies. She didn't look like a sleeping Snow White or peaceful figure recovering. It looked like she had been shot right there and left to die.
Her clothes had been ripped from her body, her designer shoes thrown on top of them in a disrespectful heap in the corner. Still pale and smeared in blood, the wound in her shoulder stood out, ugly and risen. It hadn't even been dressed, it barely looked clean. Had it not been for the small rising and falling of her chest, he would've thought it was all over.
Upon walking closer, he saw the black stains over her cheeks and down the sides of her face, where tears had smudged her makeup. Jim picked up one of her hands and turned it, but looked away when he saw the small cuts in her palm, created by her own feline fingernails. They hadn't looked after her, they had barely treated her. He may as well have taken her to the crack den down the road.
Her hair was stuck to her with with sweat and god knows what else, a small trail of blood trailing from the corner of her mouth. She was ruined. Used, broken and ruined. And he had let it all happened as he sat back in the next room.
Jim forced himself to leave the room again, cracking his knuckles and rolling up his sleeves as he walked back to stand a foot away from Swanson. Sebastian, who had taken a back seat in the whole ordeal, stood only a meter away. He hadn't seen her, but he could only imagine what the scene was like to make Jim's eyes turn the colour they were. He wasn't in control anymore, the anger had took over and there was no doubt more blood was about to be spilled.
"That's my wife, lying there..." His thick Irish drawl was deep, worrying even the men who held the Doctor against his will. "Hard to believe she was sooo perfect once...before I let people like you touch her." It was like she was made out of the finest China when they met. No scars, no real knowledge of pain or fear. They'd destroyed her and he was going to have to sit and watch as she rebuilt herself again.
"She's alive. That's what you wanted, isn't it?" It would have been smart for him to not speak. That may have saved him from going through hell before peace came.
"For how long?" Jim's head shook in disbelief. "One week before infection takes hold? A month before we find out you've done half a job?"
"Mor-"
"THAT. IS MY WIFE!" His exclamation could have brought a riot to order, but then it shrunk back like the tide and became dangerous. Moriarty wasn't scary when he was loud, it wasn't his style. It was when silence came, that people should run. "I should let her do this herself."
"Wh-" Before he could pronounce a single syllable, Jim retrieved the pocket knife from his trouser pocket and buried the short blade into the doctors groin. His scream could have cracked glass. As blood began to pour to the floor through his scrubs, Jim pulled the knife out and pushed used it again, this time in his thigh.
"What did you do to her?" There was no reply, another thick move. So he got a third injury to the side of his right hip. "What did you do to her!?" He started to cry with the pain, just like she had. It made the next tear to his stomach that much sweeter, but Jim was careful to place it so not real damage would be done. He'd live. "What did you do!?"
"I saved her." He finally spoke, voice raspy from screaming. But as Swanson picked his hanging head up, he did something which not only sealed his own fate, but that of everyone who had worked on Katherine. "Which is more than can be said for you, Mr Moriarty." Whether it struck a nerve because Jim thought it true, or whether it was just the anger from both attacks on his wife, Moriarty stabbed Swanson's left shoulder and then buried the knife in the right, leaving it there.
Then he went straight back into Katherine's room and started pulling all the tubes from her skin.
"You can't take her, not yet. She needs to rest." Sebastian, bewildered by both Jim behaviour and the scene which has just took place, regrettably agreed. As sad of a state that she may have been in, she could leave, it was too risky. But Moriarty's reply came just as he knew it would.
"And she will. But not here, not under your care." Jim lifted Katherine's naked form into his arms after laying his jacket across her, hiding most of her intimate parts. When he emerged in to the corridor with her, all his mean fell silent out of shock instead of respect.
Sebastian had imagined the worst, but it still hadn't prepared him. Maybe Jim was right after all. They had to get out of here.
"You're killing her!" Swanson practically screamed as Moriarty passed, but the consultant didn't bat an eyelid. Not until he had passed, then he started dishing out the orders.
