My teeth start to chatter. They might’ve been doing it this whole time. I don’t know. “Jameson.”
“Yeah?”
Ihearher. I’m saved from having to ask, because I hear Elise out in the hall.
Her voice is sweet, like buttercream frosting. Or maybe I really have cracked my skull. “Is he awake? Is there going to be surgery? He has to have broken bones. Is anyone going to do a CT scan?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t give you that information. If you’ll step—”
“Get out of my way.” A slight pause, and then: “Gabriel.” Then she’s next to Jameson, and I’m so fucking glad I jumped out of that window. Elise leans in close and kisses my temple, her hands hovering close like she’s afraid to touch me. “Gabriel. Are you—Charlotte said—”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re not.” She touches my face. My hair. Elise is crying, but she’s trying not to look devastated. Just like Jameson. It must be worse than I thought.Imust be wrong. “You—you’re hurt.”
“He didn’t break anything,” Jameson says. “The paramedics were speculating about divine intervention.”
“I’m—” Falling. Painful vertigo sweeps in.Crushesin. My body tenses under it. God, that’s awful, fuck. A shadow pushes in at the boundary of my vision. For a terrifying moment, I can’t see her. Then I can. “Fine.”
Her hands go to my face. “First you. Now Catherine.”
“Catherine?”
“I don’t know what to do.” Her tears fall, suspended in the air for a blink before they hit my face. “Lydia came to the bakery—my father’s keeping her captive at the house. He’s going to force her to marry Jacob.”
Elise can’t leave, or I’ll die. But any one of her sisters trapped in the house with Bettencourt—no. There’s no way my brothers will go.
“Jacob. Get him.”
Her eyes go wide. “What?”
“Get Jacob. Tell him to come here.” Another coughing fit, from deep in my lungs, is making its way up, mask be damned. “He could go get Catherine.”
“We can’t trust him. He didn’t—” Elise drops her voice. “He didn’t force me during the initiation, but that doesn’t mean he’ll turn down marrying Catherine.”
“No. He’s better than his father. And I—” I swallow the first cough, but I won’t be able to do it forever. “I can’t go.”
“But he—”
“He’s better than nothing. He’s our only choice. Get him.”
3
ELISE
Jacob Chambers causesa stir in the emergency department.
That shouldn’t be possible, since it’s literally a room full of people having emergencies. Jacob rushes between doctors calling out orders and a baby crying and a man demanding to be seen by aspecialist, right now.Nurses point him our way, a light in their eyes like the sight of him is making their lives better.
I hope to God he makes our lives better. Asking him for help could easily make things worse. Gabriel trusts him, but my mind won’t go along with it so easily. The fact that Jacob is Gabriel’s ex-boyfriend doesn’t make him trustworthy, but it does make me feel…jittery.
Or it could be leftover adrenaline from running through the emergency room to get to Gabriel. All Charlotte said was that he was alive. Then she called back to say he’d been taken to the hospital. But she’s Mason Hill’s wife, and she was my best friend before that, and that means we’re both very familiar with the damage a fall from a building can do to a man’s body.
I expected stitches. Blood. Broken bones.
Maybe I’m still expecting them to appear after the fact. There are dark bruises under his hospital gown and scrapes on one set of knuckles and one elbow. My heart hasn’t settled down from when they took him for scans to see if there was major internal bleeding.
There wasn’t, but my father is still out there, safe and free. When’s the next building going to go up in flames?