The shooter being at fault for both boys’ deaths had made a terrible kind of sense, a clean line of cause and effect in this blood-soaked chaos. But the reality that the older brother may have been the hit-and-run driver? That twisted everything into a grotesque knot that Axel's mind couldn't untangle. His thoughts scattered like cockroaches under sudden light, scrambling for the safety of a simpler explanation.
The shooter is to blame—for both boys.Whether directly or indirectly, the shooter was the reason for the two innocent lives lost. This truth felt like the only solid ground in a world suddenly made of quicksand.
As Axel and Clint passed through the hospital parking lot near the ER entrance, the cowboy pointed out the hit-and-run car, parked haphazardly across two slots, its rear end jutting into the driving lane. They approached the vehicle cautiously, as if it might still harbor residual violence. Clint double-checked the license plate number against the one in his phone. But it wasn’t necessary; the dent in the right front fender and traces of blood smearing the warped metal told its own story.
“Jesus,” Clint whispered, his voice barely audible over the distant ambulance siren as he peered inside the car.
“What?” Axel leaned forward, his breath fogging the glass. Night had settled in, but the sickly yellow glow from overhead halogen lamps infiltrated the vehicle's interior, illuminating a horror scene. “Fuck…” Axel's throat constricted, acid rising as he registered the passenger seat—once beige fabric now saturated with dark, coagulating blood that had pooled, then congealed in the seat's creases. Handprints smeared the dashboard and door handle, desperate fingers having clutched at anything solid. Clint's words echoed in his mind with terrible clarity:A panicked kid… trying desperately to save his dying brother.
Axel felt numb as they entered the ER waiting room, his legs moving mechanically across the scuffed linoleum floor. Night pressed against the outside of the large windows—the blinds half closed, their plastic slats yellowed with age—and turned the glass into warped mirrors, reflecting the occupants' grief back at them in fragmented, distorted images.
The first thing Axel registered was the screaming... raw and primal, echoing from deeper within the hospital, beating against the double-hinged doors separating the waiting room from the ER nurse's station on the other side. A chill ran through him, skittering up his vertebrae one by one and prickling the hairs on the back of his neck until they stood on end. He recognized the cries;the woman from the street. The wail of grief was so profound it could split the soul asunder. A cry every human heart feared to make, the sound of someone's world ending in real time.
The wails halted Axel in his tracks, paralyzing him. For a terrifying instant, it was hisownscreams ricocheting through the hospital as he hovered over his son’s dead body. He felt sick, thought he might puke. He almost turned and ran—fleeingthosescreamsthat scared the fuck out of him. His heart hammered against his ribs, and his head felt light. They were the same screams that had echoed in his head when Clint had disappeared a few months ago, and he’d thought he’d lost him forever.
Clint paused beside him, his hand finding Axel's elbow. “Axel?” His deep, southern-laced voice cracked slightly, revealing his own visceral reaction to the mother's anguished cries. What Axel was feeling—Clint was surely feeling a thousand times more intensely, the memories etched into the lines around his eyes. He had been with Rodriguez as the young man cradled Greco—the love of his life—while he died in his arms. Clint had been present, hearing the primal screams that only the loss of aloved one can wrench from the deepest part of the human soul, sounds that leave permanent scars on everyone within earshot.
“I’m…”Okay?He wasn’t. Axel didn’t know if he would ever be okay again after this day. The horrifying image of the boy being struck by the car… it would play on a forever loop in his head. And every time thefilmrolled—it would be Luke’s face he saw. He cleared his throat and started forward without saying anything more.
They reached the doors that led into the main ER corridor before he registered thesobbingcoming from the corner of the waiting room; deep, wrenching sobs that matched the devastation of the mother from the street, if not the volume. Axel looked around, and his gaze fell on the sobbing woman—the same woman who had rushed past him down the apartment stairwell.
The boy was shot in the chest. He’s in critical condition. Devlin said that he isn’t expected to make it.
It took a moment for Axel to register that she wasn't alone. A boy of eighteen or nineteen sat beside her on the cushioned, upholstered chair, his raw-knuckled hands resting limply on his jean-clad thighs, trembling with the fine, constant vibration of shock. Rust-colored blood caked his hands, arms, and the full front of his once-white T-shirt, with copper-brown smears on his hollow cheeks and matted in his jet-black hair. His eyes—bloodshot and sunken into purple-shadowed sockets—stared into a void too vast to comprehend, slightly flickering as he watched his own nightmare play on a merciless loop.
