Behind him, just inside the doorway, Brooke stands frozen.
Her hands are clenched in the fabric of her hoodie. Her face is pale, eyes glassy, like she’s been holding herself together by pure willpower and one wrong word will shatter her.
None of them look relieved. That’s when it hits me. Bri. “Where the fuck is she?” My voice comes out wrecked, raw like I’ve been screaming for hours. I don’t soften it. I don’t try to. “Where’s Bri?”
Brooke sucks in a sharp breath. Bella flinches. I try to push myself up again, pain be damned, panic slamming into my chest so hard my vision spots. Switch moves fast, pressing me back down with firm hands. “Blade,” he says evenly. “You’re not moving.”
“Get your fucking hands off me,” I snarl. “Where is she?”
Rev’s voice cuts in, low and dangerous. “Blade. Easy.”
“Don’t tell me easy,” I snap. “Tell me where the fuck she is.”
Bella steps forward, her composure cracking as fresh tears spill. “Blade, please. You can’t—”
“I don’t care,” I cut in. “If she’s hurt—if she’s—”
“She wasn’t there,” Bella says.
The words land wrong. Flat. Empty.
“What?” I growl.
“When we got to you,” she says quietly. “She wasn’t there.”
Cold spreads through my chest.
Brooke shakes her head slowly, like she’s been refusing to let that sentence be real this whole time.
“You don’t get to say that like it’s nothing,” I snap. “You don’t get to tell me she just vanished.”
Hawk exhales slowly. “We didn’t even know you were missing at first.”
That makes my head snap toward him.
“What?”
“We all got to Ashton,” Hawk continues. “Everyone was accounted for. Or so we thought.” His jaw tightens. “It wasn’t until Riot noticed you never showed.”
Switch nods. “Riot checked your location. That’s when we saw you’d never made it out of town.”
Rev’s hands curl into fists at his sides.
My stomach drops.
“So you went back,” I say.
“Immediately,” Hawk replies. “We found the crash site. The bike. Blood everywhere.” His voice lowers. “And you.”
Bella swallows hard. “You looked dead, Blade. Fucking dead.”
Brooke lets out a sound that’s half sob, half broken breath and turns away, pressing her forehead to the wall like she can’t watch this anymore.
I close my eyes for a second, the memory flashing in broken pieces. The gun. Bri screaming. The way her hands were slick with blood.
“Where was she?” I ask again, quieter now. Worse somehow.
“She wasn’t there,” Bella repeats. “No sign of her. No trail. Just… gone.”
