36. Remy
Chapter thirty-six
Remy
I rush through the doors while the world blurs around me, everyone turning into streaks of motion that look like strokes from a paint brush. A woman at the desk is speaking to me, and someone else is yelling somewhere, but I can’t focus on any of them, can’t hear what they’re saying.
Kent told me she was fine .
He told me she was with the senator.
And then they brought me here.
I fucking hate hospitals, and I hate Kent for lying to me. My eyes snap from face to face, looking for one I recognize, looking for her. The waiting room is full of people, but none of them are Claire, so I push toward the desk, lifting the latch that will let me behind it. The angry voices start telling me I can’t go back there, but then I see Dimitri standing there through the glass window ahead of me.
He runs to me, pushing the door from the inside so that it opens to allow me in. Except it doesn’t open, and a man comes from nowhere, barring my path as he pushes me back by the shoulder. “You’ve got to sign in.”
“Fuck you!” I snap. “Let me back there.”
“Sign in.” He snaps back, gesturing to the woman sitting at the desk watching me with wide eyes.
“I need your ID.” She says, glancing nervously from me to the guard. “I can get you checked in while you go back there to visit your friend, but I need your ID. ”
“Take it!” I say, slipping my wallet from my pocket and tossing it across the distance to her. “Take the whole thing, just let me through!”
The man in my path is starting to say something, but then I hear the click of the lock giving way, so I rush past him.
“What the fuck happened?” I shout at Dimitri, who is already turning his back to me so he can lead me to her. I had security on her for months— her every move has been watched since she left Costa Rica. Is it really a coincidence that the minute her guard had to dip, she got taken?
“Carrington Hardin,” Dimitri explains, rounding a corner and picking up his pace. I see the senator standing outside a closed door, raking his hands through his hair. It does nothing to ease the tension in every part of me, so I run the rest of the way.
The senator is trying to speak to me when I throw the door open, and there’s a series of objections from various faceless people, but I don’t let any of it stop me. I sprint across the distance to her, barely getting a glance at her sitting up staring at me before I wrap her in my arms.
The minute she’s against me, it’s like fitting a puzzle piece into the last spot. My entire body sags in relief as I press kisses against the top of her head, the relief in my chest so violent that I think it may burst outward. “Claire.” Her name is sweet on my tongue, muffled against her skin. “Fuck, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I let you go. I never should have let you leave. I should have owned up to my feelings instead of pushing you away. I—”
The aggressive throat clearing behind me alerts me to the fact that someone is trying to get my attention, but I don’t fucking care. They can go to hell.
I pull away from her just enough to slide my palms under her chin so I can look her in the eye and tell her that I am in love with her, but I stop cold when the shift lets me see the purple marks around her neck, bruising covered in blood .
My eyes flick to hers, preparing to ask if she’s okay. But I don’t have to ask that to know the answer is no. Her eyes are steady on me, and she doesn’t blink as I tilt her head up again to inspect the bruising—the pattern of it. That’s not the most disconcerting thing. The thing that is most unsettling is the whites of her eyes—the blood vessels that burst in them, making her eyes red.
Horror sinks straight through me, gripping me in its claws as I stare at her, and she stares back at me blankly. That’s when I notice she hasn’t hugged me back, she hasn’t reached out for me, hasn’t said a word. I cradle her against my chest before she can see the tears threatening to form and hope she doesn’t notice I’m shaking.
“What happened?”
The nurse is looking at me like she wants to throw me out into the middle of a busy highway, but when Dimitri and Victor come further into the room, she seems to accept my presence. “I was trying to figure that out myself. The doctor hasn’t seen her yet, but from what I can tell, she was manually strangled… maybe with some kind of chain. I don’t know if it was part of a larger assault, but maybe her attacker thought she was dead and tried to set a fire. She was showing significant signs of smoke inhalation… confusion, disorientation, shock… that’s all normal with smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning. She refused a rape kit, so I can’t really tell you anything more.”
I think I may pass out—it suddenly doesn’t feel like I’m breathing right anymore. I’m scared to take any deeper breaths lest it jostle her around against me. The nurse looks around us all. “She said she felt safe with you, so I’ll give you guys a moment, but don’t try anything stupid. The doctor will be in any minute now.”
No one says anything as she walks out, pulling the door closed behind her. I watch as the senator presses a hand to his mouth, and I don’t know if he’s trying to contain a scream or vomit.
