Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
I flinch so hard the blood-pressure cuff thinks it’s a crisis. It starts to inflate. I rip it off with my free hand.
“What does that mean?” The question comes out brittle and quiet at the same time.
“PR. Manufactured urgency. The firm staged mild threats—paper notes, online chatter—to boost the story before the IPO. No contact. No weapons. Your father says he pulled the plug after the first breach. His partner—Vale—ignored him. Hired a freelancer named Rourke. It escalated out of control.”
The ceiling hum surges. Or maybe that’s my skull filling with bees. I stare at him, shaking my head in a slow motion that tries to erase everything he said syllable by syllable.
“No,” I say. “No. He wouldn’t.” Words scramble over each other, tripping. “My father is—he’s ridiculous about optics and shareholders and who sits where at the gala, yes, but he wouldn’t—” My voice splits. “He wouldn’t use me like that.”
Sawyer doesn’t reach for me. He’s learned the shape of my edges. “He admitted it,” he says.
“Liar,” I snap, not sure if I mean my father or Sawyer. That’s how bad it is.
He doesn’t flinch. “He thought it would stay staged. He says he tried to stop it. Vale—the partner—went outside the plan. Brought in a guy blacklisted for going hot. Cam, I’m not defending him. I’m telling you the chain so we can break it.”
I hear him. I don’t hear him. My bones hear him, but my skin refuses.
“That text said my father’s name.” Tears breach despite every command I give them to stand down. “It was him.”
“It was his ghost.” He swallows. “Spoofed to look like him. Because the real him made it plausible.”
The nurse peeks in, reading the volume and our faces the way nurses do. She retreats silently and I hate that she saw us like this.
“Get my dad,” I say, voice low and lethal. “I want to see him.”
“Cam…”
“Get. Him.” A thousand memories line up behind the command: Gregory pushing me higher on the tire swing, Gregory attending my middle school ‘art show’ in the cafeteria and buying every macaroni frame for ten dollars each, Gregory calling me Pumpkin in front of everyone and me cringing because Dad and love and embarrassment are synonyms when you’re fourteen. People aren’t simple. They’re messy. But they don’t weaponize you for stock prices. They don’t.
Sawyer stands, the chair legs scraping. He looks bigger and further away all at once. “Hartley’s with him. They’ll arrange it. But before he walks in—”
“I don’t want before.” My voice breaks. “I want him.”
He nods once, a tactical retreat. He steps toward the door and hesitates. “I’m on your side,” he says, his voice raw and threadbare.
“Are you?” It knifes out before I can sheath it. “Because it feels like you’ve been keeping this to yourself while you… while you held me like I was—” I slam my eyes shut. The image hurts—my face in his neck, my breath in his shirt, the word always tattooing promises on ribs that feel bruised from the inside.
He doesn’t defend himself. “I found out not long ago,” he says. “At your house. In your father’s office. I needed to verify before I put pain in your mouth.”
“Too late,” I whisper, and the worst part is I’m not sure where to aim the hurt. It ricochets, hitting everything. Him. Me. My father. The ceiling.
There’s a knock. Detective Hartley’s face appears round the curtain, tie askew, expression carefully neutral. “Miss Kingsley,” he says. “Good to see you upright. We’ll take this slow. Your father is in a consult room with my partner. Would you like to speak to him?”
“Yes,” I say immediately. “Now.”
“We’ll keep it supervised,” Hartley adds gently.
I look at Sawyer. He is made of restraint again, ironed back up, hands hooked on his belt like he wants to use them and won’t. “Stay,” I hear myself say, then hear what I said and claw it back. “No. Go. I can’t—” I shake my head, flailing for space. “I can’t do this with you looking at me like—like you already know how it ends.”
Something flickers in his eyes—hurt, then understanding, then that maddening acceptance that makes me want to kiss him and punch him in the same breath. “I’ll be right outside,” he says anyway.
“I said go.” I don’t mean go away forever. I mean go out of my line of sight before I drown.
He nods once, and it lands like a salute. He steps past Hartley without looking back. The curtain sways in his wake.
The room is suddenly too big, or I am too small inside it. The machines beep the way games used to when I was allowed to be only a kid. My cheeks are wet. I wipe them with the heel of my hand and it stings—the tape burn, the stupid fragile skin that never asked to be the stage for anyone’s PR stunt.