Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Leo
Holy fuck, what have I done?
So, it appears that instead of getting my revenge on Vaughn, I’ve gotten revenge on his little brother.
Because I’m fairly sure that’s who’s next to me in the back seat, breathing hard through his pain. He looks too much like Vaughn not to somehow be related to him.
And his friend called him Archie, and I vaguely remember Vaughn mentioning a little brother named Artie or Archie at one point.
The guilt burns through me. The guy is in immense pain, and I caused that.
I’m used to being the solver of problems, not someone who creates them.
And I don’t know what I should do now. Archie’s foot is elevated on my lap, and I’m trying to keep it from being jolted, which feels simultaneously too intimate and not helpful enough. Should I even be here?
I mean, assailants don’t usually accompany their victims to the hospital, do they?
The friend—Billy—keeps shooting me suspicious looks, and the tattooed girl in the front seat is clutching the birthday cake like she might use it as a weapon. Both of them are definitely radiating “we’re memorizing your face for the police sketch” energy every time I meet their gaze.
I shift slightly, and Archie winces, adding another tick to my guilt scoreboard.
“I’m so sorry. I’ll pay all of your medical bills, I promise,” I find myself saying.
“It’s okay. I have an NHS card,” he says.
That’s right. I’d forgotten about the NHS, Britain’s radical experiment in treating healthcare like a human right instead of a luxury good.
Part of me finds it philosophically beautiful that both a pauper and a stockbroker receive the same standard of medical care.
The other part—the American part that’s been trained to believe money solves everything—is deeply uncomfortable that I can’t buy my way out of this guilt with a platinum hospital package.
“So, you live here in the UK?” I ask uncomfortably.
Archie tilts his head to look at me. It’s still weird seeing someone with Vaughn’s features who is not actually Vaughn.
“Yeah, I moved over from the States five years ago, but I’ve only been in London a year. I’m at the point where I’ve almost figured out which way to look when crossing the street, so my near-death experiences have dropped to only twice a week.” A grin flickers over his face.
Oh god, he’s funny even though he’s in pain.
My guilt grows.
This is not me. This is not who I am. What I am.
I’m Leo, the reliable one. That’s been my role since I turned six and realized I was more responsible than the two people who were supposed to be looking after my younger siblings and me.
I can’t get over the fact that I caused an innocent guy to break his ankle.
What can I do to make it up to him?
When we arrive at the hospital, my internal agonizing manifests itself in my take-charge mode. I’m out of the car before it fully stops, snagging a wheelchair from the entrance bay.
Billy tries to help, but I’m already in the process of transferring Archie from the car to the chair.
I keep one hand under his calf to steady the injured leg and the other against his ribs, guiding him down.
His shirt has ridden up and my palm lands on bare skin.
It’s smooth and warm under my hand. I adjust my grip and focus on the logistics.
“Fuck,” Archie says as he settles his ankle on the footrest.
“You okay?”
“I now understand why swearing was invented,” Archie grits out. “Somewhere in prehistory, someone broke their ankle and the first ‘fuck’ was born.”
I almost smile. Which is deeply inconvenient, given I’m the reason he’s constructing origin stories for profanity.
I focus instead on getting him inside.
“Coming through,” I announce when we enter the crowded waiting room, using my boardroom voice that makes people automatically step aside.
I wheel Archie straight up to the triage desk.
Unfortunately, my efficiency stops when I encounter the NHS Accident and Emergency department’s triage system.
The nurse regards Archie’s ankle with the clinical detachment of someone who’s probably already seen more than twenty broken bones tonight, assigns him a priority level that essentially means “not dying, therefore not urgent,” and hands me a laminated number like we’re at a deli counter.
“Four-to-six-hour wait,” she says, immune to my expression of disbelief.
Apparently, my boardroom look, which normally cowers tech executives into behaving, doesn’t work on people who deal with actual life-and-death situations.
I try explaining that I can pay for expedited service, and she looks at me like I’ve suggested bribing the Queen.
“Here are painkillers for the pain.” She hands Archie some tablets and a cup of water. “You need to go to the orange waiting zone.”
“Follow the color-coded misery,” Jaymee says, nodding toward the orange waiting area. It looks remarkably like purgatory with fluorescent lighting.
“So, are you just visiting London?” Archie asks as I start wheeling him again.
He’s acting like it’s normal to have a get-to-know-you conversation between two Americans in a London hospital waiting room while I’m wheeling him past a drunk guy in a banana costume who is explaining to anyone who’ll listen that he didn’t mean to superglue it on.
“I’m over here to do some work for a few weeks,” I reply as we find some spare chairs below a bright-orange wall.
“What kind of work do you do?”
I hesitate before I answer. “I’m in the tech industry.”
Will sharing that information make him realize that I know his brother, and that his broken ankle is the result of a revenge prank gone epically, disastrously wrong?
Archie tilts his head, studying me for a second. “You don’t seem like most tech guys I’ve met. They usually can’t maintain eye contact for this long.”
I bend to adjust his wheelchair brake. “How’s the ankle feeling?”
“Like it’s broken,” Archie replies. “What part of the States are you from?”
