The coffee table is on its side. A lamp is shattered on the floor. The TV is still on, muted, throwing blue light across the wreckage.
Once I’m in the kitchen, I scan my eyes and stop.
Leah is on the floor.
She's sitting against the cabinets with her back to the counter and her legs stretched out in front of her, with blood on her face.
A split lip, swelling already, the red smeared across her chin and the collar of her scrub top.
Her left eye is starting to darken—not a black eye yet, but it will be by morning.
Her hands are in front of her, palms up, and she's checking them the way nurses check their own hands after a trauma. Flexing fingers, testing range of motion, cataloging damage.
She's not crying. She's not shaking. She's assessing. Because that's what Leah does. She takes the hit and then she takes inventory.
But it's her eyes that stop me.
When she looks up and sees me in the kitchen doorway, what I see in her eyes isn't fear.
It's fury. Pure, incandescent, fury.
"I'm okay," she says before I can speak. "Check the girls."
"Where are they?"
"Upstairs. I sent them up when it started. Wrenleigh called you and then 911 from her room."
"Where are the men?"
"Gone. They left maybe three minutes ago. Dark SUV, no plates. Three of them." She touches her split lip and winces. "The tall one did this. He wanted to make sure I understood the message."
I'm kneeling in front of her before I realize I've moved.
My hands on her face. Careful, so careful, reading the damage the way she reads vital signs.
Split lip. Swelling around the left eye.
She rolls her jaw. Not broken, but she's going to hurt for days. I check her ribs and she flinches on the left side.
"They hit you."
"One of them did. Backhanded me when I stepped between him and the girls. I went down and he kicked me." She says it like she's giving a report. Clinical. Detached. Holding the emotion at arm's length the way she does in the ER, because if she lets it in right now, it'll take her down. "Then he shoved me against the counter and told me this was a reminder."
"A reminder."
"His words. 'Tell your boyfriend this is what happens when he plays games.'"
The ice in my chest isn't ice anymore.
It's something else.
Something that doesn't have a temperature, something that lives below cold, in the place where fathers go when someone hurts their children and the woman they love in their own home.
The place where rationality ends and something ancient and dangerous begins.
"Stay here," I say. "I need to check the girls."
"Coin." She grabs my arm. Her hand is shaking—the first sign that the adrenaline is starting to fade and the real reaction is coming. "Sadie Jo. They grabbed her arm. Hard. She's bruised."
