18. Chapter Eighteen
Chapter eighteen
Violet
Three black SUVs with tinted windows roll into the alley behind the hotel, engines rumbling. These aren’t our usual cars. They’re heavier, more armor than transport.
Two guys in dark suits step out of the middle one. Broad shoulders, faces blank. The way they move flips the tiny hairs on my arms upright. One of them opens the back door and waits.
“Where’s your usual security?” I ask, not taking my eyes off the line-up.
Carter stands beside me, cigarette hanging between his fingers, smoke curling past his jaw. He takes a drag, then flicks it away. The ember skids across the asphalt and dies.
“Different crew today,” he says. “We’re flying low. Off the radar, remember?”
“Uh-huh.” I angle a look at the nearest suit. The guy has a neck thick enough to have its own postcode. “Where’d Liam find them, Mobs-R-Us?”
Carter glances down at me, mouth twitching. “Something like that.”
He rests a hand on the small of my back and steers me toward the open SUV.
“Sure this is a good idea?” I murmur, climbing in.
“Relax.” Carter slides in beside me, thigh brushing mine. “It’s fine. I know them through Dameon. They helped him out with a situation a while ago.”
My eyebrows go up.
A situation.
That could mean anything from “Dameon locked himself out of his apartment” to “he hid a body and needs deniable muscle.”
I want to ask. God, do I want to ask.
But Beefhead One and Beefhead Two slide into the front seats, within perfect hearing distance. I have a basic interest in staying alive, so I shut my mouth.
For now.
The door closes with a heavy thunk, and the SUV eases out of the alley.
Madrid slips by in streaks of cold morning light. Normally, I’d be itching to photograph the old balconies, stone buildings, and graffiti properly, not just in the scraps of time I can grab between shows. But today, my brain refuses to stick to anything that isn’t the man sitting next to me.
What today means.
What happens if the news is bad.
What happens to him.
What that does to me.
I stare straight ahead. I hate Maeve more than ever. She spent her whole life making shitty decisions and drinking her way through them, dragging Carter down with her. Now there’s a chance she’s passed her damage on from the inside out, and the sheer unfairness of it makes my teeth grind.
He doesn’t deserve to go out the way she did.
Beside me, Carter barely moves. His sunglasses hide his eyes and the only sign he’s alive is the small bounce of one knee.
I reach over and take his hand. He interlaces our fingers together and squeezes once.
We don’t talk. There’s nothing to say.
Fifteen minutes later, the SUV turns down a narrow service road behind Hospital Fundación San Telmo. It’s modern and sleek, a private, high-end medical facility.
The three cars roll to a stop under a small, covered loading bay, away from the main entrance.
Beefhead One gets out first. Then Beefhead Two. They sweep the area with quick, efficient passes of their gaze, then open our door.
A woman in pale green scrubs is already waiting for us. She’s mid-thirties at a guess, brown hair pulled into a tight knot at the base of her skull, some sort of ID badge clipped to her pocket.
“Senor Ashford?” she asks in crisp English. “I’m Mariela, Dr. Soria’s assistant. Please, come with me.”
She leads us to an unmarked side door, swipes a keycard through the lock, and the light switches to green.
Every hospital has its own distinct smell. In here, though, the air is closer to Chanel No. 5 than bleach.
Every corridor we take is empty. Liam has certainly gone above and beyond to ensure Carter’s privacy.
We reach the elevator, where Mariela swipes her keycard again and ushers all of us inside. The men flank the walls while Carter stands in the middle, sunglasses still on, shoulders drawn up, almost bracing for impact.
I shift closer until my arm brushes his, and he closes the distance until it’s pressed firmly against mine.
Six floors up, the doors slide open to an empty hallway with frosted-glass doors and tasteful art. Mariela guides us into a private waiting room with floor-to-ceiling windows and soft white couches that look untouched.
Carter lowers himself onto the edge. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped tight, turning his knuckles pale. His head hangs low. The sunglasses make him unreadable, and I want to rip them off his face.
I only just got him back, and the thought of losing him now is a thousand small cuts, none of them fatal on their own, but all of them bleeding me out. I’ll take every jagged edge, every hard day that comes with him.
Just let him be okay.
If the universe takes him now, I will never fucking forgive it.
I sit beside him and place my hand on his knee. He reaches for it without even looking, fingers weaving through mine again. But the grip is harder this time.
There is absolutely nothing I can do to fix any of it. It’s out of my control. Out of his control, and all we can do is hold on and hope for the best.
So I hold on, and I don’t let go.
***
The whole day feels like it stretches into a year.
Bloods first. Vials filling with dark red.
Then ultrasound gel spread over his abdomen, the wand pressing into his ribs.
MRI. CT.
