Page 114 of Red Flag
“Can I go outside?”
“Sure,” I said. “There’s a little bench over by the pond. I’ll give you a tour when you’re done.”
“Thank you,” he said, kissed me and left.
I unpacked our things before tearing down the poster and rolling it up to store away. This place was somewhere I avoided. Ben made such a good brother, the life and soul of the house as Dad had been, trying to distract me from my thoughts.
Sometimes, I worried he spent so much time worrying aboutme and Mum that he didn’t get a chance to grieve himself.
“Do mostStormSprintriders have security?” Ben asked at my door ten minutes later.
I was scrolling through my phone, lying in bed. “What?”
Ben went to the window and looked down, pointing to the pond. I sat on my heels, peering over to see Nix standing there, pacing back and forth, looking exasperated with a deep sigh and shake of his head.
“My French is rusty, but he’s definitely going on about a security issue.”
When we lived in France for months at a time for Dad’s job, Ben excelled at his French. He was always far better than me.
I shrugged, joining him. Nix was pacing up and down by the pond. “He’s having the apartment set up with a camera system in the foyer.”
“The foyer?” he asked with a blink. “God, look at you. That’s a whole world away from where you were before.”
Nix hung up and started dialling another number.
“He’s very protective,” Ben commented.
I gave him a dry look.
“What?” he asked, hands up in surrender. “I’m just saying he clearly cares about you. More than I thought. So… guess I’m here to say I’m sorry.”
“Being together isn’t easy,” I admitted. “Keeping it a secret and…I didn’t realise how jealous a person I was.”
“He is a celebrity,Liv,” he stated the obvious.
“Oh, I completely trust him,” I said with a laugh. “The man is obsessed with me, Ben. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt me when I had to see him kiss Clara.”
Nix started a third phone call.
My phone came to life on the desk that my brother and Iwere leaning over.
“Shit,” I muttered as the text fromCrislit up my screen.
CRIS: Report’s out. Emailing it to you now. As we expected, nothing bad about Nix, but the problems aren’t over.Nazmin’shandling asCiclatiissue.
I breathed a sigh of relief before loading it up to read. Then I turned to my brother. “Nix had his lawyers write up something but would you mind checking it over?”
“About what?”
“Nix is paying for a news story to go away,” I said, grateful I’d had to do nothing more than meet for an awkward catchup with Adam in the coffee shop. I’d invited Victoria to ease some of the tension and fluttered my eyelashes a little. “We’re nearly at a sum, but I wanted your opinion on what they’ve written up.”
He sat on my bed. “Send it over.”
So, he sat and read through that as I read through the report. A lot of it was technical, but it stated very clearly NixonArmaswas not at fault.Alv’sbike slid into his path, he didn’t have time to react and was catapulted off his bike.
The majority of the report was about the helmet fitting. If it had been altered, and therefore not come off, he would have been in much better shape.
It wasn’t Nix’s fault.
