Chapter 30
Seven days. It had been seven fucking days since he’d seen her lying there, dying on the sidewalk. Seven days since he cracked her ribs with the force of CPR. Seven days since the stab wound in her belly was stitched up and yet, she still lay there in the hospital bed, eyes closed, pulse slow and steady.
Because she was in the ICU, only Sebastian and Daisy had been in to be with her, taking turns sitting by her side. It was almost time for Daisy to come in, and Sebastian once again found himself deep in prayer. He wanted to be there when she woke up, so that he could say every apology, every emotion-soaked thought that had kept him awake since that terrible morning.
The doctors had been in early to tell them that they would be lowering the dose on the medications keeping her sedated. The antibiotics had successfully warded off any infection and her wounds, both superficial and life threatening, were healing well. It was time.
That had been five hours ago. At first, Daisy sat with her, but around the three hour mark, Seb had begged to sit by her side. They had come to an agreement over the past few days, somewhere in the haze of everything that had happened.
Standing from the chair next to Emma’s bed, Daisy pulled him into a big hug. “I forgive you. I know she will too,” she whispered. “Now you just need to forgive yourself.”
“I don’t think I can,” he’d admitted.
“You can, because she’ll need you to. She’ll need to see that there is nothing you wouldn’t do for her. Including this.”
Sebastian hadn’t been able to say anything after that, but Daisy just squeezed him tighter before slipping from the room.
“Seb?” The sound of Emma’s voice, just above a whisper, had him jumping out of the chair.
“Emma. I’m right here. I’m right here, Sprinkles.”
“Where is she?” Her eyes were cloudy, probably from all the pain medication coursing through her veins. But lord, he couldn’t even count the hours he’d spent praying for her to open them just one more time. And here it was. He had so much he needed to say to her. So much he’d hoped she would hear.
“Who, honey?”
“Luna. Where is she, Sebastian?” He watched tears fill her eyes, spilling over on her cheeks. She didn’t realize where she was. Everything must be jumbled in her mind, and the ache that was warded off by hearing her voice punched him right in the chest once again. Would he be strong enough to tell her everything she went through? Was now the right time, or would it be better to wait? She shouldn’t be bombarded first thing with what happened.
“You’re confused, Sprinkles. You are in the hospital, but Luna’s not here.”
“She is. She?—”
“No. I’m sorry, honey, I’m so sorry, but Luna was born seven years ago. Marco found you in Bell Ridge and attacked you. That’s why you are in the hospital right now.”
“Where’s Gage?”
“Y-you’re in the ICU. They won’t let you have more than two visitors. It’s just been me and Daisy for the last few days.”
“I need to see Gage. Please, Seb. It can’t wait.” Tears were spilling down her cheeks in a steady stream, like sharp shards of glass cutting into his heart.
“Emma, you just woke up. You need to rest. Please, just try to relax. You’re safe.”
“GET GAGE!” she screamed, and he winced at the rawness in her voice. The small beeps from the heart rate monitor she was attached to began chirping wildly.
“Okay, Sprinkles. I’ll get him here. You just rest and I’ll make sure he comes.”
* * *
“Hey, beautiful.” It had been about an hour since she’d screamed at Sebastian, and she had to wait all that time to see Gage. First nurses and doctors swarmed her, checking over her vitals, poking and prodding at her like a piece of meat before they told her everything that had happened over the last week while she was asleep.
An entire week had gone by, and everything in her mind was scrambled. She couldn’t remember what happened. She couldn’t remember how she knew about Luna, but she did. And nothing was going to stop her from getting her back.
As the last nurse left her room, she watched Gage walk in, worry etched on his face.
“Gage.” The relief she felt at seeing him washed over her. Every inch of her body hurt, and she wished for more pain medicine. But it was good that they were tapering her off of them. She needed to think clearly. She needed to remember. Tears poured from her eyes and her words choked in her throat. Gage moved to her bedside, pulling up a chair before clasping her hand in his.
