Val dropped into the armchair like the room had personally exhausted him.
Jeremy looked up from his papers and then looked at the clock on the wall and then back at Val, because the amount of time that had passed since he'd left for the room was not enough time for anything to have gone well.
"I take it the meeting with the lady didn't go exactly as planned," he said, with the particular careful neutrality of a man who already knew the answer.
Val shot him a look that could have stripped paint.
"She's locked in that room," he said, "and she stays there until she's ready to listen." He turned away, jaw set, one hand pressing briefly against his ribs where the wounds were clearly still making themselves known whether he acknowledged them or not. "She doesn't eat, she doesn't leave, she doesn't get anything until she agrees to cooperate."
Jeremy exhaled slowly through his nose in the way he exhaled when he was watching a situation he had no power to improve and had made his peace with that fact. He reached across the desk and picked up an envelope.
"This came while you were — occupied." He held it out. "Donovan Draven. He's received the marriage papers. Appears to be convinced the ceremony took place."
Val straightened slightly. He reached for the envelope and that was the first time in the entire day that something had moved in the right direction and it showed, just barely, in the slight easing around his eyes.
"Master William has also requested the lady attend dinner," Jeremy added. "Now that he's aware of the amnesia."
Val's hand stopped on the envelope. "You told him."
"The doctor is his man. It was never going to stay quiet."
Val let out a sound that wasn't quite a groan and wasn't quite a word but communicated everything between the two. He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead and stood there for a moment with his eyes closed, because taking three bullets to the chest had apparently been the simpler portion of this particular season of his life.
Jeremy watched him. He had been watching him all day, actually, with the quiet attentiveness of someone who noticed things and said nothing until the right moment. The high color across Val's cheekbones had been there for two days. The way he held himself slightly wrong on the left side. The careful, controlled quality of his breathing that had nothing to do with composure and everything to do with not letting the pain show.
"I could speak to her," Jeremy said.
Val opened his eyes and looked at him.
Then he let out a short dry laugh, not unkind, just entirely unconvinced. Jeremy had many skills. Negotiating with women he had barely ever spoken to was not among the ones Val had ever witnessed.
Jeremy read it on his face without needing to hear it said. "If I manage to convince her to cooperate," he said, "I'd like a reduced workload. And an increase in pay."
"I already pay you enough."
"More money has never hurt anyone, Master."
Val waved a hand at him. "Get out. Do whatever you want." He turned back toward the window, which was his way of ending a conversation he no longer had the energy to continue.
"I'll have Foxy bring your medication," Jeremy said, already moving toward the door. "For the pain."
Val said nothing. He didn't turn around. But something in the set of his shoulders shifted, just slightly, in the way that things shifted when a person had been seen more clearly than they intended and found it, not entirely unwelcome.
Jeremy left before he could be told not to.
Foxy was pacing outside Val's bedroom door, biting the edge of her thumbnail, eyes unfocused and clearly in the middle of a conversation with herself that wasn't going well.
"She pushed me," she muttered. "She actually pushed me. Who does she think she is, coming here with her, with her, she doesn't even know who she is, and she's already —"
Jeremy cleared his throat.
Foxy spun around and looked at him with the specific expression she reserved for minor inconveniences and people she couldn't be bothered with, which for Jeremy were roughly the same category. She opened her mouth.
"Master isn't feeling well," Jeremy said. "He's asked for his medication. Would you be able to take it to him?"
Foxy's entire face changed. The irritation dissolved, replaced with something bright and immediate, and she was already nodding before he'd finished the sentence. She turned and disappeared down the hallway at a pace that was technically not running.
Jeremy watched her go.
Then he turned to look at the door beside him. He breathed in once, slowly, and knocked.
Nothing.
He knocked again. Twice. Waited.
Still nothing, which in his experience with locked rooms meant either the occupant was unconscious or they were standing directly on the other side waiting for the door to open and he had learned over the years to treat both possibilities with equal caution. He pushed the door open.
Something came flying across the room at considerable speed and hit him directly in the forehead before he had processed what it was.
"How dare you lock me in here —"
"Ah —"
Jeremy's hand flew to his head, one eye screwing shut, the other squinting enough to make out Lorelai at the far end of the room, arm still extended from the throw, chest heaving, absolutely furious — and then her eyes focused and her expression collapsed from fury into something closer to horror.
"That's ...that's not him," she breathed.
She crossed the room fast, grabbing his hand, pulling it aside to look at his forehead where something warm was already beginning to make its way down toward his eyebrow.
"You're bleeding," she said, her voice dropping to something genuinely alarmed. "I'm so sorry, I thought you were, I didn't mean to, here, sit down, let me-"
Jeremy sat down mostly because his legs suggested it would be a good idea and blinked at her through watering eyes.
"You have," he said carefully, "a very good aim." He tried to comfort her even though he was the one in pain he tried to calm, Lora who was half on the verge of crying at the sight of blood couldn't hold in the smile that cracked on her lip. "It is no time to joke." She said sadly. "I thought it was that jerk again."