《Too Late To Beg》全部章節：第 81 章 - 第 90 章

JAMES The past thirteen days were the longest of my life. From the moment I received that call, the one that turned my blood to ice and sent me racing across the city with my hands trembling on the steering wheel, I felt as though I were living someone else's nightmare. Tammy, injured. Tammy, unconscious. Tammy, found in the freezer storage of Sterling Hospital like a forgotten parcel, her skin so pale and so cold that the paramedics had not been entirely certain whether they were transporting a patient or a body. When I finally arrived at Sterling, the sight of her nearly broke me. She was on a gurney in the trauma bay, a bandage already wound tight around her head, her lips faintly blue, an oxygen mask covering the lower half of her face. Her hair was damp. Her skin felt like marble when I touched her hand. And Leonardo Price was standing beside her. Of course he was. The hospital staff explained, with a kind of breathless admiration, that Mr. Price had been the one to

TAMSIN After James left the hospital room, I leaned back against the pillows with my phone clutched in my hand, scrolling through the Sterling Hospital website for any update on the lead surgical oncologist position. The page refused to load properly. The signal in my private room was inconsistent at best, and the hospital wifi seemed to actively resent me. I was on my third attempted refresh when the door opened. A doctor walked in. He wore the standard pale blue scrubs of the hospital, a stethoscope draped around his neck, a surgical mask covering the lower half of his face, and a cap pulled low over his brow. Everything about him was deliberately anonymous. Except that I would have recognised those eyes anywhere on earth. I had loved them once. I had searched for them in crowds for years after they disappeared. I had memorised the precise way the corners crinkled when he laughed, the way they darkened when he was thinking, the way they softened when he looked at me. I would

TAMSIN The taxi ride back to the hospital was the longest of my life. I sat in the back seat with the folded DNA results pressed against my chest, my eyes fixed on the city lights blurring past the window, and let myself remember. The first time I had ever laid eyes on Whitney Johnson. She had been standing in a parking lot beside the wreckage of my car, her chin lifted, her eyes blazing, every line of her body radiating the kind of contempt that only the truly spoiled were capable of producing. She had crashed into me. She had stepped out of her own undamaged vehicle as though I had been the one who had wronged her. She had slapped me. And I had slapped her too. Twice. I closed my eyes against the memory. Two slaps. Two open-palmed, fully committed slaps, delivered to the face of the only blood relative I had left in this world. The face of a woman who shared my mother's bones, my father's blood, my very DNA. I had struck her hard enough to leave marks. I had wanted h

TAMSIN The courtroom destruction had felt like a beginning, not an ending. The slap had been satisfying. The phrase who the hell do you think you are had been even more so. The way the gallery had gasped, the way photographers had captured my hand connecting with his cheek, the way the judge had pretended not to notice as she had gathered her papers and exited the bench. But it had not been enough. A slap was a moment. What I needed was a reckoning. When James gripped my elbow as though he could physically hold our marriage together, I had finally let him have the second wave. "What is wrong? What did I do?" I looked at him for a long moment. Then I stepped closer, lowered my voice so that only he would hear, and said exactly what I had been planning to say since three in the morning. "You are a liar, James. You are the most disgusting man I have ever met. And whatever you thought we had, whatever future you were building in your mind, all of it is over." "Tammy,

WHITNEY The day I discovered Tammy was my sister was the worst day of my life. I had stood in that hospital corridor with two DNA tests in my trembling hands and the phone pressed to my ear while Colby confirmed, in a voice gone flat with regret, that yes, I had been adopted. Yes, they had kept it from me. Yes, the woman I had just attacked, the woman I had locked in a freezer to die, was my biological twin sister. I do not remember running with Leo to the storage room. I only remember my own voice, asking him over and over, "What have I done? Leo, what have I done?" When he opened the door and we saw her on the floor, blood pooling beneath her head, her skin the colour of old paper, I broke completely. Leo lost his composure for the first time since I had known him. He turned on me, his face contorted with a fury I had never seen on him before. "If she dies, Whitney." He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. I sank to my knees in the doorway and sobbe