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—how badly was his son hurt? Was he okay? Was he…?
The utter devastation in 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 was okay.
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 a body covered 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's bloodshot 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...”
Suddenly numb, Dan gripped her arms and moved her out of his way, his fingers leaving white impressions on her skin.
Nora wilted to the floor beside the gurney, her face buried in her hands, her cries rising again like a siren.
Shaking so badly his teeth chattered, Dan grabbed the sheet with fingers that felt disconnected from his body and yanked it back.
The mutilated image of his teenage son sent Dan sprawling backward, crashing into a metal cart of surgical instruments.
Stainless steel clattered against linoleum, the sound ricocheting off the walls and echoing into the corridor.
For a static moment, as he balanced between the reality he'd known and the one staring him in the face, he looked at his son's body as if through frosted glass—distant and unreal.
Then Jamie's familiar cowlick, still perfectly intact amid the carnage, snapped everything into focus.
A visceral rage erupted from somewhere beneath Dan's sternum, spreading like molten lead through his veins, and something primal tore from his throat—not a scream but the sound of his soul ripping in two.
“What’re you doing?” Axel couldn’t stop the shakes from vibrating through him, nor could he pull his eyes from the mother and son—his focus on the boy, who sat deathly still except for the tremor in his bloodstained hands, life gone from his eyes and replaced by a horror show only he could see.
Inside the ER, the man’s bellowing voice suddenly died.
The woman’s screams rose and fell like violent waves.
When the man fell silent, Axel’s heart dropped.
He just found out his son is dead. Right now…
right this second—a man’s world just collapsed.
Axel stared at the other mother and her son, tears filling his eyes.
Had three sons been lost that day? Would this young man come back from this nightmare? Was he already gone?
Clint had his phone out. “I’m calling Jordan.”
It took a moment for his words to register with Axel. He blinked, but still couldn’t look away from the traumatized young man. “What?” The word slipped out, barely audible. “Why?”
The cowboy’s gaze shifted to the young man, his jade eyes troubled. “Because some serious shit is about to hit the fan.”
The words had hardly left his mouth when a loud clatter echoed jarringly through the ER corridors, and the father let out a screaming roar that made Axel jump—the pain in the man ripping Axel’s heart open. “Who did this?! Who hit my son?! WHO KILLED MY BOY?! I’ll fucking KILL HIM!!”
Oh, God. The mother and son sat frozen, their bloodshot eyes fixed on nothing, deaf to the father's guttural threats echoing through the Emergency Room.
The boy's fingers twitched against his thigh, leaving rusty smears on his jeans, while his mother's chest rose and fell with shallow breaths.
What if the man—all six-foot-something of raw, muscular grief—discovered that this hollow-eyed teenager had been behind the wheel?
Would the circumstances matter in his moment of enraged grief?
Axel's throat tightened at the thought. Clint evidently shared his concern, his voice low and urgent as he spoke to Detective Jordan, his fingers pressing hard against his phone, his eyes never leaving the traumatized pair as he requested immediate police presence—and protective custody for the young driver whose life now hung in a different kind of balance.
The father won’t be the only threat, Axel realized, his stomach churning.
The public would be worse. Videos of the hit-and-run would already be circulating— the fleeing car, the screaming mother, the broken body.
Someone would recognize the vehicle or run the plates.
The boy's identity wouldn’t stay hidden long, and mob mentality would take over. They'd want blood.
His nightmare has only just begun. Soon, a faceless mob would descend—not just on him, but on his mother as well. No peace, no space to grieve their loss. Just hatred from strangers who'd decide they deserved this and mock their pain with mindless cruelty.
Axel didn’t know how long Clint had been on the phone when he put the device away. “Jordan said there are officers already here at the hospital.”
“Is he coming, too?” Axel whispered. He would feel better if the detective were there, too. He knew Will Jordan. They could trust him to treat the young man with care and compassion. Not all cops could be trusted that way. Maybe not the officers who were here.
