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Finn and George's Home
~ Sutton, Dublin ~
Olivier Morillon and Elena Velazco
~ Sutton, Dublin ~
Olivier Morillon and Elena Velazco
From the symptoms Adam claimed to be experiencing, it sounded to Olivier that he was suffering the effects of the blood loss. Hearing that he had been bleeding for up to two hours was alarming, and though Adam had said something about a risk of infection, the blood loss was a bigger priority for the moment. While the man did his best to recount the evening’s events, Olivier perched on a stool at his bedside and examined the deep laceration on his thigh. Wiping away any surface blood, he then packed the wound with gauze and held it firmly with his fingers to maintain pressure.
“George, are you fine with blood?” he briefly interrupted Adam to call over to his friend. “I need you to hold this gauze in place, keep the pressure on with your fingers right where mine are. If it starts to bleed out the top, just pack more in, okay?”
Once George had taken his place, Olivier moved up to check the untreated burn mark on his neck. From the small circular shape, it was quite obviously the mark of a cigarette, but already looked to be in need of a thorough clean. “Keep going,” he encouraged the man, not wanting him to stop speaking in case he lost consciousness. Whilst he was gathering useful information from Adam’s account of what had happened, it also let him know that his memory was still functioning well and that he was lucid. On top of that, it made clear why Adam had been concerned about his stab wound becoming infected and how he had acquired the burn mark on his neck.
Olivier briefly paused upon hearing that Elena had been forced to stab her own father. He glanced over to her, still looking frightened even in her sleep. Impatient to conduct further tests on the girl, Olivier fitted a small ice pack over the burn to try and get the temperature down before he could clean it. “Kicked, punched, burned and stabbed, eh?” he tutted with a smile. “And shot just the other week. Are you checking these off a list or something?”
He caught the way Adam placed a hand over his heart as he took some deep breaths, and it made his optimistic words sound foolish when he spoke of being back on his feet. “I’m afraid that’s for me to decide, my friend,” Olivier gently asserted. “If you want your leg to heal, you’ll listen to me.”
With George still applying pressure to the packed wound, Olivier moved to the bed next to Adam’s, where his daughter lay, and checked her blood pressure and heart rate. Both were abnormally low, but he didn’t panic, instead slightly leaning down to her. “Elena?” When she didn’t stir, he called her name again and gave her shoulder a light shake. At this, the young woman’s eyelids fluttered and she rolled her head up with a faint groan.
“Hi Elena,” he said, and her eyes began to focus on him. “Do you know where you are?”
She hesitated for a few seconds as she processed the question, and looked around her: at the cot bed she was on, the drip, the machines. “Hospital.”
“Even better than hospital - you’re in a private clinic with some very good friends of your father’s. Look, he’s right next to you, being looked after just like we’re going to look after you.”
Elena glanced over at Adam and though her weary expression didn’t change, her eyes filled with tears.
“Do you remember where you were? And what happened to you?”
Turning to face Olivier again, Elena lightly nodded her head, but her lip was trembling. “I don’t want to…”
While it would have helped to have a complete overview of what they had done to her, it was quite clear that forcing her to recount it would only upset her. Based on the state of her torn clothes, he was keen to know if and how she had been sexually assaulted, but those were not examinations he was going to do without her consent, so for the time being his sole focus was on stabilising her. “Okay, that’s okay,” he assured her. “Can you tell me how you feel right now? Do you have any pain? Dolor?”
Through a mixture of English, Spanish and pointing, Elena managed to communicate the severe aches in her head and stomach and confirmed that her captors had barely been feeding her. Her gaze kept landing on Adam as she spoke, taking comfort in his presence and reminding herself that she really was safe. Though the intravenous drip was helping to rehydrate her, Olivier passed her the bottle of water and instructed her to take small sips if she wanted. “I’ll just be here with your papa, Elena, okay?” he assured her with an encouraging smile, and draped a blanket over her up to her waist.
Back at Adam’s side, Olivier thanked George for his help and saw that the bleeding had stopped. “Right Adam, I’m going to flush out this big gash of yours, it might hurt a bit,” he casually warned him as he pulled out the gauze. “Are you feeling okay? Not going to pass out on me or be sick or something? Because I’d like some warning before you do.” Careful not to disturb any clots of blood, Olivier wiped the wound clean and then proceeded to squirt the saline solution into it. It was filthy, the dark mud visible on the walls of the wound, and though he was well-practised at not showing it, he was concerned about the risk of infection. It took some time to completely cleanse the wound, but eventually he was able to start stitching it up.
More people had begun to enter the house in search of injured loved ones. Olivier expected it, knowing that family members had been informed, but to Elena it was disorienting to see so many people around. “Óliver,” she croaked, a tremble in her voice.
“Are you okay, Elena?” Olivier responded, still having to focus on the wound he was stitching up. “I won’t be a second, just patching up your dad.”
“Tomás y-y Leo, they…they are also here? And they…are they…?”
“Thomas and Leo are both awake, their doctor is fantastic and will make sure they’re okay,” he assured her, glancing over at her to see the look of distress on her face. “I’ll go and say hi to them in a bit and see how they’re doing, okay? Don’t you worry, Elena.”
