Cooper, less than satisfied with this assumption, shakes his head. He restlessly leans forward and rubs his hands over the tops of his thighs. “They said they would update us regularly. I’ll go see if I can find someone who knows what’s going on.” Then he’s up, and his determined steps echo loudly down the hall until he reaches the nurse’s station.
Caia watches him go, clocking the tight line of his shoulders, the rigidness of his neck. He is a rope pulled taut, nearing thepoint of splitting in two. She knocks her shoe into the toe of Crew’s boot. He blinks up at her, an eyebrow slightly kinked. “How is he?” she asks him, nodding in the direction in which Cooper disappeared.
“You know,” he says, his mouth tightening. “Trying to hold it together. Failing.”
“What happened?” she asks, looking between her father and brother. “You didn’t exactly give me a full rundown on the phone.”
Crew looks at their father, who is staring sightlessly at the carpeted floor of the waiting room. His eyes are blank, dull abysses. Shallow oceans of blue, a stark contrast to the richness, the vibrancy that typically lives within them.
“I don’t remember a lot of it,” he says finally, his voice sounding far away. “Not in any real detail. But someone ran us off the road on our way out of Victoria.”
A bulky, impenetrably twisted knot forms in Caia’s stomach. “Someone—” She shakes her head quickly, trying to make sense of this nonsensical development. “Someone did this on purpose? Why?”
Clint reels backward like he’s been stung. Crew tenses, and Caia realizes he’s trembling, but it’s more of a rigid vibration, as though born not out of nerves and fear but complete fury. He looks ahead, over her shoulder, and his eyes are full of all the answers she seeks. All the answers it clearly pains him to utter.
“Crew,” Caia says firmly, her glare unrelenting, beckoning him to look at her. Talk to her. He flicks his eyes back to hers.
“Tell me what’s going on. Why would somebody want to hurt us like this?”
Crew looks down, refusing to meet her stare, and when he speaks, his voice is gravelly, equal parts pained and pissed off. Ittakes him a good thirty seconds of gathering himself before he finally says, “There’s a lot you don’t know. A lot that I don’t really want to get into until we know Mom’s okay.”
Caia doesn’t push him after that, and for a long, long while, they sit in the waiting room in tense, complete silence. Cooper returns after half an hour, having walked around the hospital badgering doctors and nurses alike until he was able to track down someone who knew of their mother’s current state.
“It could be hours more,” he tells them, slumping back into his seat. “The damage is…” He bites the inside of his cheek—a tell Caia knows means he is on the verge of tears. “It’s extensive. They said we should all try to get some rest and they’ll find us as soon as they have news.”
It’s not what any of them want to hear. Clint has to physically put a hand on Caia’s shoulder to stop her from pesteringmore, to figure out a more specific, concrete timeline. He explains to her in his most soothing, fatherly voice that in these types of situations, sometimes concrete timelines aren’t possible.
With nothing left to do but wait—impatient, terrified, and exhausted—the three Caldwell kids and their father all fall asleep in the waiting room, curled up uncomfortably into hard vinyl chairs.
Caia dreams of too many things too quickly to remember anything in vivid detail, but one scene stands apart, sharper than the rest: an SUV, destroyed beyond recognition, the taillights flashing in a horrible cadence, telling a story through their blinking of a remarkable woman, twisted up and destroyed, ripped limb from limb until all that remains is an unrecognizable blur of skin.
Chapter 23
Rocks pop and ricochet beneath the tires as Bellamy’s truck crawls through Braxton, and with every inch gained toward the bunkhouse, Grace can feel herself slowly reverting into the urchinly teenager she once was. A wiry, malnourished beanpole of a girl, all knees and elbows and dirty fingernails. She remembers baring her teeth when she first arrived anytime someone would get too close. A feral animal in a cage, fending off fascinated spectators.
As an adult, she understands now that kind of resistance is futile. With years of experience at Braxton under her belt, she knows intimately how much easier it is to just let them look, let them laugh, to remove the bars of the cage and let them poke and prod her. Better to give them what they want than have them snarling and starving over the thrill of the chase.
The thought of walking back into that all-too-familiar pit of hyenas makes her sick to her stomach, and when they pull up to the bunkhouse, Trey is already waiting for them, cocksure and grinning. At the sight of him, Grace nearly doubles over and pukes.
“Well, well, well,” Trey says in a menacing, singsong voice when the truck comes to a halt and Grace pushes the passengerdoor open. “If it isn’t Gracie Lou. Back from the dead.” He closes in as Grace’s heels sink into the gravel, indecorous as ever without a bit of regard for her personal space. He stands over her, staring down his nose at her with those empty blue eyes.
Grace holds his glare, even when his lips distort into a smirk and he huffs out a quick, barking laugh.
“Couldn’t stay away for long, could you?”
Grace feels the skin beneath her left eye start to twitch, but she doesn’t relent in maintaining eye contact with him. Best to show him right out of the gate that she will no longer bow to this false king. This detestable mountebank. “No place like home,” she deadpans.
Trey’s smirk blooms into a soulless, unsettling grin. “You missed me, didn’t ya?” He winks, reaching out to chuck her shoulder with his fist. Just shy of too hard.
Grace hums a vague assent, walking around the truck and reaching in for her bag. Bellamy’s dismounting the driver’s side and hobbling over to where they stand, lighting a fresh cigarette as he approaches. “Y’all get done what needed to get done?” he asks Trey.
Trey doesn’t look away from Grace as he answers. His smile only grows, stretching out to either end of his face in a way that looks almost painful. “ ’Course we did, boss.” His eyes flicker down her body, spending a second too long at her breasts, the tops exposed by her tank top. “It’s Gracie’s homecoming party, after all.”
At this, Bellamy snorts. “Good.” Gesturing toward the backpack slung over her shoulder, he says, “Take her shit.”
He must read the flash of confusion on her face as Trey rips her bag away, because he smiles and holds her eyes, as if daringher to question his command. It’s a rare sight, that smile—easily the most off-putting of all his expressions, because having to look at his teeth without the cover of his lips is the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Rotten, so yellow they’re nearly brown, uneven and crowded. Neglected and ruined to the point that he’ll have none left by the time he dies. In their place will be only a gaping, putrid maw. A vitriolic black hole.
“Let’s go,” Bellamy says, and he doesn’t wait for her to follow before he’s walking away, flicking a tube of cigarette ash into the brown, overgrown grass.
