“Is that a… combat knife?” I asked.
“Yep,” Jax said as he set it on the ground at his feet.
“I need a gurney in here! Someone help me, please!” I exclaimed.
“They won’t help me,” Rachel grunted. shivering violently against me.
“You’re in a hospital,” I groaned as the metal double doors burst wide open. “They don’t have a choice but to treat you.”
“Come on, let’s get you onto this thing,” Jax said, lifting Rachel’s limp body into his arms.
I watched as he placed my twin sister down onto that gurney. Nurses were pale in the face and the doctors had obviously been crying, but the second her body touched down onto that rolling hospital bed, they whisked her away. Silence blanketed my ears as I followed them. I followed them through the metal double doors as the disinfectant of the hospital filled my nostrils. Machines beeped wildly. I watched them set I.V.s and place an oxygen mask over my sister’s face.
“She’s got hemophilia!” I called out after them.
One of the doctors scanned his card before a machine-automated door popped open, and as I tried to follow them inside, someone placed their hand on my chest. I expected Jax to be standing there when I followed the arm, but instead I found a scrub nurse standing there in a bloodied outfit.
“We can take it from here,” he said.
So, with a silent nod of my head, I turned to head back toward Jax.
Except, he wasn’t where I had left him when I got back out into the waiting room.
“Ma’am, you need to come with us.”
Two police officers came from out of nowhere and scooped my arms up. “Has anyone seen a man in a white t-shirt and blue jeans?”
“Just come outside with us. We need your statement.”
I craned my head over my shoulder, but Jax was nowhere in sight. “Seriously, his name is Jax. I came in with him. Where is he?”
“It’s okay, ma’am, just come with us. We can get you whatever it is that you need.”
I yanked away from the police officers just as they led me out of the E.R. “What I need is the man I was with when I came in. Now, where is he? What did you do with him?”
“What man?” one of the officers asked.
His question filled me with dread. My stomach sank to my toes and my heart leapt into my throat as I shoved my way through the growing crowd. People collapsed in tears and clung to those they loved while nurses and doctors alike bounced from crowd to crowd, taking vitals, and checking over wounds. I scanned the parking lot, looking for any sign that Jax had made a break for it. Maybe he wanted to get back to the guys once he knew Rachel was no longer a threat, just to stay beneath the police’s radar. But when I stood on my tiptoes and gazed over at the dark corner of shrouded trees they had parked beneath, I found no one sitting there.
No bikes.
No Jax.
No men.
“Brielle?”
Oh, my God. Where did my boys go?
“Brielle.”
They wouldn’t have just abandoned me like that. Not after what we had all shared. Not after they made me fall in love with them.
Right?
“Brielle! Honey! Over here!”
28