"Lock him up, somewhere, anywhere, I don't care. Find everyone else in the building and take them out. Two bullets for each, one in the shoulder, one in the head. Ten minutes between each." He was showing how cruel he could really be. Every other day he was the text on a screen who never got his hands dirty. Today was one of those days, those one in a million days where someone pushed too far and he proved how twisted he really was, going so far as to get blood on his own hands.
In the kingdom of guns and dynamite, he was king and there wasn't anybody who dared mess with the queen.
"Jim." Sebastian tried to reach out and help but all he got was a glare of strict warning.
"If I so much as hear you breathe, you will join them." Moriarty then carried on, holding Katherine close to his chest and nodding his head as is close second best. "Kevin. Car."
6am and Jim was slumping in his chair, but sleep was not even a threat. It was like deja vu, waiting for a doctor to emerge from behind a door. At least time it belonged to a man who he truly trusted with his life.
He had phoned Doctor Phillips the second he'd left that abandoned warehouse he dared to call a clinic. It was late but Phillips owed Jim a favour and upon hearing the situation, there wasn't anyway he could refuse. The drive had been long. Two and a half hours of Katherine laying on his knee, his hands restlessly running over her thighs. Half an hour in she had moved but she hadn't awoken, still unconscious when he handed her into the welcoming arms of the Doctor and his team.
That's was four hours ago and he had yet to hear a peep. The only other man in the waiting room was Kevin, who kept himself to himself in the far corner of the room. But he was loyal and waited...probably too scared to move.
As he started to grow restless, impatient and stiff, Jim stood and walked to look out of the small window that looked out over the vast countryside. A much better view than Battersea. One arms was crossed over his chest, the other covered his mouth so stop himself biting his lip.
A click to his left made him tune in but he didn't move. Something just didn't sit right within him, something wasn't right. Out the corner of his eyes, he could see the doctor walking towards him, almost as clean as when he had entered the theatre. But he couldn't see his expression and Jim didn't want to look. As much as it pained him to admit it, he was scared to look.
"Well?" Jim was forced to speak first when Phillips stood awkwardly off to his left.
"She's in an awful state Jim." With a scoff, Moriarty dropped his hand to his sides and finally turned with his back hunched a tiny bit. That meant she was alive, but it didn't mean well. At this point he just wanted the details, all of them, as quick as possible.
"Tell me something I'm not already aware of."
Sensing the unease in Jim's mood, the doctor started to explain. "We redid the surgery, or we redid what we could. We cleaned it up, made it as neat as we could by restitching the wound. But it means the scar is larger." He knew Moriarty and he knew he liked things perfect. "In future I could maybe do some plastic surgery on it but, for now, it's as good as it's going to get."
"I don't care, as long as she's alive and safe." Jim eyes turned down towards the ground and desperately, he tried to stop himself from picturing Katherine in the state she was in when they had arrived. At least now she was clean and safe and appreciated. Even if it cost him a small fortune.
But then he looked at Phillips and his brow rose. There was the sign of a frown. There was something else. See the Doctor had been expecting a much grander reaction from the professional criminal standing before him. He'd, kind of, been hoping for one as it would had lessened the blow the his next news. The news which had kept him in his office ten minutes longer than necessary.
"What?" Moriarty pushed after a short silence fell over them.
"There was something else Jim." He couldn't speak as he listened to the words, already thinking the worse. Nothing could have prepared him though, it had never even crossed his mind. "Katherine was pregnant."
Later, Phillips would be sworn to secrecy. Nothing that happened inside that surgery, happened. It was all some long, bad nightmare. He wouldn't tell anyone of the screams Katherine would give once she woke up and heard the news, he wouldn't speak a whisper of how Moriarty himself had paled and stood over her unconscious body, feeling the flat softness of her belly. He would take it all to the grave, or so help him god. But for now, he had to stand, stiffened by fear as Jim slowly began to shake his head, stuttering.
"You've made a mistake. She'd couldn't have been..."
"She had a miscarriage early into the surgery. At first we did know what it was but..." Phillips trailed off as Moriarty walked back to his seat and fell back into it. His normal self would have been relieved. He would've cared less about the loss, but after watching Katherine fall from full health to a slab of meat on a metal table, he didn't know what to think.
