Chapter 3 - The Wolves Gather
The debridement took forty-five minutes.
Dr. Arthur Vance, who had been the Holloway family’s private physician for thirty years and an old friend of Grant’s late father, did not sugarcoat the reality. He administered five milligrams of morphine through an IV butterfly in Lydia’s hand, but even through the chemical fog, the sensation of sterile saline washing away dead skin and peeling the remaining silk fibers from her flesh made her bite down on a rolled washcloth until her gums bled.
Grant never left the bathroom.
He held her right hand—the less injured one—clamped between both of his, letting her squeeze his knuckles until the bones ground together. He didn't look away from the wounds once. He watched every sweep of the surgical gauze, his face set in stone, his eyes dark and hollow.
“Second-degree partial-thickness across sixty percent of the left forearm,” Dr. Vance said, taping down the final layer of silver-impregnated dressing with practiced efficiency. “Splatter burns on the right are superficial partial-thickness. You got lucky, young lady. Another three seconds in that boiling fat, or an infection from waiting another twelve hours, and we’d be talking about full-thickness tissue necrosis and skin grafts from your thigh.”
Lydia was floating on the edge of the morphine now, the sharp, blinding knives of pain dulled into a heavy, thrumming vibration. Her arms were swathed in thick white cotton from knuckles to elbows, smelling sharply of medicinal silver and petroleum base.
“She stays in bed for seventy-two hours,” Vance told Grant as he packed his surgical instruments into his leather bag. “Oral antibiotics every eight hours. High protein, plenty of fluids. I’ll return on Sunday to change the dressings. If she develops a fever above 101, you call me immediately, night or day.”
“Thank you, Arthur,” Grant said quietly.
Vance paused by the bathroom door, looking at the young woman resting against the pillows on the master bed where Grant had transferred her, then back to the billionaire whose family he had known for three decades.
“Grant,” Vance said in a low voice. “Celeste called my wife twenty minutes ago. She is beside herself. She’s calling an emergency meeting of the Holloway Foundation executive board for tomorrow morning at the Drake Hotel. She intends to invoke the morality clause in the family bylaws—claiming you displayed violent, erratic behavior in front of guests and endangered the family’s public standing.”
Grant didn't blink. “Let her hold the meeting.”
“She’s looking for blood, son. She thinks this girl is an opportunist who staged an accident to humiliate Brielle.”
A cold, humorless smile touched the corner of Grant’s mouth. “Then my mother has completely lost whatever remained of her mind. Go home to your wife, Arthur. I’ll see you Sunday.”
When the doctor’s car rolled down the driveway, the manor fell into an eerie, cavernous quiet.
The rain outside had turned to sleet, rattling against the tall leaded-glass windows of the second-story suite. Grant returned to the master bedroom, carrying a glass of ice water with a silicone straw. He pulled an armchair to the side of the bed, sat down, and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.
Lydia was staring at the ceiling, her eyes heavy lidded from the narcotics.
“You came to the diner,” she whispered, her voice slow and thick. “Every Tuesday and Thursday.”
“Booth four,” Grant said softly. “Behind the pie carousel. I always ordered black coffee and the rye toast. You never looked at my face for more than three seconds because you were always trying to balance three ticket orders while wiping down the counter.”
“I remember booth four,” she murmured, a faint, sleepy frown creasing her brow. “The man with the dark coat who read the *Financial Times* on an iPad. You never left a tip under twenty dollars.”
“You always gave half of it to the busboy whose mother had diabetes,” Grant said.
Lydia turned her head on the pillow, looking at him through the dim light of the single bedside lamp. “Why, Grant? Why would someone like you care about a girl drowning in grease and payroll taxes?”
Grant looked down at his own palms, his broad fingers still faintly stained with the dark grease from the turkey platter he had caught.
“Sixteen months ago, my father died in a hotel room in Zurich,” Grant said slowly, each word weighted with old, bitter iron. “The official release said cardiac arrest. The reality was an overdose of prescription stimulants and alcohol, in the company of a twenty-two-year-old woman he had put on the payroll of our European subsidiary.”
