Page 32 of You Owe Me (21 Rumors #2)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Rumor has it, his heart stopped.

Maverick

The hospital gown is scratchy against my skin, and the IV line in my arm feels like a tether to something I can’t control.

6:47 a.m.

Thirteen minutes until they wheel me into the OR to burn away a part of my heart.

And I’m alone.

Just like I planned. Just like I orchestrated with surgical precision—cover stories, hotel reservations, lies stacked on lies to keep everyone I care about from knowing that their bulletproof bastard is about to be unconscious and vulnerable for the next four hours.

My watch sits silent on the bedside table, disconnected and powerless. No more heart rate monitoring. No more warnings. Just the steady beep of the machines they’ve hooked me up to, marking time until I either come out of this fixed or I don’t come out at all.

Dr. Patel will be here soon to go over the procedure one more time, and I’ll nod and pretend I haven’t memorized every detail from the medical journals I’ve been reading obsessively for the past week.

Catheter ablation. Radiofrequency energy.

Targeted destruction of the electrical pathways that have been misfiring since I was nineteen and my world first imploded.

Controlled burning to fix uncontrolled chaos.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

But right now, staring at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling and listening to machines monitor functions my body should handle automatically, all I can think about is last night.

Dinner was silent.

Not the comfortable kind of silence we’d built over months of learning each other’s rhythms. This was the silence of two people drowning in secrets, sitting across from each other at our small kitchen table, pretending to eat food that tasted like cardboard.

I’d made pasta. Something simple, something that wouldn’t require conversation or coordination. Just boiling water and jarred sauce and the kind of mechanical cooking that gives your hands something to do while your mind races through everything you’re not saying.

Ainsley picked at her food, twirling around her fork without eating, her eyes focused somewhere past my shoulder like the wall behind me held answers she couldn’t find anywhere else.

Her phone lay face down beside her plate, silent, but I could see the tension in her shoulders every time it vibrated with notifications she didn’t check.

“You’re not eating,” I said, because the silence was stretching too thin and someone had to break it.

She blinked, refocusing on me like she’d forgotten I was there. “Neither are you.”

She was right. My own plate sat mostly untouched, pasta cooling into unappetizing clumps while I tried to figure out how to have a normal conversation when everything between us felt like walking through a minefield.

“Long day,” I said, which wasn’t a lie but wasn’t the truth either.

“Yeah.” She set down her fork, giving up the pretense of eating. “Me, too.”

The weight of everything we weren’t saying pressed down on the room like humidity before a storm.

I wanted to tell her about the surgery, about the lies I’d constructed to keep her from worrying.

I wanted to ask her what Carter had done to put that haunted look in her eyes, what threat he’d made that had her checking her phone like it might explode.

I wanted to reach across the table and remind her that whatever she was carrying, she didn’t have to carry it alone.

But I didn’t.

Because I was carrying something, too. And if I asked her to trust me with her secrets while keeping mine locked away, what did that make me?

A hypocrite. A coward. A man who’d built his entire life around control and was about to lose it in the most fundamental way possible.

“I’m going to see Pops tomorrow,” I said instead, the lie sliding out smooth as silk. “Help him with some quarterly reports. Probably be gone through the weekend.”

Something flickered across her face—relief, maybe, or guilt, or both. Like my absence might solve a problem she couldn’t tell me about.

“That’s good,” she said softly. “He’ll be happy to see you.”

“Cooper’s got regionals this weekend. Figured I’d catch his game while I’m there.”

Ainsley doesn’t follow his schedule closely enough to know any better. And by the time she realized the timeline didn’t add up, I’d either be recovering in a hotel room or dead from surgical complications.

Either way, the lie wouldn’t matter.

“Tell him I said good luck,” she said, and her smile was so genuine, so trusting, that it made my chest ache in ways that had nothing to do with my condition.

We finished dinner in that same weighted silence, clearing plates and loading the dishwasher with mechanical precision. Every movement felt deliberate, careful, like we were both afraid of saying the wrong thing and shattering whatever fragile peace we’d managed to maintain.

I watched her move around the kitchen—rinsing dishes, wiping counters, organizing things that didn’t need organizing—and tried to memorize the details.

The way her hair fell across her shoulder when she leaned over the sink.

The unconscious grace in her movements. The small scar on her knuckle from where she’d cut herself opening a can of cat food for a stray she’d tried to rescue last year.

All the little things that made her uniquely, perfectly Ainsley.

All the things I might not see again if something went wrong tomorrow.

Later, in bed, we lay wrapped around each other like we were afraid the other might disappear in the night. Which, in my case, was exactly what was going to happen.

Her back pressed against my chest, my arm around her waist, her fingers tracing patterns on my forearm that felt like Morse code for all the things we couldn’t say out loud. Her breathing was too controlled, too measured, like she was working to keep it steady.

“I love you,” she whispered into the darkness, and her voice broke just slightly on the words.

“I love you too,” I replied, my lips against her hair, breathing in the vanilla scent of her shampoo and trying not to think about how this might be the last time I got to hold her like this.

The last time she trusted me completely.

Because when I came back—if I came back—there would be questions. About where I’d really been, why I’d needed to disappear, what else I’d been hiding. And I wasn’t sure our relationship could survive the answers.

