Page 4 of Marcellus: House of Drakos
Niko could barely nod he was so weak. “Yep.”
“Why don’t you have a private physician here attending to you? Or a nurse?”
“I don’t need a doctor nor a nurse. I’ve been having these bouts every year since I was fifteen. It’s a chronic condition. It’ll pass. It just hurts while it’s passing.”
Niko, nor any of his half-siblings, ever lived with their father. And because their mothers were still in love with him and wanted to stay in his good graces, they never told him the bad stuff. They never wanted to scare him away.
“What about your maid?”
Niko looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Is there more to your relationship than worker and boss? She’s going above and beyond it seems to me.”
“She always does that,” said Niko. “That’s just how she is. And no there’s no relationship like you mean. She’s way older than I am.”
“Not that much older surely.”
“She’s twenty-nine, Dad,” said Niko. “That’s six years older than me.” He said it as if it was a lifetime of a difference. Marcellus shook his head. The foolishness of youth. He wouldn’t give a damn to be that age again.
“And she’s not my maid,” Niko said as if he meant to say it earlier. “She’s my secretary.”
Marcellus looked at him. “Your secretary?” he asked as Savannah returned to the room with a clean bowl. “Why didn’t you correct me?” Then he looked at Savannah. “Why didn’t you correct me?”
“Correct you about what?”
“The fact that I mistook you as Niko’s maid when you’re actually his secretary.”
Savannah was dumbstruck. “What difference does it make?”
Marcellus couldn’t believe this woman. Most secretaries would view it as quite the difference. But she didn’t, as if titles didn’t matter to her at all. He stared at her.
Then Niko started breathing heavily. Savannah sat the bowl on the nightstand and picked up another cold compress and a thermometer. She placed the cloth over his head and the digital thermometer under his tongue.
“What’s wrong now?” Marcellus asked.
“Signs of a fever,” Savannah said. When the thermometer beeped, she took a look at it.
“Is it in danger range?”
“No,” she said. “But it’s slightly elevated. You need to get some sleep,” she said to Niko.
“How can I sleep in all this pain?”
But Savannah left the cloth on his forehead and sat down in the chair beside the bed. She was dead on her feet. Marcelluslooked around and sat in the chair against the wall. He crossed his legs and stared at her as she stared at Niko.
When Niko finally fell asleep, Marcellus could hear her let out a relieved exhale. And then she stood up. “I’m going to go take a shower,” she said. “Keep an eye on him. If he raises his head, put that bowl beneath his chin.”
Marcellus was astounded. “You expect me to . . . ?”
“To care for your son?” Savannah finished his unfinished sentence for him. “Yes.” She looked at him as if that went without saying. And then she left the room.
It had been decades, when Marcellus was a poor kid running around those backstreets of Paris beating up his mother’s pimps and stealing her away from them, only for her to run back to them, since he’d been treated so shabbily. Who did she think she was?
But the more he thought about her, the more he inwardly smiled. The more he liked who she was. He’d never met anybody like her. And he couldn’t hold it in any longer.
Wow.
He finally said the quiet part out loud.
