Chapter 65
Chapter 65:
“Edmund.” His voice was ice over fire — the Hargrove composure, cracked, revealing the heat beneath. “Isn’t it enough that you took Lara? Now you send someone to run Declan off the road p>
He wrenched free of Edmund’s grip. Staggered. Steadied himself against the doorframe.
“He’s in the hospital. They don’t know if they can save his leg. His leg, Edmund — the legs he raced with, the legs that were his career, his identity, his life.
And you — you did this. You arranged it.
Because you couldn’t just win — you had to destroy everyone who lost p>
The accusation hung in the hallway like smoke.
Edmund’s expression didn’t change — not because he was unaffected, but because his face was processing the information before responding to it: Declan in hospital. Leg injury.
Accusation of orchestration.
Each item catalogued, evaluated, filed.
“I didn’t do this p>
The words were flat. Simple.
Carrying no performance, no indignation, no defensive posture. The words of a man stating a fact and expecting it to be assessed on its merits.
Callum didn’t assess.
Callum swung again — with the other hand this time, a left hook aimed at the temple, thrown with the desperate, artless energy of a man whose analytical faculties had been overwhelmed by something older and more primal.
Edmund blocked it. Redirected it.
And then, instead of counterattacking — instead of leveraging his position, his strength, his clear physical advantage over a man who was running on grief and sleeplessness — he stepped back.
“I didn’t arrange the accident,” Edmund said. His voice was still level, but there was something beneath it now — not anger, but the particular tension of a man who was being accused of something that offended him not morally but aesthetically.
Edmund Blackwell did not sabotage cars.
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Edmund Blackwell did not need to. “What I arranged was to have you both sent back to Halcombe.
Cleanly. Without harm. So you wouldn’t interfere with our wedding. That’s all p>
They fought. Not with the choreographed elegance of action films — with the ugly, grunting, furniture-bumping reality of two men in a hallway, one in a bathrobe and one in a three-day suit, neither of whom was willing to back down and both of whom were skilled enough to prevent the other from landing anything decisive.
A lamp fell.
A side table shifted.
A vase — crystal, expensive, a wedding gift from someone whose feelings would not be consulted — rocked but didn’t fall.
Lara appeared at the end of the hallway.
She was wearing a nightgown — white, simple, the kind of garment that made her look younger than she was and more vulnerable than she’d allow herself to be in daylight. Her hair was loose. Her feet were bare on the marble.
And her face — her face was the face of a woman who had been woken on the first morning of her marriage by the sound of the two men she’d left behind destroying her husband’s hallway.
“Stop it p>
Two words. Not shouted. Spoken with the quiet, absolute authority of a woman who had spent a month being fought over and was done. The voice of a woman who had been the object of a tug-of-war and was now cutting the rope.
They stopped.
Both of them. Immediately — not because the voice was loud but because it was Lara’s, and Lara’s voice, in this particular register, had an effect on both men that was involuntary, neurological, embedded in their systems the way reflexes are embedded: beyond choice.