He saw it happen. He saw the exact moment the wordunlesswent 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, thekind 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.
Chapter Twelve
There’s a particular kind of surfacing that comes after the dark, slow and underwater, the world arriving in pieces that don’t yet agree to be the same world. A ceiling I don’t know. A weight of blanket that isn’t mine. A small green sound somewhere to my left, patient and electronic, counting something out. The ache of a needle taped into the back of my hand. And the smell, that clean nothing-smell that is somehow the most frightening smell there is, because it only ever means one place.
A hospital. I’m in a hospital, and I can’t remember?—
And then I see him, standing at the foot of the bed, and the first soft foolish thought my drugged mind offers up is that I must be dreaming, because of course I’d dream him. Of course, given a dark to fill with anything I wanted, my traitor of a brain reached straight past every happier thing it owns and built me my husband, tall and still and watching me with an expression I’ve never once seen on his real face, the one I’m not allowed to want anymore.
But it isn’t a dream.
I know it the way I always know, the instant he shifts his weight and comes a half-step forward into the space at mybedside, because the heat of his presence reaches me the way it has reached me from the very first day, a thing my body reads before my mind gets a vote, a pull I have no defense against, like he carries his own weather, his own gravity, some magnetic field my whole foolish self leans toward even now, even here, even laid out on my back with a needle in my hand and my heart in pieces. I should be past this. After everything, after all of it, I should be the one woman in the world immune to Trey Flint. Instead I lie here and feel the room rearrange itself around him the way it always has, and I want to weep at how little my body cares what my heart has learned.
