I ended the call before he could ask more questions and before I blurted out that I was pregnant. He didn’t need to hear that now. Or ever, I prayed.
27
Lucas
Hospitals smelled like fear, bleach, and final endings. I’d been in and out of the emergency room several times because of sports injuries, and I never liked the atmosphere it evoked. Nor did I care for all the sounds. People moaning in pain. Monitors beeping. Doctors and nurses running toward a code blue. Death hanging in the balance.
A nurse had escorted us to a quiet and private waiting room reserved for families of surgical patients an hour ago. Thank fuck because I couldn’t sit in a packed ER waiting room, listening to kids cry.
“You could’ve been killed,” my mom whispered from her seat on the other side of the room.
My amazing mother was trying to keep it together while I was ready to kill my father.
That possibility that someone would finish him off was still on the table if Kurtis didn’t settle his debt. Or worse, target my mother. Or even Mazzie, for that matter.
I did my best to wear a hole in the shiny white floor, pacing like a madman. Luckily, no one but my mom and me were in the room. After what had happened to Kurtis and that call with Mazzie, I was about to lose my shit.
The phrase we need to talk clawed at my mind, dragging me back to the dreary, rain-soaked day in high school when Natalia uttered those dreaded words right before the morning bell rang. By the end of that day, she’d broken up with me. I would never recover if Mazzie ended things between us.
But why would she? She just told you she loved you.
“Lucas, please sit. You’re making me more nervous than I already am.”
I couldn’t stay still. I needed to punch something and feel more pain than I was already in. My fucking father and his addiction.
She dabbed a tissue under her nose. “I have money to pay Mr. Blackwood.”
“I’m pretty sure his son, Shane, is behind this, not him,” I said, throwing her an angry look she didn’t deserve. “And until we know the whole story, we can’t do anything.”
Shane could be doing his father’s dirty work. Whatever the case might be, Kurtis had to shape up or else the goons would keep coming and coming until someone was dead.
“We need to call the police,” my mom said.
I ran my tongue over my split lip. “What will we tell them, Mom? We don’t know anything other than someone beat up him and me. And I don’t know the men who roughed me up.”
“You’re lucky it wasn’t anything that would ruin your football career.” She shuddered as she dipped a hand in her purse for something.
I dared not tell her that my attackers had threatened to do exactly that if Kurtis didn’t pay.
The life that we’d spent ten years rebuilding was about to be shattered because my father was still a loser.
I heard footsteps and hushed voices in the hall and one voice I knew well.
Mazzie breezed into the room, her hood falling back from her head.
One look at her swollen eyes made my heart stutter. Whatever had her upset was deep and dark. She’d mentioned her mom. Maybe she’d been beaten up in jail.
She ran straight to me. “Lucas.” Her hand flew to her mouth as she examined my face.
“I’ve taken worse hits on the field.” I wrapped my arms around her, but it didn’t ease the knot in my throat that seemed to be suffocating me. “But you? What’s going on?”
Her lips parted then pressed shut.
“Let’s take a walk,” I said.
Bailey came in and took a seat next to my mom.
“Bailey, Mazzie and I will be around the corner. Can you come get us if my dad comes out of surgery?”
