Troublemaker Read Online Free

him from talking, the needles in his arms that kept him—in his own mind, at least—from moving. They—the nameless they —promptly strapped him down so he couldn’t move a muscle, not even his head.
    Rage joined the pain. He was so damn mad he thought he might explode, and what made it even worse was that he had no way of expressing his absolute fury at being so helpless, while every inch of his body and all of his instincts were abused.
    Then, exhausted, he would sleep—or sink into unconsciousness again. Maybe they were one and the same. He sure as hell couldn’t tell the difference.
    One day he opened his eyes and focused—actually focused— on the middle-aged woman who was standing beside him fiddling with the lines coming from multiple plastic bags hung on a metal tree. For the first time he thought, Hospital, which meant his torturers were actually taking care of him, but that didn’t help his feelings. He put all of his animosity into the glare he leveled at her.
    â€œWell, hello,” she said, smiling. “How are you today?”
    If he’d been able to talk he’d have told her exactly how he was, and his language wouldn’t have been pretty.
    She seemed to know exactly what he was thinking because her smile widened as she patted his shoulder. “The tube will come out pretty soon, then you can tell us all about it.”
    He tried to tell her all about it right then and managed only some faint grunting noises, then he humiliated himself by promptly going back to sleep.
    When he woke again, he knew immediately where he was . . . kind of. Moving nothing but his eyes—because he fucking couldn’t move anyfuckingthing else—he took stock of his surroundings. His vision was blurry, but he was trained to observe and analyze and after an indistinct length of time, he fuzzily came to the conclusion that though he was in a hospital bed with raised rails on each side, and he was obviously in some sort of facility, he definitely wasn’t in a hospital. The room, for one thing—it was painted blue, there were curtains over the windows, and it had a regular door with a regular doorknob instead of the massive doors found in hospital rooms. It seemed to be an ordinary bedroom that had had a ton of medical equipment shoved into it and positioned however it would fit into the room.
    Then there were the nurses—damn their sadistic hides—who tended him. They sometimes wore colorful uniforms, but sometimes not; the middle-aged woman who had been there the last time he woke up was always dressed in jeans and sneakers and a sweater, as if she’d just come in from a farm somewhere. Sometimes when his door was opened, he’d catch a glimpse of someone armed standing just outside, and it was never anyone he recognized.
    All of his thoughts were blurred, his memories even worse. He had a very fuzzy memory of Axel MacNamara being there a couple of times when he’d awakened, asking insistent questions—not that MacNamara ever asked any other kind—but the best Morgan had been able to do was blink his eyes a few times and he wasn’t sure what the hell he was blinking his eyes for, so eventually MacNamara went away.
    But even as he fought through the fog of sedation and trauma, anger still burned deep and bright inside him. When he could think, he remembered what had happened, though the ambush kept getting mixed up with the aftermath and sometimes he’d have shot the nurses if he’d had a weapon in his hand. He couldn’t formulate all the ramifications of his ambush, but he knew they had to be bad, and no matter how unfocused and helpless he was, he was still damned and determined to find out who had done this and what their goal was. A more naive and protected person might think the goal had simply been to kill him, but Morgan had stopped being naive somewhere around the age of three, and “protected” wasn’t