Isabella Velazco
The man who had come over gave Isabella a brief explanation that Adam was out looking for Elena, but the lack of other details offended her. As the missing girl’s mother, she believed she had the right to know everything - why she had been taken, who had taken her, where Adam was expecting to find her and why he hadn’t managed to find her yet. Isabella seethed when James suggested that she calm down. She had to quash the urge to slap him. “Yes, Isabella,” she reiterated with an impatient sigh. “Ah, Adam knows what he is doing. Okay. My daughter is missing for five days because he knows what he is doing.”
Isabella still didn’t have a clue who the man was, but she felt inclined to listen to him since he seemed to know what she was talking about. It had taken her months to track Adam down, not least because she didn’t even know his name. All she had to go on was the name of the man whose parties she used to attend in Havana in the 60s: ‘Liam Sullivan’. Anyone who would get her closer to her daughter, no matter who they were or how they spoke to her, she was willing to follow. So, as much as the two men she was currently talking to infuriated her, she was forced to respect their knowledge on the matter of where her daughter was.
After all the gangsters she had had to face to help her track down where Elena had gone, both friends and enemies of Adam’s, Isabella had become hard to intimidate. She was already a tough woman but having to confront so many shady figures on her journey had only strengthened her tough exterior. So when James informed her that Elena had been found and that he would be able to take her to her, she found it easy to conceal how much she wanted to cry in that moment.
The beautiful picturesque house that they pulled up to a short time later was far from what Isabella was expecting. It was unlike any house she had ever seen, appearing more like a converted church with its decorated windows, pointed roof and old stone exterior. It was adorned with wisteria and other climbing plants, with a lush front garden and a small wooden gate that didn’t exactly look high-security. But then the security appeared, in the form of a smartly-dressed man who demanded to pat her down. Instead of protesting, Isabella bit down on her tongue and showed her disapproval in the form of a glare which she fixed on James.
As soon as the guard let her go, Isabella marched ahead and stormed through the front door. The house was full of conversation, with multiple people being treated and even more surrounding them - but it only took her a few seconds to spot the girl she was after.
“ELENA!”
The name came out as more of a scream than a call, and in a flash the woman was at her bedside. Elena’s eyes widened and the heart monitor that she was hooked up to began to beep rapidly, prompting Olivier to look up.
“Elena, te llevaras a casa, lejos de estos hombres peligrosos -”
Isabella was grabbing her by the arm and trying to lift her upright, explaining to her in Spanish that she needed a real hospital and that she would be safe once they were back in Cuba.
“Hey, hey!” Olivier jumped to his feet and came to stand between the two women. “I don’t know who you are but you can’t take her, she’s my patient and needs to stay here!”
Isabella slapped him hard across the face. “SHE’S MY DAUGHTER!” she roared at the medic. “She comes back to Cuba with me, away from you - you monstruos!”
While the slap was unexpected, Olivier managed to quickly shake it off, more concerned by Elena’s soaring heart rate as she appeared to be having a panic attack. Meanwhile, Isabella’s fierce eyes had landed on a man laying on the bed next to her daughter. At first he had only looked vaguely familiar, but now that she was getting a proper look at him she knew exactly who he was. Those handsome, rugged features had only matured on him since they had first met at that glamorous party in Havana 20 years before.
Seeing Elena for the first time in several months, and in the condition she was in, had upset Isabella enough that she no longer cared to hold back. “You,” she growled at Adam, tears forming in her eyes. “You, you take away my daughter -” She pointed a manicured nail in his face. “All this time, she is with YOU, and you don’t tell me? She is missing and you don’t TELL ME?!”
In her distress, Elena was trying desperately to escape, tugging at the tube inserted into her vein and trying to scramble out of bed. Olivier was busy trying to stop her, softly but firmly encouraging her to calm her down and keep her in place.
Isabella slapped Adam and grabbed him by the face, digging her fingernails into his flesh as she forced him to look her in the eyes. “You keep Elena from me, you criminal,” she spat. “You did this to her. You rob her from me, mi propria hija, and you put her in this danger!” Letting go of his head with force, Isabella slammed a fist down against the man’s chest. She then ripped off the ice pack from his neck and threw it onto the floor before reaching back and punching the wound on his leg that had clearly been freshly stitched up, pressing down into it with her knuckles.
“THAT’S ENOUGH!” Olivier shouted at her, letting Elena go for a moment as he leapt over to Adam’s bedside and took Isabella firmly by the shoulders. “My patients are undergoing treatment and you need to leave them alone. Get out.”
“You don’t know what you talk about, stupid child,” Isabella snapped at him.
“Calm down and stop attacking my patients or the guards here are going to force you out of here, and I can’t promise they won’t hurt you.”
“Papa,” Elena whimpered from the bed, reaching across the space between their beds in search of his hand. “I want to stay with you…”
With Olivier’s firm hands squeezing her shoulders tight, Isabella knew she would only be allowed to remain at her daughter’s bedside if she calmed down. So, after some deep breaths, she swallowed the lump in her throat and locked eyes with Olivier. “I am calm,” she insisted with a forced smile. “Now take your hands off me.”
She hadn’t missed Elena’s words to Adam and couldn’t deny that they stung. Once Olivier finally let her go and returned to Elena to make sure she was stable, Isabella stepped back over to Adam’s bedside and, forcing herself to control her anger, she swept her hair behind her shoulder and cleared her throat. “Adam Harper,” she opened, her calm tone of voice obviously forced. “Start talking.”
Interactions
Misty Gray monster criminal failure of a father, Adam Harper
Mentioned:
Bellz Tomás
Melanin-Gxdess Leo