Chapter 3

This time I didn't answer.

The air around Helena went cold. She took my jaw in her hand and turned my face until I had to look at her.

A cruel little smile pulled at her mouth.

"If you're so determined to play the bigger person, I'll give you all the room you need."

Helena shoved me into the back seat of her car.

"Felix is having surgery. You're going to look after him.

"You've taken a knife before. You've got the experience, don't you?"

My hand started shaking again, and I touched my stomach without meaning to.

There's a scar there.

I got it stepping in front of a knife meant for Helena.

First year of the marriage. Ashcroft Biomed was climbing fast, and climbing fast makes enemies.

A competitor paid someone to put her in the ground.

I took the blade instead.

At the hospital, Helena held onto me and cried like a kid.

She swore she'd spend the rest of her life being good to me.

Now she was smiling and telling me I had experience getting stabbed.

Somewhere in the fog, a message from my old mentor came through.

"Simon, the fellowship came through. It's approved.

"Don't panic. I've sent Vivian to come get you."

Something in my chest that had been drifting for a year finally caught hold of solid ground.

So I let Helena run every red light between the house and Grayhaven Medical Center.

I let her drag me into the blood-draw room.

I let her shout at the physician, "He has the same rare blood type as Felix. Take his."

I didn't make a sound.

The nurse got the needle into my vein, and then Helena told her to stop.

She bent down until we were eye to eye.

"Simon, talk. Say no. Say one word and nobody takes anything."

She knew I'd been afraid of needles since I was a kid.

She knew the sight of blood made me faint.

She brought me anyway.

For a second the face in front of me slid back into the face of the cool, guarded girl I used to know.

Helena had pulled me out from under a crew of men collecting my father's debts and run me to a clinic without stopping once.

When the nurse came at me with a needle, she covered my eyes, awkward about it.

"Don't be scared," she'd said, right against my ear. "It stops hurting in a second."

Later she emptied out savings she'd been building since grade school to clear what my father owed.

Call this the last of it, I told myself. Call it paid.

After today, neither of us would owe the other anything.

So I managed something close to a smile, looked straight at her, and said quietly, "One."

Helena shut her eyes. Her breathing went fast and shallow.

She stood up. "Fine," she said. "Fine. Fine."

Then, flatly: "Simon, you brought this on yourself."

She turned on the medical staff. "You said you needed units on reserve. Is ten enough for you?"

By the sixth tube I couldn't hold myself upright.

The physician called for a stop, and Helena snapped, "Ten. Not one less."

Her smile never got near her eyes. "My husband wants to be generous. Who am I to get in his way?"

The physician started to argue.

I patted his hand and nodded for him to keep going.

There was no point. Ashcroft money was in the walls of that hospital.

If a physician's objection meant anything there, my mother wouldn't have spent her last months waiting on medication Helena kept cutting off.

I closed my eyes and felt myself draining out a tube at a time.

My lips went white. My body started to sway.

Then the sounds came through the wall.

Felix, who wasn't supposed to be out of bed at all, called out loudly, "Helena, easy. Simon's right next door."

What answered him was a woman's breathing I knew far too well.

The curtain ripped back.

The two of them were tangled on the hospital bed, half-dressed.

Helena gave the doctors and nurses one cold look.

"Out."

In seconds the big room held nobody but the three of us.

Helena smiled, ugly with it, and put her hands on Felix where I couldn't avoid seeing.

"Keep your eyes open, Simon. You can't stand my hands on you, but there's no shortage of men who'll line up for them.

"Don't ever think you're the only one I've got."

Then she kissed him, right in front of me, like it was nothing.

She'd hung my mother's locket out over the open window. The second I shut my eyes, the last thing my mother left me was going to be gone.

When they finished, Helena threw the sheet at me.

"Get rid of that."

Felix gave me a look of manufactured embarrassment. "God, that's got all of my—

"I couldn't possibly make you wash it."

He got out of bed slowly and came over to where I stood.

He lifted the locket off the latch.

Turning it over in his fingers, smiling.

"Weren't you the one telling everybody this thing keeps people safe? Then why is my heart acting up again with it on me?

"I was going to give it back to you. But I think it's picked up something dirty.

"Let me take care of it for you."

"No—"

Felix flicked the locket out the window.