Rebirth

"Please let him go!!!" Liam heard Aurora plead for his life. He despised having to die in front of her; she had been through enough to have his death added to her lengthy list of past tragedies.

He wished for the strength to fight back and break free from the chains that bound him to the anchor that was bringing him down to the bottom of the sea. Her tear-stained face was the last thing he saw before the water forced him to close his eyes.

He was a brilliant swimmer thanks to his mother, who made sure he attended swimming lessons even though she barely had enough money to pay for them, but it couldn’t save him from the bottom of the sea.

He struggled as the thought of Aurora living with that bastard and his mother the bastard threatened to meet most likely to bully her, filled his mind. He had an even stronger desire to survive but there was no way he could with the thousands of pounds pulling him down.

He fought for only a few minutes before his life began to slip out of him into the sea. Fishes would just count him as one of the many meals they have for the day and the ocean will count him as one of the many souls it has swallowed.

Even as life left him, he was unwilling to accept it with his life flashing before his eyes. He was very ambitious and although he was intelligent, he still worked harder to get a scholarship to college and he succeeded in getting into one of the most prestigious private universities in the country.

He was bullied by his peers since he was one of the few underprivileged scholarship students in the school. He never bowed to them and stood by his principles even with the bullying and that only made them hate him more since he was the only scholarship student who did not bow to the power of the money they had.

Their bullying never made him give up, rather, their ridiculing words made him even more determined to survive and excel in life enough to stand before them in the future.

He might have dreamed hoped and worked towards a better life but that did not make his present situation any better. He was unwilling to die in the depth of the sea, but his will to live did not do him any good. He could almost feel the fish in the water mock him for trying so hard when he had no chance of survival.

***

Liam opened his eyes to a brightness that caused him pain and he closed his eyes once again. He slowly opened his eyes and his eyes adjusted to the brightness of the daylight streaming in through the white curtains of the room.

He could still remember the moment he was dragged into the sea as though it happened only a second ago. He was on a bed and looking around the spacious room, he could not completely confirm that he was in a hospital or a five-star hotel suite.

He gazed down at the needle in his palm, which was delivering fluid into his body from the fluid bag above the bed. He was alone in the room, and he realized he couldn’t be in enemy territory to be granted such a comfortable place to stay and medical attention.

He survived, that was all he could think of as he tried to sit up and figure out where he was. He made no headway on that, which irritated him because he desperately wanted to leave the facility to ensure his mother and Aurora’s safety.

They were the most important people to him before his near-death experience and that bastard threatened their lives before pushing him down into the ocean with his body chained to an anchor.

He called out for help when it took him more than half an hour to sit up and no progress at all to stand up. There had to be someone out there right?

His call was answered as the door was pushed open and a man in a white lab coat walked in followed by a woman dressed neatly in a white knee-length gown. None of them was familiar but he immediately smiled at them since he believed they were the people in charge of his health.

"I need to go," he told urgently the doctor as soon as the man got to his bed.

"You can’t move yet, you should wait until you are strong enough to leave," the doctor replied warmly before reaching towards the drip to check it. "You were able to sit up which shows tremendous progress, it will take you a few days to walk out of this room."

A few days? That was crazy, there were so many things Carlos could do to his mother within those days. "For how long have I been here?" it occurred to him to ask and he did so immediately.

"Five months and four days," the doctor replied calmly.

Liam’s lips parted in disbelief. He wanted to ask how that was possible but the words stuck in his throat and he stared around helplessly.

Was Aurora still alive? Did Carlos kill his mum? He had so many questions but when he looked at the doctor, he gave in to the feeling that the man was not the person he should ask those questions.

"Who saved me?" Liam asked.

The doctor glanced at the woman and shook his head.

After a few seconds and he got no answer to his question, Liam asked again, "Who saved my life?"

"I think that will be left to the person who saved you to answer," the woman replied when the doctor remained silent.

Who could be so nice as to have two medical personnel to wait on him? He tried to list out anyone who could be this nice as well as powerful to make this possible but he could not come up with anyone aside from Carlos who threw him down to die, why then will he be saved by Carlos?

His mind was blank, and the fact that the medical professionals refused to react to his question just added to his confusion and fear that he had fallen into the wrong hands.

He couldn’t help but assume he’d been kidnapped to donate organs to their employer, and that they’d been stopped from telling him the truth. Given his previous contacts with the wealthy and powerful, that was the only scenario he could think of.

