Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The corridor outside the cardiac unit was the kind of quiet that came with money, carpet instead of linoleum, real art on the walls, a hush you paid extra for, and Troy had been pacing the length of it for the better part of an hour with his jacket gone somewhere and his sleeves shoved up and the whole night still roaring in his ears.
He’d ridden in with her. He’d told the team in the ambulance everything they needed to know before they’d thought to ask it, the cardiologist’s name, the medication, the resting numbers he’d had memorized since she was nine years old and he was a gangly teenager who’d appointed himself her shadow, and he’d held her cold hand the whole way and talked to her unconscious face the way you talk to someone you refuse to let leave.
She was stable now. Stable was the word they kept using, as though it were a thing you could trust.
He heard the elevator before he saw the man step out of it.
“How is she?”
Troy’s face remained cold and hard at the arrival of Camilla’s husband, who had come straight from the ball, still in his dinner jacket, the tie pulled loose and his face the gray of a man who had run a long way to a place he wasn’t wanted.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m her husband?—”
“—and you almost killed her.”
He expected the man to bristle at that. He expected the famous cold, the leverage, the lawyer’s quickness Flint was so known for, some version of the voice that had built a fortune out of never once being caught at a disadvantage. He expected Camilla’s husband to deny it.
But when Waymakers’ new team owner only whitened at the words, said nothing, took the blow standing and wore it where Troy had aimed it, something shifted a fraction in Troy’s chest. He had spent two months wanting to put this man through a window.
He had built an entire architecture of contempt around him, brick by brick, every time he’d seen Camilla’s face do the careful brave thing it did now whenever Flint’s name came up.
Maybe there was still hope for this man.
“I didn’t know.”
Camilla’s husband was speaking in a tone that could only be described as numb.
Or dead. Troy had heard that tone before, from men at gravesides, from a teammate the night his kid stopped breathing.
It was the voice of someone whose mind had walked out ahead of the rest of him and was standing somewhere down the corridor refusing to come back.
“I know it’s no excuse, but you were right. She never told me, and she’s so young, I would never have thought to ask about it. And Ericsson…” The man’s jaw worked. “He never told me either.”
“He wanted to keep it a secret, and everyone working for the family followed suit.” Troy heard his own voice come out level, almost gentle, and resented it for coming out that way.
“They didn’t want to risk anyone finding a way to exploit her illness.
” Which somebody always would, he didn’t add, in a city like this one, where a weakness was just an asset you hadn’t bought yet.
For a long moment Flint said nothing. Then, low, as though the question cost him something to push out: “How…bad is it? Her heart.”
And there it was, the thing that decided Troy, against his every instinct, to keep talking to this man instead of leaving him to rot in his thousand-dollar shoes.
He hadn’t asked what it would cost him. Hadn’t asked how it touched the team, the deal, the optics. He’d asked how bad it was. Just that.
“She was told to keep it easy,” Troy said.
“Low stress. No shocks. Nothing that makes that heart of hers work harder than it was built to. She’s lived her whole life inside a circle drawn around her by people who loved her, and most days you’d never know there was a circle there at all.
” He let the next part out slowly, because he wanted it to reach bone and he wanted it to hurt.
“But when she saw you dancing with your ex?—”
“I know it’s still not an excuse.” Flint’s eyes came up, and there was something raw in them now, something working its way loose. “But I did that when I saw you with her.”
Troy stared at him.
“Nothing’s going on between us,” he said impatiently, the words almost a reflex, the same denial he’d have given a reporter or a rumor or a man in a bar who’d looked too long.
“You and Camilla have been seeing each other behind my back?—”
“We spend time together,” Troy snapped, and the calm he’d been holding cracked clean down the middle, because of all the rotten, backwards, upside-down things this disaster of a night had produced, this was somehow the one that lit him up, “because I practically raised her. She’s like a baby sister to me. ”
The words rang down the quiet corridor and hung there.
Flint didn’t answer, but Troy could see, in the set of the man’s shoulders, in the careful blankness that came down over his face like a shutter, that the other man was still unwilling to accept his words as truth.
