Page 54 of Branded

I can’t speak for a moment.

Then I put my hand very carefully on the side of his face, and I say, “Say it again when you’re not bleeding.”

He looks almost hopeful.

“Is that a no?”

“It’s a chain-of-custody concern,” I say, and my voice cracks right down the middle. “I want to make sure the statement wasn’t made under duress.”

He laughs. It hurts him. He does it anyway, and puts his forehead against my collarbone, and I stand there holding his head against me in a rural clinic with his blood still under my fingernails, and I don’t let myself cry, but it’s close.

The receptionist taps on the half-open door.

“Mr. McCall. I refused a request for your medical information. The caller said he was Russell McCall. He wanted to know whether you’re fit to attend tomorrow’s family vote.”

Garrett lifts his head. He looks at me.

Russell knows which clinic I chose.

Chapter 18

Garrett

At 4:28 in the morning, I discover that a sling turns a clean shirt into an engineering problem.

The clinic let me go after midnight with twelve stitches in my right arm, a shoulder that won’t lift its own weight, and a sheet of instructions Tessa has read more carefully than I have. She drove us back. Mercer inspected the suite and kept the case. She kept her own keys.

I slept in her bed because she asked me to. She slept beside me because she chose to. Neither fact has improved my ability to get my right hand through a sleeve.

The fabric catches at my wrist. Pain runs from the front of my shoulder up into my neck, hard enough that I stop before the stitches pull. I’m standing next to the bed in unbuttoned trousers when she turns on the lamp.

“What movement did the clinic allow?” she asks.

“Elbow and wrist. Nothing away from the body. Sling when I walk.”

She checks the sheet on the nightstand. “That’s what the paper says too. Useful coincidence.”

She gets out of bed in the shirt she stole from me three nights ago and looks at the untouched pain pills. “Sit.”

I sit on the edge of the mattress. She gathers the sleeve in both hands and feeds my bad arm through without lifting the shoulder, brings the shirt around my back, threads my left arm, and buttons from the bottom so her knuckles never touch the dressing.

Letting someone dress you shouldn’t take trust. My father made needing help into an admission that somebody had found where to hurt you. I’ve spent twenty years making sure no ordinary task ever gave anybody that information.

She does the top button. “You look angry at the shirt.”

“It knows too much.”

Her mouth moves. “Should I threaten it?”

“You’d document the threat first.”

“Naturally.” She picks up the sling but doesn’t put it on me. “You have five hours before the vote. Why are you getting dressed now?”

“Russell called that clinic before I knew he knew where we were. I want the portal checked again, the drivers questioned, the conference room swept.”

“Cole has the security list. Counsel has the portal. Mercer has the phone record.”

“I know.”