“Yeah,” Clint said. “But it’s good that the officers are here now.” He hesitated. “Jordan said calls are already pouring in, with descriptions of the car and the license plate number. And the officers from the hit-and-run scene are already filing the evidence.”
Axel leaned against the wall, his stomach churning. “I was one of the witnesses who described the car,” he whispered, his vision blurring as he looked at the young man. “Did I help set a mob on him?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” Clint pulled him close.
“I sent Jordan the video and the license plate number.” He kissed Axel’s head.
“We thought we were chasing a killer.” His eyes drifted to the young man.
“We didn’t know he was a victim, too.” He hugged Axel tighter.
“Call Devlin. Get him down here. Maybe he can move the boy and his mother to a private room and…” He stared at the young man, covered in his little brother’s blood, and the tension in his face tightened. “… maybe get him cleaned up.”
With fingers that felt numb and clumsy, Axel called Devlin. The doctor's voice came through tinny and strained, promising he was on his way down.
Blood, vomit, and despair permeated the New York hospital corridors every day, but on some days the air itself seemed to curdle with suffering.
Today, as Dr. Devlin Grant descended in the elevator, the fluorescent lights flickered twice—an omen?
One life. Two. When the brushed-steel doors swooshed open with a mechanical sigh, he stepped onto linoleum polished to a high sheen that reflected the overhead lights, making him squint.
Twenty feet away, the distraught father prowled the corridor like a wounded predator, his meaty hands clamped behind his neck so tightly that his knuckles had turned white.
His broad shoulders—barely contained by his work shirt, now stained with dark patches of sweat—clenched with such tension that they trembled visibly, yet slumped like a condemned building in the seconds before collapse.
His face, stubbled and splotched crimson, twisted between expressions—unbearable grief and surging rage mixing like nitroglycerin and sulfuric acid, ready to detonate at the slightest touch.
The mother’s screams had died down, but she could still be heard sobbing loudly. Her husband flinched at her painful cries, as if each sob were a dagger tearing into the flesh of his shattered heart.
Devlin had fled the ground floor when the screams began. They catapulted him back to the park that night—Abel clinging to him, face buried in his shoulder, wails drilling into Devlin's skull. Those screams had branded themselves into his memory. He still heard them and knew he always would.
Devlin headed for the nurse's station, his white coat flapping against his legs with each hurried step.
The three nurses behind the curved counter watched the father with the wary vigilance of people tracking an approaching hurricane—eyes darting between computer screens and the man's hulking figure as he paced the corridor, muscles bunched beneath his sweat-soaked shirt, veins pulsing at his temples.
Harsh shadows from the overhead lights fell across his ravaged face.
“Has his son’s body been moved down to the morgue?” Devlin asked in a hushed tone, his sympathy for the man and his wife mounting as he watched the traumatized father pace the floor, as if some desperate part of him believed if he kept moving… then this new, unbearable reality couldn’t take hold.
“He won’t let anyone near the body,” Gina, an RN with silver-threaded black hair pulled into a tight bun, told Devlin, her voice barely above a whisper.
She leaned forward, elbows pressed against the laminate countertop, her ID badge swinging from its lanyard.
Her eyes, rimmed with smudged mascara from a twelve-hour shift, flicked nervously toward the father, then dropped her voice even lower.
“Dr. Landers said to just let them be for now and give them time to process.” She swallowed hard, the professional mask she'd worn through countless codes and traumas cracking as a tear escaped, catching the light as it traced the laugh line beside her mouth. “The mother just stopped screaming. And the father…” She glanced at the broken man. “… after seeing his son’s body, he… he went feral, saying he would kill the person who hit his son.” Uncertainty darkened her eyes.
“If he finds out who it is… I think he might really do it.”
A small shiver skipped down Devlin’s spine; anyone who would hit a kid and just keep on going—maybe they deserved the father’s wrath.