Chapter 63
Chapter 63:
“Declan p>
His voice was calm. This was the worst sign.
Callum’s calm was not peace — it was the absence of everything else, the blank that remained when fear and anger and grief had all been burned away simultaneously, leaving nothing but function.
“I’m here p>
Declan’s eyes were open. His face was white beneath the blood. His lips moved, and the sound they produced was not a word but an instruction — the instruction of a man who had been in crashes before and knew the protocol:
“Legs.
Can’t feel them p>
Callum had a decision to make.
The decision took three seconds. In three seconds, Callum Hargrove — who had spent his entire adult life making decisions that affected thousands of people and millions of dollars and the trajectories of companies and careers — made the most important decision of his life, and it had nothing to do with money.
He could continue to Kingsgate Hall. He was three miles away. The wedding was happening now. If he left Declan — left him with the paramedics who were already arriving, left him with the professionals whose job it was to extract people from wreckage — he could reach the hall in four minutes. He could walk through the doors. He could see Lara.
Or he could stay.
He stayed.
Not because the decision was easy. Not because it was obvious. Not because he didn’t want, with every cell in his body, to be in that hall, in that room, in the presence of the woman whose absence had been the organizing principle of his entire life for the past month. He stayed because Declan was bleeding on a steering wheel, and Declan’s legs weren’t working, and Declan’s eyes were the eyes of a man who was afraid — genuinely, physically afraid, for the first time in a life built on the refusal of fear — and because some things were more important than love.
Friendship, for instance.
The paramedics arrived.
Step into fiction with gαℓησν𝒆𝓁s․𝒸o𝗺
Callum helped where he could and stood back where he couldn’t. The extraction took twenty-two minutes — twenty-two minutes of hydraulic tools and careful hands and the particular, focused silence of professionals doing precise work under pressure.
Declan was removed from the car on a backboard, his legs immobilized, his face gray.
Callum rode in the ambulance. He held Declan’s hand — not sentimentally, not with the tender, romantic grip of a man comforting a lover, but with the firm, practical grip of a man keeping another man tethered to consciousness. The grip that said: I’m here.
Don’t leave.
At the hospital, Gwendolyn arrived. She ran down the corridor — ran, in heels, at sixty-one, with the speed of a mother who had spent thirty years dreading this phone call — and the sound of her heels on the linoleum was the sharpest thing in the building.
By the time Declan was in surgery, Lara’s wedding was over.
The ceremony at Kingsgate Hall had concluded. The suona had played its final note. The doors had opened.
Edmund and Lara had emerged into the late afternoon light of Thornfield’s old quarter, married for the second time — once legally, once ceremonially, once in the language of documents and once in the language of tradition — and the gold coins had been scattered and the blessings had been given and the celebration had moved indoors, where it would continue until midnight.
Callum sat in the hospital waiting room and looked at his phone. The news coverage was already running — the Blackwell-Ashworth wedding, the most lavish ceremony Thornfield had seen in a decade, complete with photographs and video and the breathless commentary of social columnists who treated weddings like sporting events. He found a photograph: Edmund and Lara, standing together at the entrance to Kingsgate Hall.
Edmund in red and gold. Lara in red and gold. Their hands joined. Their faces carrying the particular expression of two people who had just made a promise in front of everyone they knew.
His thumb rested on Edmund’s face. The screen smeared under the pressure.
It must have been Edmund. The accident. The intersection. The timing — Declan racing toward the hall, a van appearing from exactly the right angle at exactly the right moment. Too perfect. Too precise. The kind of coincidence that wasn’t a coincidence, because Edmund Blackwell didn’t deal in coincidences — he dealt in outcomes, and the outcome of Declan Thorne in a hospital bed was the outcome of a man whose wedding had been threatened.
The thought was a fire. It started in Callum’s chest and spread — through his arms, his hands, his jaw, his eyes — until his entire body was a vessel for a fury so pure it had no heat.
Cold fury. The Hargrove kind. The kind that made phone calls, that assembled evidence, that destroyed things methodically rather than explosively.
He stood up.
Gwendolyn reached for his arm — “Callum, wait, don’t—” — and Vivienne, who had arrived minutes after Gwendolyn, added her voice — “Think, Callum, think before you act—” — but Callum was past thinking. He was past strategy and past calculation and past the board-room composure that had been his defining trait for his entire adult life.
He walked out of the hospital.
Got in his car.
Entered the Blackwell estate address into the navigation system.
Today was the first day of Edmund and Lara’s marriage.
Callum intended to make it memorable.