“I live in San Francisco now, but I’m originally from Detroit.”
He sneaks me a quiet grin. “I thought I detected some of that Great Lakes vowel shift sneaking through.”
I try to hide my surprise. Most people hear my accent and guess somewhere Midwestern. No one’s ever pinpointed it that precisely.
The grin fades from his face as he tries to shift his ankle, grimacing.
“Are you okay, Archie?” Jaymee asks. Her obvious suspicion hasn’t faded.
“I’ve been better,” he says.
Fuck.
“I’ll go track down some more ice,” I say. “And see whether they have any stronger painkillers available.”
As I stand, Billy mutters something to Jaymee that I don’t quite catch, but probably isn’t flattering. Jaymee just watches me go, arms folded.
I spend what feels like a geological epoch waiting at the triage desk to ask about stronger painkillers.
When I finally get to the front of the line, the answer is no.
The look the nurse gives me suggests I’ve been mentally filed under probable addict.
She does, however, grant me ice, which feels like a major diplomatic victory.
I’m just heading back to Archie when my phone rings.
It’s my friend Andrew.
After Vaughn stole my idea and got promoted ahead of me, I hadn’t lasted long at QuantumTech.
My next job was a gamble—VP of a startup run by a kid fresh out of college with a brilliant idea and crippling social anxiety.
In Andrew, I saw who I’d been: someone with something to prove and no one watching his back.
So I learned how to be the person who made sure no one took advantage of him.
We built NovaCore into something worth a fortune, becoming good friends in the process, before Andrew decided to sell.
Our friendship meant I’d had a front-row seat as Andrew embarked on his recent revenge plan after he encountered his high school bully Justin, who hadn’t recognized him.
Andrew decided to worm his way into Justin’s life to get revenge, and proceeded to do the absolute worst thing possible.
Fall in love with him.
The fallout was spectacular. Andrew flew back to the States to try to fix things, and I’ve been waiting to hear the verdict.
I juggle the ice to my other hand so I can answer the phone.
“Hey, Andrew,” I say.
“Hey, how’s it going?” he says.
“Uh…I’m not having the best night, actually,” I say truthfully.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s kind of a long story. Anyway, how is everything with you? Did you sort things out with Justin?”
As I head back to the orange zone clutching my ice, Andrew proceeds to tell me how things went down, and I have a pulse of relief that everything has ended up far better than I anticipated.
“So, what’s your long story?” he asks when he finishes.
I can’t help giving a dark chuckle as I turn the corner and see Archie right where I left him. Jaymee has taken the cake out of the box, and she and Billy are leaning over it.
“Well, remember how I talked about getting revenge on Vaughn?” I ask.
“Vaughn Mansley, the guy who stole your idea and used it to get a promotion ahead of you?”
“Yeah, him.”
Billy gets something out of his pocket. It looks to be a lighter.
“What happened?” Andrew asks.
“Well, I ran into him, and an opportunity came up to exact some revenge, so I decided to take it, but…uh…things have gone slightly wrong,” I explain, watching with growing horror as Billy lights the candles on the cake.
“What went wrong?”
“Well, I may or may not have accidentally gotten my revenge on his brother instead.”
It appears the candles aren’t ordinary candles. They are weird sparking candles that immediately ignite and start fizzing like sparklers on the Fourth of July.
“What? What happened?” Andrew is saying in my ear.
But I’m not listening to him now. I’m jogging toward the unfolding disaster. Because, unfortunately, the sparks from the candles are spraying out from the cake in an indiscriminate fashion.
And it turns out sparks don’t play nicely with the nearby hand sanitizer dispenser, which has a puddle of liquid underneath from where someone obviously rage-pumped fourteen times.
The hand sanitizer ignites.
“Uh…I’ll have to fill in all the details later. I’m at the hospital right now,” I say breathlessly.
A fire alarm starts to shriek. Because of course it does. That’s what happens when you introduce naked flame into a hospital waiting room.
“The hospital?” Andrew’s voice goes up an octave in the space of two words.
“I’ve really got to go. Talk later.”
I end the call and lunge immediately toward the nearest fire extinguisher.
Billy, meanwhile, seizes the offending flaming cake and steps back, promptly tripping over a wheelchair footrest and launching the cake in a perfect arc across the orange zone.
It lands in a potted plant, which turns out to be artificial and extremely flammable.
Because apparently nothing says healing environment like plastic ferns that melt on contact.
Luckily, I manage to yank the extinguisher off the wall. I pull the pin like I’m in some sort of action movie and blast the hand sanitizer puddle.
The foam shoots out with way more force than anticipated. I’m immediately thrown off balance, spraying a Jackson Pollock of fire retardant across the orange zone while pivoting like a drunk ballet dancer.
When I finally regain my balance, I redirect my foam assault toward the second lot of flames, which have risen from the potted plant and are now curling their way up a Know Your Rights as an NHS Patient poster.
The flames die. The alarm keeps shrieking. Everyone in the nearby vicinity is covered in foam.
Archie starts laughing. Not a chuckle, but full-body, tears-streaming laughter while keeping his ankle elevated on a foam-covered chair.
“This birthday keeps getting better and better,” he wheezes.