There was no way he could accept a second death silently. He faced death and was grateful to be alive; he would not readily let it go, even if he was saved to be meat on someone’s dish.

The doctor and his assistant examined him and left when they were satisfied that he was fine, which was excellent news to him although he wasn’t sure what they meant by "fine." They could claim he was fine to be the grisly offering he had been picturing in his head during the checkup.

They stated he was still weak from being in a coma for so long and that he would need to recover through treatment to be able to move, and that was what he attempted to focus on when he has left alone in the room.

They will not need him to walk if his body was to be harvested of all its good organs. Basing all his hope on that baseless encouragement, he went on for the day. He was served lunch and dinner afterward and he ate it as he was fed by the nurse who introduced herself as Belle.

"Could you lend me your phone?" he asked Belle after dinner. He inquired as politely as he could. He’d eaten and been gentle since waking up only to make her feel at ease enough for him to ask.

"No, I can’t," she said flatly, despite her lovely grin.

He felt a strong urge to shout out his worries about his mother and lover to her but that would not do any good too since she had walked into the room without her phone during lunch and now too. She must want to keep phones as far from him as possible, which had to be her employer’s command.

It enraged him so much that he inquired calmly, "Why won’t you give me your phone?"

"I need to phone my mum," he said, expressing his concern for his mother.

If he spent more than five months in this bed, he must have missed all of school and will not be able to graduate this year as planned.

This was too much for him to accept; he had studied hard for years to earn a certificate so he could get a decent job and eventually become the director of a large corporation, which he had always wanted to work for.

That might be too much of a dream for him to have since his mother always told him that it was fine as long as he was happy with a house, children, and a lovely wife.

With everything he had fought for being destroyed by the sad accident, there was no way he could reclaim his life after the five months he had spent in a coma. He wasn’t even ready to return since he couldn’t stop thinking about how much time he’d have to spend recovering entirely.

There may be no incentive for him to work hard now that all he worked so hard to safeguard has been lost. On the bed, all he could think about was getting a gun and killing Carlos for stealing everything from him.

He only wanted to find Carlos, kill him, and spend the rest of his life in prison for the crime he planned to commit. He had given up hope in that room after more than a week of futilely attempting to stand and walk on his own through treatment.

He had yet to meet the person responsible for his safety, and with the intense desire he felt to kill Carlos, he focused all of his attention on rising and walking by himself to escape the house because he did not know the objective of his savior.

He didn’t meet the man who saved his life until the beginning of his third week in the residence. He could finally get up and stroll around the room a few times before his body felt the need to rest on the bed.

He was pushed to the dining room in a wheelchair, and on the way, he noticed a few bodyguards, which made him worried about the escape plan he had been planning for the past two weeks.

The man appeared to be in his early sixties, smoking a tobacco stick while seated at a large pricey dining table that fit well with the riches of the places he passed on the way there.

The nurse offered to assist him in getting out of the wheelchair, but he declined and stood up on his own. He wasn’t that frail.

He noticed the man looked happy. He had no idea why he thought the man was pleased, and to find out, he continued to stare at the man, even when the man met his gaze with his intimidating pair of brown eyes.

The squareness of his shoulder gave him the impression of someone who had lived in riches and power his entire life, and he could almost picture how much of a mafia leader he must have been as a youngster. If only he had that much authority…

The man introduced himself to Liam as "Joseph Rowling."

"My name is Liam Rowling," Liam found himself immediately introducing himself to the man.

"I notice she gave you my surname, I only told her that night and she must have liked me to remember my name when she had my child," the man laughed.

Liam couldn’t explain why he was offended to hear the man speak to him as if he were his father or grandfather. His sophisticated intellect just realized on second thought that the man could be his father.

"I am grateful that you saved my life, but I need to find my mother because the person who attempted to take my life also threatened my mother’s life, and I need to make sure she is safe, so may I return home today?" Liam inquired as the prospect of the man being his father reminded him of his mother and gave him hope that because he encountered a father he thought was long dead, his mother could still be alive.

"That is too soon, I did not save you simply for your appreciation," the man replied before Liam could stand with the conclusion that he could finally leave.

"Then what do you want from me?" Liam asked the man seriously. He had earlier concluded that the man could not ask for his kidney since he was his son but he was beginning to correct that thought.