Two months of believing a thing did not come undone in a hospital hallway in the space of a sentence, however true the sentence was, and Troy understood that, even as it made him want to take the man by the lapels and shake the wrongness out of him.
So he tried the only currency he had ever fully trusted.
“I’m known to be many things,” Troy said, “but never a liar. You know that. The whole city knows that. You should’ve remembered that before you started building whatever it is you’ve built.” He watched Flint’s face. “Unless…”
He saw it happen. He saw the exact moment the word unless went into Camilla’s husband like a key into a lock the man hadn’t known was there, saw the cold intelligence that had made Flint dangerous finally turn and point itself in the right direction. Flint had stiffened.
“Someone deliberately fed you lies about Camilla and me.”
A muscle started ticking in the other man’s jaw.
Troy watched him run it back, whatever it was, the photographs or the whispers or the helpful voice at his ear, watched him hold it up against the new light and see, for the first time, the seams. And then Flint said one name, quietly, and it had everything in the last two months making its slow, traitorous, sickening sense.
“Raymond.”
Troy felt his own stomach drop, because the name fit. The name fit like the last piece of something he’d been turning over in his hands for weeks without knowing what it was.
“That son of a?—”
“You read my mind,” Flint said.
“I’ve been hearing rumors.” Troy kept his voice curt, because the alternative was to say what he was actually feeling, which was the cold dawning fury of a man realizing his baby sister had been collapsed on a ballroom floor as the end product of another man’s spreadsheet.
“He’s got gambling problems. Bad ones, the kind that don’t stay quiet.
And word is he might’ve convinced someone he has what it takes to remove you out of the picture before selling the team?—”
“Is there a next of kin here for Camilla Flint?”
Both men turned. The doctor had come out through the double doors, a chart in hand and reading glasses pushed up into her hair, looking between the two of them with the particular weariness of someone who’d done a hundred of these conversations at one in the morning.
Both men answered yes at the same time, and Troy grimaced.
“He’s the husband,” he said. “I’m the big brother.”
Flint shot him a look at that, something quick and unreadable. Troy ignored it.
The doctor decided, sensibly, not to wade into whatever that was.
“She’s conscious now,” she said, and Troy felt the whole night let go of his shoulders an inch, “but we’ll keep her confined for a couple of days to run some tests.
Her rhythm’s behaving for the moment and I want to keep it that way.
” She looked at them both, and then, deliberately, she looked at the husband.
“And again. Don’t cause her any kind of trouble.
No fights, no scenes, no bad news she doesn’t need tonight.
Or next time, she won’t just lose consciousness.
” A beat, to be sure it had gone in. “She’ll pass away for good. ”
She let that sit, then turned and went back through the doors, and the corridor was quiet again, and the two men stood in it with the warning between them like a third person.
When the doctor was gone, Troy looked at Camilla’s husband for a long moment, taking the full read of him, the gray face and the loosened tie and the eyes that hadn’t left the doors she’d disappeared behind. Then, grimly, he gave the man the thing it nearly killed him to give.
“Go on. Check on her.”
Silence.
Then Flint said, quietly, in a voice that had finally come all the way back from wherever it had gone, “Thank you.”
Troy watched the other man walk away down the hushed and carpeted corridor toward the room where his wife lay learning how to trust her own heartbeat again, and he let him go, because it was the least he could do, and because some small unwilling part of him had begun, against all the evidence of the last two months, to hope.
But hope was a luxury, and Troy had never been able to afford much of it.
Because he knew how Camilla’s mind worked.
He had watched it work since she was a child, watched her go quiet and careful and far away whenever the people who were supposed to hold her let her fall, and he knew that a girl could forgive almost anything except being made small in front of the whole world by the one person whose job it was to make her feel safe.
She had stood in her father’s ballroom tonight and watched her husband choose another woman in front of three hundred cameras, and her heart had stopped rather than keep beating through it.
She would leave him. Troy was as sure of that as he had ever been of anything. And when she did, when she finally decided she was done, he would not say a single word to talk her out of it. He would do what he had always done.
He would help her disappear so completely that not even Trey Flint’s money would ever find her again.