The woman clung to him, her sobs shaking them both. Between ragged, hiccupping cries, broken prayers slipped out—“Please… don’t take my baby… please… save him…”
Was the boy still alive? Stillclingingto life?
Maybe there’s a chance. Doctors don’t know everything—
The outer entrance door to the waiting room slammed open with such force that the blinds rattled against the windows. A barrel-chested man in a grease-stained work shirt burst through, his steel-toed boots pounding across the tile like thunder. Axel caught only a glimpse of his face—granite-hard with clenched jaw but eyes wild with terror—before the man's shoulder clipped him hard, sending Axel stumbling backward into Clint's solid chest. The man crashed through the ER doors, the hinges protesting with a metallic shriek as he bellowed, voice breaking with desperation:“Where is he?! Where is my SON?!”
CHAPTER 3
Dan Brown's bellowing voice died mid-syllable as his wife's wailing screams echoed through the antiseptic hallways. Everything inside him—bones, muscle, resolve—liquefied into a cold dread that pooled in his gut.“Nora!”he cried, his voice cracking, and barreled toward the sound of his wife's devastating cries.“Nora!”He shoved past nurses in seafoam scrubs and white-coated staff who tried to calm him with outstretched palms. Their faces blurred into meaningless flesh-colored ovals as he bulldozed through. His heavy work boots thundered down the wide corridor, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and casting his desperate shadow in multiples across the gleaming linoleum.“Nora! Jamie!”
Mr. Brown, there’s an emergency call from the hospital. Your son’s been in an accident.
An accident. There was no other information—howbadlywas his son hurt? Was he okay? Was he…?
The utterdevastationin his wife’s screams ripped through him, demolishing his world, and bringing it to ruin… because he already knew the answer to those questions. A mother didn’t make those sounds when her child wasokay.
No-no-no… not my son… not my Jamie… no, God… please, no…
“Nora!”Dan swiped at the heavy curtains covering the ER exam rooms, the metal rollers screeching along the overhead track. He zigzagged back and forth down the corridor, leaving a wake of fluttering fabric. The antiseptic smell burned his nostrils as he ripped open another sea-foam green curtain and froze. His wife's name died on his lips when he saw her—honey-blonde hair matted with sweat, shoulders heaving with each sob—slumped over a gurney, over abodycovered by a white sheet… blood staining the crisp fabric.
Dan began to shake—a mountain crumbling beneath a massive earthquake. A muscle in his jaw spasmed, his stubbled chin quivering uncontrollably. His head twitched left-right-left as his mind rejected the scene before him, refusing to process this sudden, new reality he couldn't possibly inhabit. His big, calloused hands—weathered from twenty years of construction work, strong as an ox—curled into tight fists at his sides, squeezing until his knuckles turned bone white and thick blue veins snaked up his forearms.
His Adam's apple bobbed a few times as he struggled to speak, the knot in his throat working like a piston beneath the stubble of his unshaven neck. “Jamie…” The name fell from his lips in a terrified whisper that seemed to echo off the sterile walls, yet was somehow deafening to his own ears, drowning out the hospital's mechanical hum.
Nora clung to the form beneath the sheet, her raw-throated screams rising to deafening pitches that made the fluorescent lights seem to flicker, then falling to shuddering sobs that wracked her slight frame, and rising again like a terrible tide. Crimson blood—now darkening to rust—stained her trembling hands and the front of her powder-blue blouse. Her honey hair—always so carefully pinned in a neat chignon—hung in loose, haphazard strands around her ashen face, as if she'd been ripping at it with desperate fingers.
“My baby…”Nora's cries had bottomed out into trembling sobs that seemed to come from somewhere deep beneath her ribs. Her body strained forward over the gurney, as if physically unable to separate from what lay beneath.“My baby…”
Dan's work boots squeaked against the sickly green tile as he lurched toward the gurney, his hands already reaching. Nora'sbloodshot eyes widened with fresh horror as she whirled toward him, her honey-blonde hair whipping across her tear-streaked face. She flung herself at his chest, fingers splaying desperately across the oil-stained cotton of his shirt.
“No... no, Dan...”she cried, her voice breaking. Her slight frame trembled violently against him as she tried to anchor him in place.“Don't look... don't look at him... don't...”Her face burrowed into his chest, leaving wet smears on the faded blue fabric. Her fingernails caught in the threads as she clawed at him, leaving tiny pulled threads in their wake.“Don't, baby... don't look... don't... don't...”