But I couldn’t tell her. Not tonight. Not when she was already drowning in whatever Carter had done to her.

So, I held her tighter and pretended that love was enough to bridge the gap between truth and protection.

Pretended that we weren’t both lying to each other with every breath.

Pretended that tomorrow wouldn’t change everything.

“Mr. Lexington?”

The nurse’s voice pulls me back to the present. She’s young, efficient, holding a tablet and wearing scrubs covered in cartoon hearts that somehow make the whole situation more surreal.

“Dr. Patel will be in shortly to discuss the procedure.” She checks my IV line with practiced precision. “Is your ride here yet? You’ll need someone to drive you home and stay with you for twenty-four hours post-discharge.”

My throat goes dry. “She’s running late. Traffic.”

The lie comes out smooth, automatic. Just another piece of the elaborate deception I’ve constructed to keep everyone from knowing their invincible bastard is about to be filleted like a fish.

“Of course,” the nurse says with understanding sympathy. “These early morning procedures are tough on family. She’ll make it before you go back, I’m sure.”

She won’t. Because she doesn’t know I’m here. Because she thinks I’m driving to see Pops right now, probably stopping for coffee and complaining about having to spend a weekend doing family obligations instead of more interesting things.

Because I chose lies over truth, control over trust, and now I’m about to go under anesthesia with the weight of those choices sitting on my chest like a concrete block.

My heart monitor starts beeping faster.

The nurse glances at the machine, then at me. “Nervous? That’s completely normal. This is a routine procedure, Mr. Lexington. Dr. Patel has performed hundreds of these ablations.”

Routine. Right.

Nothing about having your heart’s electrical system deliberately burned feels routine. Nothing about lying unconscious while strangers thread catheters through your arteries feels normal. Nothing about waking up alone because you were too proud to admit you needed someone feels manageable.

148 BPM. 152.

The beeping gets more insistent.

“I’m going to give you something to help you relax.” She’s already preparing a syringe. “Just a mild sedative to take the edge off.”

I want to tell her I don’t need it. That I can handle this the same way I handle everything else—through sheer force of will and carefully controlled breathing. That I’ve been managing crisis situations since I was nineteen, and this is just another problem that needs solving.

But my heart rate keeps climbing—158, 162—and I know that if I don’t get it under control, they’ll delay the procedure. Start asking questions about stress levels and emotional support and whether I’m really ready for this.

Questions I can’t answer without revealing that I’m here alone by choice, not circumstance.

“Go ahead,” I say.

The medication hits my bloodstream like warm honey, and the sharp edges of panic start to soften. My heart rate begins to drop back toward something resembling normal, and the beeping becomes less urgent.

Better. More manageable.

But it doesn’t change the fundamental truth of what I’ve done.

I’m about to undergo major cardiac surgery, and the person who loves me most in the world doesn’t even know I’m in danger.

“Much better.” She checks the monitors. “Dr. Patel will be right in.”

She leaves, and I’m alone again with the steady rhythm of machines and the growing haze of sedatives that make thinking feel like swimming through molasses.

I should have told her.

The thought hits me with crystalline clarity despite the drugs coursing through my system.

I should have told Ainsley about the surgery, about the risks, about the fact that my heart has been trying to quit on me for months.

I should have trusted her to handle it, to be strong enough to sit in a waiting room while strangers try to fix me.

Instead, I chose control. I chose the illusion of protecting her over the reality of letting her love me through something difficult.

And now I’m here alone, about to lose consciousness, with regret as my final coherent thought.

The door opens again. Dr. Patel this time, looking professional and confident in his surgical scrubs.

“How are we feeling, Maverick?”

“Ready,” I lie.

He runs through the procedure one more time—insertion points, duration, recovery expectations. All information I already know, but I nod along anyway because it gives me something to focus on besides the growing weight of the sedatives.

“Any last questions?”

Just one: What happens to the people you love when you die alone because you were too stubborn to admit you needed them?

But that’s not really a medical question.

“I’m good,” I tell him.

“Excellent. We’ll have you back here in a few hours, and that heart of yours will be running like clockwork.”

Clockwork. Like all the mechanical precision I’ve spent years building around myself is somehow going to transfer to the organ keeping me alive.

The surgical team arrives—more scrubs, more efficiency, more people who see me as a procedure rather than a person. They release the brakes on my bed and start wheeling me toward the OR, and the ceiling tiles blur together as we move down the hallway.

The sedatives are pulling me under now, making everything soft and distant. But even as consciousness starts to slip away, one thought cuts through the pharmaceutical haze with brutal clarity:

I should have told her.

I should have trusted Ainsley with the truth instead of trying to protect her from it. Should have let her decide whether she could handle watching me go through this instead of making that choice for her.

Should have remembered that love isn’t about controlling the variables—it’s about facing them together.

But it’s too late now.

The OR doors swing open, and I’m swallowed by bright lights and sterile efficiency. Someone places a mask over my face and tells me to count backward from ten, and the world starts to fade around the edges.

Ten... nine... eight...

The last thing I think before the anesthesia takes me completely is that if I don’t wake up from this, Ainsley will spend the rest of her life thinking I died lying to her.

Seven... six...

And that’s a regret I’ll carry into whatever comes next.

Five... four...

The darkness takes me, and for the first time in years, I’m not in control of anything.

Three... two...

One.