Page 24 of Sawyer (The Maddox BRAVO Team #1)

Camille

Hospitals always smell like lemon-bleach and boiled linens, like somebody tried to scrub life into something that forgot how to breathe.

The ceiling over my bed hums with fluorescent daylight even though it’s well past noon.

A blood-pressure cuff kisses my arm every six minutes as if it can squeeze fear out of the arteries it helped flood.

I’m wearing a gown the color of regret and a warm blanket that never warms all the way.

Tape rash blooms along my cheekbone where silver adhesive ripped my skin.

The nurse with honey-brown braids keeps offering me ice chips.

I take them because they’re the only thing that doesn’t taste like duct tape and panic.

Sawyer is a silhouette in a vinyl chair, boots planted, shoulders squared, headset in, phone face-down for once.

He’s said maybe twenty words to me since we got here—most of them not about me: to the triage nurse (“mild head trauma, tape abrasion, possible sprain left wrist”), to Detective Hartley (“we’ll do the statement once scans clear”), to Dean through that deceptively ordinary phone (“we have the file; sending the whole rotten tree”).

The rest he says with hands—the ones that found me in a concrete room—and eyes that won’t stay still, bouncing from door to clock to drip line to me, back to the door.

“Your CT looks clear,” the physician says, flipping a tablet at my bedside.

He’s young, probably my age, with a ring-shaped divot on his ring finger where a glove bit down during residency.

“Concussion symptoms minimal. Tape burn we can treat. You’ll be sore.

” His eyes lift to Sawyer. “No evidence of… anything else.”

Relief punches my diaphragm from the inside. I nod. “Can I go home?”

“We’d like to observe you for a few hours,” he says. “Detective Hartley’s waiting to take a statement if you feel up to it.”

“Later,” Sawyer answers for me, voice sanded down to control. He stands, shakes the doctor’s hand. “Thanks, Doc.”

The doctor exits. The nurse helps me peel gauze from my cheek.

Tears threaten and I grip the rails hard enough to squeak the plastic because I refuse to cry over adhesive.

Crying is for actual things, like the moment the van door closed and the world shrank to stink and dark and the sound of my heart learning how to be a hammer.

“You should try to rest,” the nurse murmurs, patting my shoulder. She leaves us alone with the ceiling hum.

Sawyer takes the chair again. He’s so close I could reach out and brush the hardened scar near his collarbone if I wanted. I don’t. I can’t. There’s a tightness in his mouth I don’t recognize, a secret lodged like a pebble under the tongue.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I ask.

The muscles along his jaw leap. He looks at the door instead of me. “We’ll talk when you’re resting.”

“I’m resting.” I gesture at the cannula taped to my hand, the beeping monitor counting my every spike. “Talk.”

He exhales through his nose, the way he does right before he picks a wire to cut. “Hartley wants to take your statement before we?—”

I snap. “Sawyer.”

His attention snaps with me. For a second the soldier falls off and the man shows; it hurts more, seeing him bare and bracing.

“Okay,” he says. Careful. “First: the text that got you to the garden wasn’t your father. It was spoofed.”

My lungs let out air I didn’t realize was hoarded. It explains the wrongness, the prickle. “Then who?—?”

He swallows. His eyes flicker—hallway, IV pole, my face—calculating angles. “Someone used a contact they knew you’d trust to get you outside.”

“Someone inside,” I say, because he’s trained me to follow threads. “Someone who knew which name would move me.”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t keep going. I can feel the rest of it in the room like electromagnetic vibrato, rattling the bed rails. “That’s not the pebble,” I say. “Say it.”

He rubs the heel of his hand once over his sternum, a soldier’s tell I’ve learned to read.

“Cam…” He sits forward, elbows on knees, head bowed like a man about to pray to a god he doesn’t believe in.

“Your father made a deal. Months ago. To create… a controlled security narrative around the company and—” His throat tightens.

He forces the next words out. “—around you.”

I flinch so hard the blood-pressure cuff thinks it’s a crisis. It starts to inflate. I rip it off with my free hand.

“What does that mean?” The question comes out brittle and quiet at the same time.

