Chapter 23

Chapter Rating: PG

She was lying on her side, curled up amongst a mountain of pillows. The light in her room was off, but it was the middle of the day and the sun had snuck its way passed the slim space between the drawn curtains. It didn't bother her as much anymore. Prescription pain medications had seen to it that she wasn't physically feeling a thing. But though her body was now numb, Natalia was still in pain.

She tossed behind her the long body pillow that her arms and legs had been clinging onto and reached over to the bedside table. She palmed the bottle of pills and brought it to her face, squinting in the muted light as she attempted to read the label.

"One tablet every four hours." She eyed her alarm clock out of the corner of her eye. She liked to believe herself to be a wise woman, prided herself on it sometimes. She was fully aware of how to tell time. She knew that it would be three and a half hours too soon for another pill, and that she had already taken the last one almost two hours earlier than she was supposed to as well. This would be a prime example of 'risky behavior'. The type of 'risky' that Natalia secretly knew so well. The kind of 'behavior' that she had long ago become accustomed to.

Risks that no one else knew she liked taking.

Behavior that she had refused, until recently, to get under control, and she didn't know why.

Well, she knew why, but she had never cared to analyze it closely until a few months ago. And she certainly wasn't willing to analyze herself again right now. It would just supply her with one more thing to feel guilty about. One more stain on her already sullied heart.

She stared at the pills once again.

"Your head doesn't hurt, dumb-ass, put the bottle down." It was her own voice and her own thought. And yet when she said it out loud, it was someone else's voice she heard.

NO! God-dammit! She is gone. She is a thing of the past. She almost lured you into painting another mark of regret on your soul but then, thankfully, she walked away.

Natalia clenched the pill bottle in her hand.

'Take one of these every four hours and you won't feel a thing,' the doctor had informed her. The way he had said it, it seemed, to Natalia, to be almost a promise. One that she had looked forward to putting her faith in.

"Liar!" she seethed and forcefully threw the bottle across the room into a wall. She closed her eyes and tried to wait patiently for the full, drug induced stupor from the last pill to wash over her. It was taking far too long. Her mind was alert and it was returning, over and over again, to its new favorite obsession. It was beginning to seem as though the topic was on a manual loop, and she couldn't find the off switch anywhere. She realized a better use of her energy would be to try and focus on the fallout from her covert operations yesterday. To try and prepare herself for the ramifications she knew were coming. But her one tracked mind was forcing a name from her lips, breathed out in a cross between a hiss and a sigh.

"Spencer." Natalia whispered, ruefully.

"Ms. 'No-Feelings-At-All' Spencer," she spoke into the darkness of her room. She rolled onto her back and noticed the absence of pain when her wound pressed against the pillow. Not good enough, she mumbled to the pill bottle on the floor and continued her former process, internally.

The same 'No-Feelings-At-All' Spencer who had cruelly kissed her so meaningfully just before walking away. The same one who claimed to be absolutely desensitized, but who made a point to call her secretary, Sheila, and ask her to come to the hospital and sit beside her employer while she slept so she wouldn't be alone. The emotionless woman who had called the hotel's emergency nursing station to alert them that Natalia was going to need to be checked upon every few hours and ordered them to have everything she would need for her recuperation brought to her room ahead of time.

Natalia tried to see all of these things as simply being procedures that were executed by Olivia to help herself come out on top, to be seen as being 'The Better Woman.' It was just a ploy to antagonize her one last time.

But the truth of the matter, which Natalia was somewhat surprised was still able to make its way through her fogged mind, was that she knew exactly why Olivia had done so much for her, knowing full well they would never see each other again. And it was simple.

She did it because Ms. 'No-Feelings-At-All' Spencer is a liar... just like me.

Natalia looked over at the alarm clock again. "Kick in, Dammit!" she begged the painkillers. Out of the corner of her eye, and through her open bedroom door, she caught a glimpse of the liquor cabinet out in the living-room. Her attention was instantly diverted as she focused on the large variety of very helpful looking liquids.

"That is not who you are," Natalia closed her eyes to the mirage-like sight and continued the familiar mantra. "That is not what you do." She willed her already dwindling self control to make one last grand attempt to resist temptation.

Her brain was jarred with the shrill ring of her bedside phone. She groaned at the offensive noise and swatted at it to find the receiver.

"What!" She bellowed into her end.

"I was told you weren't feeling well," came the calm, but saddened voice on the other.

Natalia sighed. "Let me guess which vulture, I mean, little bird told you that."

"She was a Good Samaritan when she really didn't have to be concerned with you at all, Natalia. You don't meet people like her everyday."

"Thank God."

"I will let you rest for the night, but first thing in the morning, you will come to my office."

There was a tense pause.

"What are you going to do?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"I didn't expect my actions to go unpunished. I am not a fool. I would like to know what will be done with me?"

"Natalia, we will discuss this tomorrow. I do not wish to say anything right now, out of anger, that I will later regret."

Natalia couldn't keep in the indignant chuckle that slipped out at that last word.

"Regret? Really, Father?" She knew that the painkillers were helping her be defiant – giving her the voice she never had when she was young. But she also understood that if she continued to speak, she would be verging upon a conversation that both she and her father had mutually, though separately, agreed never, ever to discuss.

"Natalia, enough!" Antonio, too, sensed where the dialogue was headed and was completely unwilling to have that conversation over the phone. "If you have decided, finally, to put me on trial, then we shall do this face to face, tomorrow."

"It wasn't about that... Daddy." She added in the familiar term that she had not spoken since the day he had robbed her of her spirit. She knew it would pierce his heart with guilt, and she didn't care. "I did it for our company."


"My company."

"Debatable."

"My office! Tomorrow!" The phone line went dead.

She kept the receiver to her ear. The noise of the dial-tone drowning out her whisper.


"I love you."