Page 59 of Sawyer
“I don’t want before.” My voice breaks. “I want him.”
He nods once, a tactical retreat. He steps toward the door and hesitates. “I’m on your side,” he says, his voice raw and threadbare.
“Are you?” It knifes out before I can sheath it. “Because it feels like you’ve been keeping this to yourself while you… while you held me like I was—” I slam my eyes shut. The image hurts—my face in his neck, my breath in his shirt, the wordalwaystattooing promises on ribs that feel bruised from the inside.
He doesn’t defend himself. “I found out not long ago,” he says. “At your house. In your father’s office. I needed to verify before I put pain in your mouth.”
“Too late,” I whisper, and the worst part is I’m not sure where to aim the hurt. It ricochets, hitting everything. Him. Me. My father. The ceiling.
There’s a knock. Detective Hartley’s face appears round the curtain, tie askew, expression carefully neutral. “Miss Kingsley,” he says. “Good to see you upright. We’ll take this slow. Your father is in a consult room with my partner. Would you like to speak to him?”
“Yes,” I say immediately. “Now.”
“We’ll keep it supervised,” Hartley adds gently.
I look at Sawyer. He is made of restraint again, ironed back up, hands hooked on his belt like he wants to use them and won’t. “Stay,” I hear myself say, then hear what I said and claw it back. “No. Go. I can’t—” I shake my head, flailing for space. “I can’t do this with you looking at me like—like you already know how it ends.”
Something flickers in his eyes—hurt, then understanding, then that maddening acceptance that makes me want to kiss him and punch him in the same breath. “I’ll be right outside,” he says anyway.
“I said go.” I don’t meango away forever.I meango out of my line of sight before I drown.
He nods once, and it lands like a salute. He steps past Hartley without looking back. The curtain sways in his wake.
The room is suddenly too big, or I am too small inside it. The machines beep the way games used to when I was allowed to be only a kid. My cheeks are wet. I wipe them with the heel of my hand and it stings—the tape burn, the stupid fragile skin that never asked to be the stage for anyone’s PR stunt.
Hartley clears his throat. “Do you need a minute?”
“No.” If I stop moving I will rot. “Bring him.”
He disappears. I try to slow my breath the way Sawyer taught me—four in, four out—but all I can hear is the rush of a van’s engine and all I can see is a white rectangle of sky framed by cargo doors.
I twist the hospital bracelet on my wrist until the plastic bites. The ink bleeds:KINGSLEY, CAMILLE—as if I needed reminding who I am.
The curtain rattles. My father steps in with Hartley. He looks smaller in fluorescent light, his hair mussed, tie loose, eyes rimmed in sleepless red. He stops six feet from the bed like it’s the edge of a cliff.
“Pumpkin.” His voice breaks on the word.
I nearly laugh because it’s so wildly wrong and tender and infuriating I could scream. “Did you text me,” I ask, calm as the moment before a shatter, “to meet you in the south garden?”
He blinks. “No,” he says quickly. “No, sweetheart, I would never?—”
“But you set the stage where a text like that would feel normal.” The calm peels away. “You hired a company to scare me so Wall Street would clap for you.”
He flinches like I slapped him. “Who told you?—”
“I didn’t hear it from the gossip rags, Dad,” I spit. “I heard it from the man who found me tied like a package in a storage unit. So—answer me. Did you?”
His mouth opens. Closes. He looks at Hartley like the detective might throw him a rope. Hartley’s face is granite. My father looks back at me. “I thought it would be controlled,” he says, words spilling, desperate. “No one was supposed to touch you. I pulled out when it went too far?—”
“But only after it started.” My hands shake. “Only after you lit the fuse.”
He presses his fingers to his eyes and for a second I see the man who taught me to ride a bike and bled with me when I fell. “I’m sorry,” he says into his palm. He drops his hand and the CEO returns for a beat. “I will fix it. I will make him pay.”
“Which him?” I ask. My voice has turned wrong. It’s the calm before the final storm, the eye. “The man you paid to light a fake fire? The partner who threw gas? Or the one who used me as kindling?”
He sways. “All of them.”
I inhale like I’m drawing air through a straw in tar. “Get out.” The words arrive before I know they exist. They surprise me. They fit.