Every machine has its own sound, its own rhythm. Beeps, whirs, the heavy thud-thud of magnets charging. I stay with him for everything I’m allowed to, watching nurses tape cotton to the crook of his arm, watching him disappear into white tubes and loud coffin-like structures.
I try to keep up a low mutter of shit talk to fill the silence—complaints about hospital gowns, quips about how the MRI sounds like a nineties techno remix—anything to take his mind off all of this. Most of it lands flat. I don’t blame him. My heart’s not in it, either.
Carter doesn’t flinch or complain, not once. There are no smart-ass remarks. He does whatever they ask, like he’s already accepted the verdict and is here for the paperwork.
He looks . . . done.
I don’t know if that’s better or worse.
When he’s finished, Dr. Soria runs through everything in a calm, careful voice. There won’t be any results today, of course. Today is about data collection, imaging, and numbers. If anything throws up red flags, there’ll be more tests. Maybe a biopsy or something else.
Carter nods through it, expression barely shifting.
I sit there and quietly hate on Maeve, who taught him to meet fear by flattening himself out instead of asking for help.
When the SUVs drop us back at the hotel, the sun’s gone down. Being constantly on the move has finally caught up with us.
We end up in his suite, shoes kicked off near the door, clothes shed on the way to the bathroom. We shower fast, nothing sexy about it, washing the hospital and the anxiety of the day off our skin.
Fifteen minutes later, we’re cross-legged on his couch with a spread of Spanish takeout between us.
Patatas bravas, tortilla, grilled octopus, two tubs of gambas al ajillo, croquetas in a greasy paper bag.
Not what he wanted at first. We spent twenty minutes doom-scrolling delivery apps, arguing over the merits of ordering local food versus ordering burgers.
In the end, tapas won because he got sick of scrolling and told me to pick something before he ate his own arm.
Carter cracks open the container of patatas and eyes me over the lid. “If this tastes like shit, it’s on you. You picked.”
“I chose the only place that didn’t require me to translate a novel from Spanish while you breathed down my neck.”
His head jerks up. “I didn’t breathe down your neck.”
“You hovered,” I say, spearing a potato and waving it at him. “You were close enough to fog up my screen.”
The corner of his mouth twitches, fighting a smile. “Shut up.”
I hold the fork out. He leans in and takes the bite straight off it. Chewing slowly, his eyes narrow.
“It’s good,” he admits at last.
“I know. I have taste.”
“You have questionable taste,” he shoots back, stealing one of the croquetas from my tray. “You’re here with me, aren’t you?”
I smack his hand away from my food. “Dickhead.”
“Maybe,” he says, wearing that slow, lazy half-smile he knows damn well is a weapon. “And yet you’re still here.”
I roll my eyes and focus on cutting up a piece of grilled octopus before I say something stupid, like that’s the problem.
We eat in silence for a while. The food is genuinely good.
He leans back eventually, tipping his head against the couch, and closes his eyes. The exhaustion sits heavily on him.
I watch him.
I can’t help it.
Tonight, under the hotel lights, the bruise-dark shadows beneath his eyes are deeper, his cheekbones cut sharper. The stage version of him is gone. What’s left is Carter—the real Carter, exposed in a way he’d swing at anyone for mentioning.
He opens his eyes and catches me looking. “What?”
“Nothing,” I lie.
He lets out a quiet laugh, but he doesn’t press.
My appetite disappears. I set my fork down and curl my hands around my shins, pulling my knees up, needing something to hold.
“You okay?” I ask softly.
“Ask me when the results come in.”
“It’s okay to be scared, you know. It means you care enough to want to stick around. To fight.”
Carter releases a slow breath. “People like me don’t exactly age gracefully, Vi.”
My stomach twists.
He keeps staring at the ceiling. “Rock stars, addicts, screw-ups with bad blood and worse habits. We’re not built for long retirements.”
His face smooths out into a faraway blankness. I hate that he expects the worst. But I don’t blame him; I’m doing exactly the same.
He’s resigned, prepared for whatever worst-case scenario they throw at him. That scares me more than any result sheet.
He’s carried this damage so long it’s fossilized—baked into the way he breathes.
I can tell that deep down, some part of him thinks he deserves whatever’s coming.
That dying young is just what happens to people like him.
That’s the part I don’t know how to fix.
Most of the time, you can treat a failing organ.
Cut it out, replace it, patch it up. But how do you undo the slow kind of rot that starts when you’re a kid and just keeps spreading, because no one ever taught you how to stop it?
He’s already accepted the worst version of this as a done deal.
And if he’s already at acceptance, how the fuck am I supposed to fight for the both of us?
More than anything, I want him to stay. Alive, here with me.
But that’s a problem for another day. Tonight, I move closer until my whole side is flush with his, then let my head rest against his shoulder.
We sit there in the quiet. Neither of us fills the silence with jokes or deflection or sex.