Lydia’s eyes widened slightly.
“The family covered it up,” Grant continued. “Mother spent four hundred thousand dollars in legal hush money within forty-eight hours to keep it out of the papers. Brielle went on a shopping spree in Paris to celebrate inheriting her trust fund early. And I spent three weeks going through my father’s personal safe in the Chicago office.”
He looked up, meeting Lydia’s gaze.
“My father had a partner forty years ago. Before Holloway Logistics went public. A man who owned three delivery trucks and a warehouse in Cicero. A man who put up his own house as collateral so my father could secure his first bank loan.”
Lydia’s breath caught in her chest. “My father.”
“Thomas Ward,” Grant said. “When the company went public in 1989, my father executed a reverse stock split that squeezed out the minority holders who didn't have high-priced corporate attorneys to protect their dilution rights. Thomas Ward was left with forty-two thousand dollars for an equity stake that was worth twenty-eight million on the opening bell.”
Lydia closed her eyes as a wave of cold comprehension washed over her. “My dad never talked about it. He just... he always hated logistics companies. He wouldn't even let us order things online if they came by freight.”
“Your father was an honest man who didn't understand that men like Reginald Holloway view honesty as an exploitable weakness,” Grant said, his voice raw. “When your father’s trucking business began failing four years ago, he didn't come to Holloway Enterprises for a handout. He went to private lenders because his pride was the only thing my family hadn't stolen from him yet. When he died, and I found the original 1982 partnership ledger in the safe, I realized the blood on my family’s hands wasn't metaphorical. It was real.”
“So I was a debt,” Lydia whispered, a sudden, sharp ache in her chest that had nothing to do with her burned arms. “A guilt payment.”
“At first,” Grant admitted, his dark eyes unwavering. “I told myself I would buy the debt, set you up in a condo on the Gold Coast, and give you an annuity. But then I sat in that booth. I watched you work eighty hours a week with a smile on your face, taking care of elderly customers, protecting your staff, never complaining, never asking the world for a single break it wasn't willing to give you.”
He reached across the space between the chair and the bed, his fingers hovering just above the white bandages on her wrist, not daring to press down.
“I realized,” Grant said, his voice dropping to a whisper, “that if I just gave you money, you would reject it. And if I left you there, you would work yourself to death to pay back men who didn't deserve a nickel. So I created a cage that looked like a business deal. I thought... I thought I could keep you safe here. Away from the world that had spent forty years taking everything from you.”
He looked around the cavernous, opulent bedroom, his jaw tight.
“And instead, I brought you into a snake pit.”
Lydia looked at the bandages covering her arms. The pain was still there, a low, thrumming beast beneath the narcotics, but for the first time in six months, the cold, hollow terror in her stomach was gone.
“Grant,” she said softly.
He looked up.
“Brielle didn't just bump into me with that door,” Lydia said, the morphine loosening her tongue, peeling back the silence she had kept all afternoon. “She saw me holding the pan. She looked right through the safety window in the swing door. She kicked it open hard because she was angry I wouldn't leave the kitchen to go steam her dress for dinner.”
Grant’s eyes went dead.
Not angry. Not heated.
Dead.
“She looked at you?” he asked.
“She looked right at me,” Lydia whispered, her eyelids finally fluttering down as the heavy tide of sleep pulled her under. “She knew I was holding it.”
Grant sat completely motionless beside the bed until her breathing leveled out into the deep, rhythmic pattern of exhausted slumber.
Then he stood up, walked out into the corridor, and pulled out his phone.
“Marcus,” Grant said into the line.
“Yes, Mr. Holloway?”
May you like
“Call the Chicago Police Department, Lake County Sheriff’s Annex. Ask for Detective Miller. Tell him I am filing a formal criminal complaint for aggravated battery causing severe bodily harm against Brielle Holloway. And call the city desk at the *Chicago Tribune*. Tell them I have an exclusive statement regarding the Holloway Foundation board of directors.”
***
