Chapter Thirty
Bellamy
When I next open my eyes, I’m lying in a hospital room surrounded by my friends, their husbands and mine conspicuously absent. At first, I have no immediate memory of what happened. I wake and smile when I see my loved ones. That smile wipes off in the flutter of a heartbeat when I see the somber expressions on their faces.
And everything comes screaming back to me.
The abject horror. The gut-wrenching fear.
The heart-rending realization that my son was taken.
Tears flood my eyes. Six squeezes my hand in both of hers, an equally stricken look splashed across her features. She tries for me, a tremulous smile painting itself across her lips, but she can’t manage to hold it up and it disappears as quickly as it materialized.
“Tell me it was a bad dream.”
Her mouth opens and closes, words failing her. Her lips flatten into a tight line and her eyes water.
I look at Nera. “Please, Ner.”
She shakes her head. “I wish I could. More than anything, I wish I could.”
The tears spill over when I see Thayer huddled in the corner, her legs pulled into her body and her arms wrapped around herself.
“Thayer…” My mouth is suddenly as dry as my cheeks are wet. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so, sorry. I—”
She stands and comes to the bed, flinging her arms around my body. I feel her tears fall onto the skin at the base of my neck.
“I’m glad you’re okay, B,” she whispers, even as her body racks with sobs.
“I’m so sor—”
“Stop. It’s not your fault.” She cups my face, careful to avoid the injury on my forehead. “It’s not your fault.”
I stare into her eyes, seeing my own despair and fear reflected in her gaze. It tells me everything I need to know, but I ask anyway.
“Ivy…” My voice breaks, the next syllable nothing more than a hopeless croak. “Rhodes?”
Her face fractures, as close to a Jenga tower falling and shattering to pieces as I’ve ever seen anyone’s expression be. Her brows pull down and her lip trembles as she tries to swallow a fresh wave of tears. She shakes her head and releases me, turning away. Nera stands and goes after her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
“Oh, God… I should have stopped him. I should hav—”
“There’s nothing you could have done, B,” Six assures me. “We all saw the footage, he—” Her voice catches in her throat. She wipes a palm under her eye to catch a falling tear. “It nearly killed Rogue to watch it. The sounds he made when Gingrinch hit you, when he took the kids, when you were left there, unconscious and bleeding… It sounded like he was being physically ripped apart from the inside.” She scrubs a hand over her mouth, an agitated shiver coursing through her. “I–I’ve never heard anything like it.”
The throbbing in my head is nothing compared to the ache in my heart and the pure unadulterated fear in my belly. I wish I could go back in time and redo everything.
“Where is he?” I ask. “Where’s Rogue?”
“He’s with the others, tearing the city apart searching for the kids,” Nera tells me.
Thayer wipes a tired hand over her face, drying her cheeks in the process and pulling on her endless reserves of strength as she explains what happened.
“I’m the one who found you. I got to your house only twenty minutes after it all happened. I couldn’t bear to miss out on all the action and I wanted to make sure Ivy was ok— that Ivy was okay.” She looks off to the side, a small smile cresting the corner of her lips. It disappears suddenly as the memory changes. “Finding you on your front steps, bleeding and unconscious, B… I think a part of me died and I’m not sure it’s ever going to come back. I thought you were dead .” Her voice cracks audibly. “I called Rogue and an ambulance immediately. I didn’t think it could get worse and then I realized the children were missing,” she explains. “I thought Rogue was going to go into cardiac arrest when he arrived and found you unconscious and Rhodes missing. He…He didn’t take it well, B. He destroyed hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment when he got here and you were taken away. He assaulted two of the cops who tried to kick him out. Phoenix managed to keep him from being arrested and thrown in jail, but he’s completely lost it. It took Rhys, Tristan and Phoenix to be able to drag him away. The only thing that finally got him to calm down was refocusing him on finding the children.”
“He didn’t want to leave you. He didn’t want you waking up without him,” Six adds. “He said he’ll spend the rest of his life begging you for your forgiveness for not being here. It was an impossible decision, his wife or his son.”
“I need him to find Rhodes and Ivy,” I sob.
Nera nods. “That’s what we told him you’d say.”
I can only imagine the state Rogue was in upon his discovery of my assault and his son’s kidnapping. Peter set out to hurt me and I’m sure he has no idea how inadvertently true his blows struck.
There’s no way to quantify the amount of pain Rogue must have been in upon finding that his family had been targeted, that I might die and that his son had disappeared much like his mother had. The similarities with his traumatic past triggered that reaction in him, except this time I couldn’t be there to help him through it.
Peter hurting my husband to such an extent strikes a killer blow to my own psyche.
“How long?”
Sixtine shifts uncomfortably in her chair and looks away. Thayer starts crying again, still held in Nera’s arms. Nera refuses to look into my eyes.