"How...what?" Not many people had seen him in such a state, had it not been for the exhaustion he would have killed himself right on the spot for showing such human emotions. People died, it's just what they did. He shouldn't care.
"8 to 10 weeks judging on the tests we ran."
After a uneasy moment, Jim stood once again and looked at Phillips with a state that portrayed how serious his next demand was. "I want to see her."
"She's still resting, I-"
"I want to see her Frank." Jim was already walking past him when he answered with a sign.
"End of the corridor, to the left." Sighing with defeat. Phillips didn't leave them and quickly followed Moriarty to the room. However, he was smart and stayed under the threshold of the door as Jim slowly approached her bed side.
His hand touched her ankle ever so faintly above the covers she was tucked into, and as it dragged up her body, his fingers barely made contact. Until it reached her arm which rested on top of the scratchy hospital blankets. His thumb held her wrist to feel for a pulse just so he had some hard evidence she was just sleeping, that she hadn't crossed over into the land of the angels. Her skin was almost blue it was so pale, her lips were cracked and now they'd cleaned off her make up she looked too much like a child. For a woman of thirty, she looked younger. That was the main reason it took his men and clients so long to respect her...but also why more of them fancied her. Katherine's long, dark hair was down and framed her face in messy tats. Jim felt as though they'd both been taken back two years, to when he'd had to carry her broken body into the care of the very same doctor. But this time was different, this time it was all him. This was an attack on him...and his family.
"The shooter or the doctor?" Jim's head barely turned away from Katherine but he knew Phillips was standing close by.
"Sorry-"
"Who caused it. The shooter or the doctor?" Jim couldn't bring himself to say the actual words. It just wouldn't come to his tongue. He wouldn't be the one to tell her, he couldn't be the one to deliver that and see the reaction it caused.
"It's hard to tell..." The explanation started slow, until Phillips noticed the tension rising up Moriarty's spine. "Possibly the shooting, the stress and pain would have been too much for her body to cope with in such early stages of pregnancy. But the first surgery would have been a lot for her to take..." His words slower and Moriarty knew something was coming, something Phillips didn't want to be the one to say this close to Jim. "When I checked over her injuries, there was reason to believe she was awake for most of the surgery." There was a pause, left mainly to assess how Jim was reacting. His breathing had quickened and his posture was now stiff but he was silent so Frank carried on. "A blood test picked up traces of Ketamine. She wouldn't have felt a lot of the pain due to the high, but she would have been awake and she would have felt it. She probably fell unconscious soon into it though." Was that meant to make him feel better? That she may have fallen unconscious due to stress and pain a little into it?
His stomach churned as his mind stared to imagine what she would have gone though. How he wasn't there with her and he didn't try to stop it. How she'd probably been suffering from the pain but too high to scream for him, too terrified and helpless.
"Will she remember?" Jim voice cracked, so he coughed to hide it, startling even himself.
"I can't say." He hoped she wouldn't. He hoped to god she woke up with just dream like images of what had happened. He didn't want her to remember, he didn't want her to have to suffer through trying to forget.
"It would be best, if we keep that part a secret between the two of us." When he turned his head, Jim saw the doctor looking at him with confusion. "She doesn't have to know about the pregnancy." There was no way she knew already, she had been acting for too normal. And she didn't have to find out. For all she knew, everything was fixed and nothing had been lost. But Jim knew if would be that easy and it was confirmed by Frank.
"I can't Jim, as much as I want to. I'll have to run some checks once she is awake."
"Tell her it's for something else." He would play every card her had, every favour he was owed would be used in order to protect her, and protect her mind.
"She's not stupid, they'll be a certain type of check." There had to be a way, she couldn't know. But for once Jim was defeated and he let it show as his hand entwined with Katherine's and he closed his eyes. Phillips saw it all, he'd experienced the rise of Moriarty through the years and what he saw now looked very much like the first signs of his first fall. "I'll leave you be. You know my number."
Nothing was said as he left, the door closing with a silent click. But one thing was certain, to both doctor and consultant. More blood would be spilled by dawn.