“PR. Manufactured urgency. The firm staged mild threats—paper notes, online chatter—to boost the story before the IPO. No contact. No weapons. Your father says he pulled the plug after the first breach. His partner—Vale—ignored him. Hired a freelancer named Rourke. It escalated out of control.”

The ceiling hum surges. Or maybe that’s my skull filling with bees. I stare at him, shaking my head in a slow motion that tries to erase everything he said syllable by syllable.

“No,” I say. “No. He wouldn’t.” Words scramble over each other, tripping. “My father is—he’s ridiculous about optics and shareholders and who sits where at the gala, yes, but he wouldn’t—” My voice splits. “He wouldn’t use me like that.”

Sawyer doesn’t reach for me. He’s learned the shape of my edges. “He admitted it,” he says.

“Liar,” I snap, not sure if I mean my father or Sawyer. That’s how bad it is.

He doesn’t flinch. “He thought it would stay staged. He says he tried to stop it. Vale—the partner—went outside the plan. Brought in a guy blacklisted for going hot. Cam, I’m not defending him. I’m telling you the chain so we can break it.”

I hear him. I don’t hear him. My bones hear him, but my skin refuses.

“That text said my father’s name.” Tears breach despite every command I give them to stand down. “It was him.”

“It was his ghost.” He swallows. “Spoofed to look like him. Because the real him made it plausible.”

The nurse peeks in, reading the volume and our faces the way nurses do. She retreats silently and I hate that she saw us like this.

“Get my dad,” I say, voice low and lethal. “I want to see him.”

“Cam…”

“Get. Him.” A thousand memories line up behind the command: Gregory pushing me higher on the tire swing, Gregory attending my middle school ‘art show’ in the cafeteria and buying every macaroni frame for ten dollars each, Gregory calling me Pumpkin in front of everyone and me cringing because Dad and love and embarrassment are synonyms when you’re fourteen.

People aren’t simple. They’re messy. But they don’t weaponize you for stock prices. They don’t.

Sawyer stands, the chair legs scraping. He looks bigger and further away all at once. “Hartley’s with him. They’ll arrange it. But before he walks in?—”

“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 word always tattooing 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 mean go away forever. I mean go 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.

“Camille—”

“Get. Out.” I point at the curtain because I have to point at something that isn’t his face.

“I can’t—” My throat closes around how much I can’t.

“Hartley can take your statement in the hallway or in hell; I don’t care where.

I will talk to you when I can hear myself think without hearing the van doors. ”

Hartley moves him gently by the elbow. Gregory lets himself be steered, stunned and gray. At the curtain he turns back. “I love you,” he says, and I want to throw the heart monitor at him because that word feels like counterfeit currency he used in a place that only takes cash.

They’re gone. The room fills with fluorescent and beeping and that lemon-bleach again like a stupid hymn.

I fold in on myself. Not a ball, because my hip aches and the IV tubing tethers me, but some smaller shape. I drag the warm blanket up and it smells like a hundred other people who were scared here before me. It doesn’t help. I bury my face in it and breathe until breaths stop clawing.

Through the thin curtain I hear low voices—Hartley, clinical and inexorable; my father, smaller and smaller. Somewhere, a door opens. Somewhere, a pen scratches ruin onto paper.

I think of Sawyer in the hallway. I think of the way his eyes softened when he said always and the way they hardened when he said we finish it . I think of the sticky note I pinned to his chest— trust your gut —and wonder if I can obey my own handwriting when my gut is an ocean churning.

A soft shadow falls across the curtain. “It’s just me,” comes his voice, low and careful.

“Go away,” I say, because love is a thing with edges and mine is flayed to ribbons. “Please.”

A beat. “I’ll be right outside,” he says.

“I know.” It isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t anything yet. It’s just a fact. He leaves footsteps in air where there should be floor.

I stare at my paint-stained cuticles. They look like somebody else’s hands, somebody else’s life. I flex them, feeling tender skin pull. Color can’t cover blood. I know that now. But maybe, when the blood dries, color can make a map. Later. Not yet.

For now, I lie under the hospital light and let the ache expand until it’s as big as the sky. I let the truth sit, sour and heavy, because it’s better than the lie that almost killed me. I let myself hate and love the same two men in different measures that change with every beep.

And I wait for the next breath to come without breaking.