“Claire… ”
I drop in front of her, not letting my touch leave her cold skin, and steady her face in my hand, making her look at me… making myself look at her.
Seeing the scars on Violet’s face had been a terror all its own— knowing that at some point in time someone had taken a blade to her skin with every intent of marking her forever. When I’d thought it was Claire, it was awful, because it meant someone had hurt her, but at least the marks were faint, fading. Now, Claire bears the evidence of a recent attack—pain that hasn’t even begun to heal.
“Tell me what happened, sweetheart.” Her lips are parted, but she doesn’t seem to try to get any words past them. She stares at me like I’m a fixed point, like I’m not moving in front of her, begging her to see me. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “You can tell me, anything. Did he—?”
“Dimitri called me while I was on my way to dinner with my wife.” Victor explains, stealing my attention. “He told me that he thought she was in trouble and gave me the coordinates. It was a friend’s house.” He shakes his head, like he can’t even believe he just said that. “When I got there, no one was home, but we have the code… we’ve known each other for years, house sat for them on occasion. I let myself in, just to see, and I could hear the fire in the basement. I—” Dragging a hand over his face, he tries to compose himself. “I broke down the door, because Dimitri said she was there, and she was.”
He turns to Dimitri, seeking an explanation as to how he knew where to find her. He presses his lips together, like he’s trying to figure out how to deliver news I won’t like. “When you sent me after her last summer, before Moose, I gave her an air tag. Told her to authorize me as a user, and if she ever felt unsafe, to turn my access on. I got a notification that she used it, but she wasn’t answering the phone, so I knew something was wrong. I was on my way before you even knew she was in danger. ”
I stare at him, unsure whether I should be impressed or annoyed. “An air tag? You mean, you tracked her like luggage ?” Victor sounds appalled.
“And she just happened to have it on her and have time to access it while she was being kidnapped?”
Dimitri lets out a measured breath. “I don’t know. I—”
“He didn’t… kidnap… me.” Claire’s words are a jumble, the cadence all wrong and the pauses for her to breathe in the wrong spaces. We all turn our attention to her, hoping she’ll elaborate.
“What do you mean?”
“He… didn’t. I went… to him.”
I’m staring at her, trying to make those words make sense, when she sucks in a deep gasp. I look around for the source of her pain, expecting that some kind of physical discomfort has broken through. I’m already turning to call for the nurse and demand more pain meds when I hear her final gasp, a release of air that got trapped somewhere in her.
It gives me just enough pause to turn back to her as she goes limp, and her eyes roll back.
I catch the back of her head before she can fall.
***
None of us have said a word since the doctor rushed into the room and called out for the staff to help him. The last woman in pushed me the rest of the way out of the room—I went easily, unable to gain control of my body—and shut the door behind them.
It’s been silent—I haven’t heard a single sound since that door shut, taking all the noise and my air like we’re in a vacuum.
“She killed him.” Victor finally says, like he’s just realized it.
“Good.” I growl. “I’ll have his body recovered so I can feed him to the fucking wolves. Fucker can rest in pieces.”
“What did he do to her that she had to kill him?” He sounds like he may be sick, his voice heavy with disbelief.
I want to sink my fist into a wall, but I’m not taking the chance of getting kicked out if the nurse decides to follow through on her earlier threat. “You’re in it now. You fucking know what they’re capable of.”
“But, I— do you think he was one of… them ?”
I don’t just think—I know.
Michael dug into Evan Ludlow for me while I was on the way here, after Dimitri texted him with the name to look into. He seemed like a random sadist, at first, until Michael discovered where he worked.
Ludlow used the cover of one of his associates in the auction. This whole time, I’ve been worried about Carrington Hardin, but the real threat was his boss. I doubt Hardin even knows his identity was stolen and used to fund sex slavery.
I don’t have the energy to explain it to any of them right now. Part of me is pissed that Dimitri didn’t notice it when he did his reconnaissance, but the larger part of me knows Ludlow was smart. His financial portfolio revealed large stakes in Boulder Tech, so I’m willing to bet every penny in all of his accounts that he was able to work around a lot of security protocols, just in case anyone ever started asking questions. He was willing to throw his employees under the bus and implicate them in violent crimes, but that’s not really a surprise given everything else I know him to be capable of.
“How did the fire start, though?” Dimitri asks, I think more to himself than either of us.
