Page 51 of Temptress
24
SLOANE
He took the phone from my hand and shook his head on a chuckle at the sight of Kim’s name. If I hadn’t talked to Kim myself a couple times on FaceTime when she and Darcy were catching up, I might have been intimidated by just how good Silas’s and her relationship was. But she was the sweetest person, and I never once got the impression there was anything between her and Silas other than mutual respect and friendship. Really, I was just so happy that the two of them were still as close as they were for Darcy’s sake.
He swiped to answer and brought it to his ear. “Christ, woman. You miss me that much?”
I couldn’t hear what she was saying on the other end of the call, but from the way Silas’s entire body locked up and the color leached from his face, it wasn’t good.
I sat up straight, feeling my muscles tighten as he spoke. “Whoa, hold on, sweetheart. Just calm down. What’s going on?”
Something shifted in the atmosphere then, making the air in the room go electric, and the energy pouring off Silas was ice cold.
The breath froze in my lungs and the edges of my vision started to close in when I heard him ask, “What the fuck are you talking about? What hospital?”
A second later he was on the move, grabbing his clothes scattered around my bedroom and yanking them on in a hurry as he continued to listen to whatever Kim was saying on the other end of the call.
I jumped into action too, getting dressed while keeping an eye on him the whole time, trying desperately to gage what was going on.
Once Silas was dressed, he stopped and bent his head forward, raking his fingers though his hair. “Fuck!” he barked so loud it made me jump. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Okay. Yeah. I hear you. I’m on my way now. Fuck, Kim. I’m so goddamn sorry.” He paused, his eyes rimming red at whatever she was saying. “Yeah, got it. I’ll let you know the second I figure out what the hell is going on.”
Without another word, he ended the call and stuffed the phone into his back pocket. Turning on the heel of his boot, he moved faster than I’d ever seen him move before, shooting out of my room and down the stairs.
I had to run to keep up with him.
“Baby, what’s going on? What happened? Is Darcy okay?”
“I don’t know,” he said on a growl as he took the stairs two at a time. I tripped in my desperation to keep up and nearly cartwheeled the rest of the way down.
“Silas,” I called when he hit the landing, and I had to pick up the pace to get in front of him, placing my hands on his chest to make him stop. “Honey, take a breath and tell me what’s going on.”
He interlaced his fingers and brought his hands to rest on the top of his head. In the months I’d known him, I’d never seen him look how he did just then. He looked terrified and manic. Like he didn’t know if he needed to run or puke his guts up in a trash can. Possibly both. “Half those fucking calls I ignored were from the school. When they couldn’t reach me, they called Kim. All they were able to tell her was that there was an accident at cheer practice and they had to call an ambulance to take my girl to the emergency room.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and slapped my hands over my mouth.
“Oh my god,” I breathed as fear tore at my chest. “Is—is she okay?”
“I don’t fucking know!” he barked, his expression turning desolate. “I don’t know because I ignored the goddamn calls.” He grabbed me by the arms and shifted me out of the way so I was no longer blocking the door. “Sloane, I have to go. I have to get to her. Jesus, she’s probably scared out of her mind.”
“I’m going with you.” I snatched my purse from the hook just inside my front door and followed him out, yanking the door closed behind me.
“Sloane, I don’t have time to argue—”
I pinned him with a hard look. “Then don’t. There’s no point, because the outcome won’t change. I’m going with you, and that’s all there is to it.” Then I walked past him to his SUV. Just as I reached the passenger door, he beeped the locks, and I didn’t hesitate to climb right in.
The ride to the hospital was eerily quiet and fraught with so much tension; the air in the cab of Silas’s SUV was thick enough to be cut with a knife. I was so worried about Darcy, I didn’t know what to say to make him feel better. When we finally made it to the hospital, he whipped the car into the first spot he saw, barely putting it into park before climbing out and racing toward the emergency entrance. I ran after him, reaching his side just as he barked out his daughter’s name to the poor woman sitting behind the help desk. Once we were signed in, we were directed to a waiting room.
I held Silas’s hand as he moved down the long, sterile-smelling corridor, and there was no missing the way it felt like a block of ice, or that his hand remained limp in mine.
When we made it to the waiting room, I spotted two women, one about my age who wore a T-shirt in Darcy’s school colors that read Cheer Coach on the front, and the other slightly younger, her shirt stating she was the assistant coach. There were a handful of other girls in the room, huddled together in chairs with matching expressions of worry, and I could tell by what they were wearing that they were from Darcy’s squad.
“Hi,” the older woman said the second she spotted us. She stood up and moved toward us, her hand extended to Silas. “I’m Coach Wallace. Are you Darcy’s dad?”
Silas nodded his head, his movements wooden as he took the woman’s hand and gave it a shake.
“Yeah. Can you tell me what happened?”
I listened, the color draining from my face as she explained that they were working on a new routine in which Darcy was a flyer. Something went wrong partway through a stunt, girls moved the wrong way, so instead of being at the bottom to cradle Darcy’s landing, there had been no one to catch her as she fell. She hit the mat at a bad angle, breaking her arm.