“Please,” I beg, looking at them one after the other. “How long ago was the attack? How long have I been unconscious?” I sit up, wincing at the throbbing in my head. “How long have they been missing?”
It’s Thayer who steps forward and clasps my hand in hers. Nera follows, wrapping her hand over both of ours. Six is the last to add her comforting touch to mine.
“Twenty-eight hours and thirty-seven minutes.” Thayer’s voice is dead. “That’s how long they’ve been gone for.”
***
It takes another fifty-one hours before Rogue and Rhys track down the children and rescue them. Fifty-one hours of mental torture and torment more painful than anything Peter could have inflicted on me physically.
Fifty-one hours spent holding onto Thayer as we take turns crying and attempting to be strong for each other. Fifty-one hours that stretch interminably, the grains of sands in the hourglass falling so unbearably slowly I think mistress time herself is taunting me personally for my many failures.
I don’t see Rogue during that time. I know he and Rhys don’t sleep or eat or even stop for a second as they turn the country over looking for our children.
Eventually, they track them down to a farmhouse under Gingrinch’s sister-in-law’s name. Thayer and I are on our way there when they call to tell us that Peter and his two accomplices, whom he met during his brief stay in prison, are dead.
We sit huddled over the phone, oxygen trapped in our airways and our lungs frozen stiff as we wait for them to confirm the words we so desperately need to hear.
“Are they…” I swallow. “Are they alive?”
“They’re alive,” Rhys croaks. “They’re okay.”
Thayer and I fall into each other’s arms in relief at the news. They’re alive , everything is going to be alright.
In retrospect, I should have asked if they were unharmed.
Rhys’s answer to that question would have been incredibly more measured.
It would have been more indicative of what was to come.
When I see my son again, I instantly know things will never be the same. He’d told Peter back at the house that he wasn’t a boy, but he was .
He was my boy.
And now he’s gone.
In his place stands a twelve-year-old with dead eyes and a void where his heart used to be. Not quite a man yet, but definitely no longer a boy. The flat wasteland of his gaze as he stares back at me reminds me so much of his father’s the day I met him that it stops me in my tracks.
The shock makes the breath dry up in my lungs.
The kind, innocent boy is gone.
I lost him that day and I would never get him back.
Peter took that from me, from all of us.
Rhodes was near despondent when questioned, refusing to utter a word about his ordeal or give a clue as to how he was feeling.
He was marble; cold and beautiful and impossible to penetrate.
The only time he expressed any emotion in the immediate aftermath of his rescue was when he saw Ivy.
And that was perhaps the greatest shock of all.
Where reverence and adoration had previously shone in his gaze every time he laid eyes on her, he’d snapped out of his near comatose state on first glance at her and his tongue had swung in her direction, wielded like the sharpest of swords cutting through the softest of targets.
“Get the fuck away from me,” he’d hissed, jerking to his feet and getting in her face. She’d cowered back against the wall, her gaze pinned dutifully downwards, her entire body trembling and submissive. “I never want to see you again. I never want to hear your name or listen to your voice or smell your perfume. I fucking hate you.”
He’d loomed over her, fists clenched and nostrils flared as the vitriol spewed unendingly from his lips. And she’d taken it, crying softly but not saying a word in rebuttal or defense of herself.
At first frozen in horror, the four parents had then leapt into action, separating them. Even as he was being dragged away, Rhodes continued screaming at her and Ivy kept crying. We stood, stunned, torn between stupefaction at this sudden emotionality from him and staggered at the depth of his anger and its chosen target.
Neither one of them would talk about what happened during those three days, no matter how many times we asked over the coming weeks and months. We tried waiting for the dust to settle and reintroducing them once some time had passed, but the results were always the same. Rhodes was cruel and Ivy took it without looking at him.
We might have gotten our children back alive, but they hadn’t emerged unscathed. Far from it.
They’d both changed.
Whatever happened during those three days destroyed them both in their own way.
Life couldn’t continue as before.
After months of navigating a new normal that didn’t feel normal at all, Rogue and I made the difficult decision to leave London.
We needed a fresh start. An opportunity for Rhodes to start over, away from the trauma, away from the constant trigger that was Ivy, somewhere that was a clean slate.
We took our family back to Chicago, to be closer to my mom. Being with their grandmother helped my kids and my family as a whole, but being away from my friends was incredibly hard. It was the right decision, but I was homesick in a way I’d never been before, and although the girls and I spoke every day and tried to FaceTime each other often, it wasn’t the same.
The ripples of that one afternoon cracked the very foundation of our found family. Those fissures kept pushing us further apart for a long time. It would take years and us parents getting out of the way for things to finally settle back into place.
We would all be happy again, but I didn’t know it then.
***