“Electrical, I think? She was chained to something like a fucking hoist system, and it was motorized. I don’t know.” He looks like he’s about to be sick again, and I can’t even blame him. The thought of her hanging in his basement like cattle for slaughter makes me want to carve out the insides of any man who so much as looks at her. “Only Claire can tell us what happened in there, but you can’t be thinking of asking her? ”
“No.” I answer for him, swallowing my disgust. “Whatever happened in that basement is her business. She doesn’t tell us anything she doesn’t want to, and nobody fucking asks. Understood?”
Victor looks like he’s going to protest, but he catches my eye and nods instead.
We’re quiet again, and the anxiety is unraveling inside of me. It shouldn’t be taking this long, should it?
I’m grateful when the ringing pulls me out of my head, but for one horrible moment, I think it’s the flat drone of a machine that’s not detecting a heart rhythm.
And then Victor slides the phone against his ear. He doesn’t say anything; the voice on the other end of the line begins immediately. It’s so loud I can’t not hear her—his wife. “Where the hell are you?”
I see the senator’s eyes sweeping the hospital walls, trying to come up with an answer. “Police station.” He says finally. “I brought her here to make a statement. Evan’s dead… we need to work on her defense.”
“The police station?” His wife screams. “You fucking idiot. Get the fuck out of there. They don’t know she was even there! Bring her home, right now!”
“I will.” He says gently. His behavior is so at odds with hers, it makes everything feel even more surreal. “She’s with an officer now. As soon as she’s done, I’ll bring her back to the house. You’ll make up a room for her?”
“Yes, Rose will get everything ready. Just… don’t let her tell them anything that will come back to hurt us.”
I watch his face crumple, but he works hard to keep his voice neutral. “Why would anything come back to hurt us, Addison?”
“You found a girl chained up in someone’s basement!” She shrieks. “That’s not a good look for us, Vic. Evan worked for us for years… his wife babysits our boys. I’m sure whatever happened, this is all just a misunderstanding. ”
“A misunderstanding.” He nods, dragging a hand over his face. “Yeah, I’m sure nothing nefarious happened.” The sarcasm is obvious to me, but his wife is happy to accept his agreement.
“It was probably a little light BDSM. You know he and Kristen opened their marriage. She’s probably just a new pet.”
“A pet.” The senator echoes. “Right. I have to go.”
I hear Addison’s protests, but it doesn’t stop Victor from ending the call. His eyes find me watching him. He’s quiet a moment, and I don’t have the energy to pay him any mind. I’m already turning away from him to stare at the door when he speaks.
“She recognized her.”
I turn back to glance at him, trying to make sense of whatever he just said. “What?”
“Claire.” He swallows, placing a hand against the brick wall to steady himself. I catch his eyes lingering on his wedding band, like he’s wary it may brand him suddenly. “Claire recognized my wife.”
“Like… from pictures?” Dimitri asks, glancing between the two of us.
“No…” Victor punctuates the word with a slow shake of his head. “No, she knew her. She called her Addie.”
I’m not sure what he’s getting at, until an old memory unlocks in my mind. The first time I took Claire out on my boat, when I’d been so convinced that she was hiding something from me, I’d demanded she tell me things. She had been hiding things, it turned out, just not the things I expected she was.
“My social worker, Addie, was there when I woke up in the hospital.”
Addie. She was the one constant in Claire’s life, she got her out of the psych hold of her attempted suicide, she told her to emancipate herself. And she got Claire moved up the admissions list at a prestigious University.
I hadn’t bothered to ask, back then, how a social worker would be capable of doing these things. But now I know, a social worker couldn’t have managed all that alone. And burying the police records from the night Claire was removed from the Giante’s home? A social worker couldn’t do that.
But I know damn well a senator’s wife could have done it.
“Fuck.” I say, all the terrible pieces to an ugly puzzle falling into place right in front of me. My eyes flick up to find him staring at me, awaiting whatever revelation I just had. He’s not ready for it—I’m about to blow his world apart, but I can’t bring myself to worry about him. “You said your wife was Lauren’s guardian?”
Victor nods, and I can see him trying to figure out the puzzle I already solved. “Fuck,” I say again. I feel like I may throw up, but I push it down as I turn to the man I’m sure is Claire’s father. “I could be wrong, but I think I know what happened to Lauren all those years ago.”
Desperation is a sad look on him, but I imagine I’m wearing it just as poorly right now. I just need them to open the doors, to tell me she is going to be okay, to let me hold her.
“Your wife had her murdered to keep your daughters from you.”