Call an Ambulance Now
Chapter 02 - Call an Ambulance Now
The ambulance arrived within nine minutes, though to Adrian, kneeling on that marble floor with his father's head cradled against his arm, it felt considerably closer to an hour.
Paramedics moved him carefully onto a backboard, checking his pupils, his pulse, calling out numbers to each other in the clipped, urgent shorthand of people trained not to waste a single word during an emergency.
"He's got a pulse," one of them said. "Weak, but there. Possible cardiac event on top of the fall. We need to move now."
Adrian rode in the ambulance, still in his tuxedo, blood from his father's split lip smeared across the sleeve of his jacket, watching the paramedics work with a specific, helpless terror he'd never once experienced in thirty-four years of a carefully controlled, comfortable life.
Rosalind followed in a car with their family driver, hands pressed to her mouth the entire ride, unable to speak, unable to do anything but stare out the window at the ambulance lights flashing ahead of them through the dark.
Bianca was left standing alone in a ballroom full of shocked, whispering guests, security escorting her, with careful, deliberate distance, toward a side room while the party dissolved entirely around her.
Marisol Vance, the Bellamy family's longtime attorney and a close personal friend of Bianca's from law school, arrived at the estate within twenty minutes of receiving Bianca's frantic, barely coherent call.
"Don't say another word to anyone until I get there," Marisol had told her over the phone, voice sharp with professional urgency. "Not to the police, not to Adrian's family, not to anyone. I mean it, Bianca."
Bianca sat in the small side room, still in her black dress, still shaking, staring at her own hands as though they belonged to someone else entirely, someone capable of the violence two hundred people had just watched her commit.
*He deserved it,* she thought, the words arriving fierce and certain even through her horror. *He deserved considerably worse than that.*
She thought of the fifteen minutes before the ballroom, the private study, Edmund's hand closing around her wrist, his voice low and confident in a way that had made her stomach turn even before he'd said a single word she could later repeat to anyone.
She hadn't told Adrian. She hadn't told anyone. She'd walked back into that ballroom instead, smiling, performing normalcy, because that was the only skill Edmund Bellamy had ever actually taught her, the specific art of pretending nothing terrible had just happened in a room full of people who would never believe her anyway.
Marisol arrived and sat across from her, expression carefully professional despite the genuine worry in her eyes.
"I need you to tell me exactly what happened," Marisol said. "Everything. Starting before the ballroom, not just the kick everyone saw."
Bianca's hands trembled as she began, haltingly at first, the words catching in her throat the way they always had whenever she'd tried, in the privacy of her own mind, to even fully name what Edmund had done.
Marisol listened without interrupting, her expression shifting from professional caution into something considerably more focused, more urgent, as the full shape of the evening finally emerged.
"Bianca," she said, once Bianca had finally finished. "This changes everything about how we handle what happens next. I need you to understand that clearly, and I need you to trust me completely on what comes next."
"Is he going to press charges," Bianca asked, voice small. "Adrian's father. For the kick."
"That's possible," Marisol said carefully. "Depending on what happens at the hospital tonight, we may be dealing with considerably more than a simple assault charge either way. I need you prepared for that reality, and I need you to let me build your defense properly, starting tonight, before anyone else gets to shape the story first."
May you like
Bianca nodded, exhausted, terrified, and underneath both, something she hadn't expected to feel at all in the wreckage of this particular night.
A small, fragile relief, at finally having said the words out loud to someone who believed her instantly, without a single flicker of doubt.
