Chapter 62
Chapter 62:
The intersection was three miles from Kingsgate Hall.
Declan was driving at a speed that the road was not designed for — the speed of a man who had spent his career exceeding the limits of what machines could do and had forgotten, or was choosing to forget, that racetracks have barriers and runoff zones and medical teams stationed every two hundred meters, and city streets have none of these things.
He didn’t see the car.
It came from the right — a delivery van, heavy, moving at the legal speed limit, doing nothing wrong, being where it was entitled to be, at the time it was entitled to be there. The van’s driver had the green light.
Declan had the red.
Declan, whose eyes were fixed on the road ahead and whose mind was fixed on Kingsgate Hall and whose foot was fixed on the accelerator, ran the red light the way he’d been running every boundary for the past three weeks: without slowing, without looking, without acknowledging that boundaries existed for a reason.
The impact was on the driver’s side.
The sound was not like it is in movies — not a clean crash, not a cinematic crunch. It was a complex, layered thing: metal deforming, glass shattering, the high-pitched shriek of tires that were no longer touching pavement in the way tires were meant to touch pavement. The sports car — light, low, designed for speed rather than survival — folded around the van’s bumper the way paper folds around a fist. The driver’s door compressed inward. The dashboard shifted. The steering column, which had been in front of Declan, was now against him.
His legs were trapped.
He knew it before he felt it — knew it the way a pilot knows an engine has failed before the instruments confirm it, through the body, through the absence of sensation where sensation should be. His legs were there. He could see them, pinned beneath the crumpled dashboard, his left foot still wearing the Italian leather shoe he’d put on this morning in the apartment Callum had rented.
But they weren’t communicating. The signals his brain was sending — move, push, fight — were arriving at a destination that had been disconnected.
Blood ran from his forehead. Not dramatically — not the cinematic gush of action movies — but steadily, a warm line tracking down his temple, along his cheekbone, pooling in the hollow of his jaw. He could taste it. Salt and iron. The taste of a body that had been opened.
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In the wreckage — surrounded by broken glass and the smell of leaking fuel and the distant sound of someone screaming, probably the van driver — Declan’s hand found his phone. It was cracked. The screen was spiderwebbed with fracture lines.
But it was on, and his fingers were working, and the instinct — the first instinct, the deepest instinct, the one that superseded everything, including survival — was to call Lara.
He dialed her number. The number he’d known for twenty years. The number that had once been the first entry in his contacts, before it was deleted, before it was blocked, before the three doors closed like chambers of a heart shutting down.
The call didn’t connect. Three tones — the short, mechanical beeps of a number that has been permanently blocked — and then silence. Not voicemail. Not a ring. Just the empty, digital nothing of a connection that no longer existed.
He lowered the phone. Set it on his chest, which was the only surface available. Stared at the cracked screen, at the name that wasn’t there anymore, and felt — beneath the pain that was beginning now, arriving in waves, the body’s delayed report of damage — a clarity that he hadn’t experienced in weeks. Months. Maybe years.
She was gone. Not metaphorically. Not strategically. Not in the recoverable, negotiable way that people are “gone” when they’re angry or distant or playing hard to get.
Gone in the permanent, structural, irreversible way that a road is gone after an earthquake: the path he’d been trying to follow no longer existed. The destination he’d been driving toward had been removed from the map.
And he was sitting in the wreckage of a machine he’d pushed too far, bleeding from the head and unable to feel his legs, and the woman he loved was at a wedding three miles away and would never know he was here.
Callum arrived seven minutes later.
He’d followed Declan out of the Ashworth estate — not at Declan’s speed, because Callum’s response to crisis was not acceleration but control, and control meant driving at a speed that allowed for decision-making. He’d been two miles behind when the sound reached him — not the crash itself, which was too far away, but the sirens, which began within minutes and told him, with the specific, terrible certainty of a man who understood cause and effect, exactly what had happened.
He saw the intersection first. Then the glass. Then the sports car, which was no longer recognizable as a sports car — it was a shape, a compressed, angular shape that bore no resemblance to the machine Declan had been driving and that contained, somewhere in its interior, the man Callum had known for thirty years.
Callum parked.
Got out. Walked to the wreckage with the rigid, mechanical gait of a man whose body was operating independently of his mind because his mind had gone somewhere else — somewhere quiet, somewhere where the things he was seeing didn’t require processing.