“Hey, none of that now. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Didn’t Cap or those fancy doctors tell you? I’ll kick their asses if they all let you think you weren’t going to make it out of this.”
“I-I’m just so h-happy to see you. She’s here, Gage. I need you to find her.”
“Who, Em?”
“Luna.”
His face remained blank as he just sat, staring at her.
“How do you know?”
“Addie…” Emma tried to sit up, but a sharp pain ran across her chest, forcing her to pull a harsh breath in and hiss through her clenched teeth. Jesus, she had no idea broken ribs could hurt so much.
“She’s safe, Emma. Addie and Natalie are both okay. I mean, Natalie was pretty shaken up, but she’s been here everyday since it happened, checking on you.”
The monitor at Emma’s bedside started beeping angrily.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
They were still in Bell Ridge. The revelation had the room spinning around her. She needed to get herself together. She needed to tell Gage about Addie, but she couldn’t get the words out. A flustered nurse entered her room, shooing Gage away from her bedside, but he didn’t budge. He just stood, holding on to her hand, eyes locked to hers.
“Breathe, Em. You’ve got to breathe, gorgeous, or they’re going to make me leave.”
She couldn’t. The fear of losing Addie now was too much.
“Emma, dear, I’m going to give you a sedative, okay. You need to rest. You’re friends will still be here when you wake.” The nurse pulled a clear liquid out of a vial and slipped it into her IV. She felt the effects almost immediately. Her brain was shutting down, pulling her back into the warmth of darkness, but she had to fight. She had to tell Gage.
“Addie…she…she’s Luna.” She mumbled as the edges of her vision grew blurry, hoping Gage understood.
* * *
Sebastian paced in the waiting room, like he had for hours every day since Marco attacked Emma. Why had she been so insistent on seeing Gage? It had been her first time awake since she came out of surgery, and she hadn’t wanted to see him. There had been a little part of his heart that held some hope, some perilous wish, that she would wake up forgiving him. But that wasn’t the case, and he couldn’t blame her.
He’d left her alone, to be brutalized by the man who had taken everything from her before. It made Sebastian the worst type of man. Even if she could find it in her heart to forgive him, he never would.
“Cap.” He spun around to see Gage standing in the doorway of the waiting room.
Something happened. Sebastian’s stomach dropped. Gage was pale, anxiety pouring off him as he walked across the room.
“What happened, Tracker? Is she okay?”
“They sedated her.”
His fists curled at this side.
“Why the fuck did they need to do that?”
“She was trying to tell me something. Asking about Addie all worried. I figured she was just upset because Addie had been home with Natalie that night and she got things confused in her mind, but then she said…” he shook his head.
“What? What did she say?”
“As the medicine was pulling her back under, she told me that Addie is Luna.”
His heart stopped beating, but his mind went wild. What the fuck? How the hell could Natalie’s daughter be Emma’s? Her file hadn’t flagged anything strange when Sebastian had Gage run a background check when she was hired on at Montgomery Equities. Had they been thorough enough? What about her husband? Had they looked into him? How hadn’t he thought to re-run everything after Emma told them about her past?
“How is that possible?” he asked, sinking into a nearby chair.
“I-I don’t know. Do you think she’s just confused?”
“No. This is the most important thing in the world to Emma. She wouldn’t say that unless she was sure. No matter what she’d been through or how many drugs she was pumped full of.”
“Okay, so what do you want me to do?”
Sebastian pulled his phone from his pocket and started typing furiously.
“Natalie should be at the office with Stone and Hawk. I’m telling them to make sure she doesn’t leave, and one of them needs to be with her at all times.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to dig into her file. We must have missed something, somewhere. Did we look at her husband? Do a background check on him?”
“Yeah, I remember pulling that info. I need to grab my computer from my apartment, but I’ll send you the file as soon as I’m there.”
Sebastian’s phone beeped, his eyes flashing as he read the incoming message
“Fuck!”
“What’s wrong?”
“I messaged the guys about Emma waking up. Apparently, they shared the news with Natalie. Stone says she left about ten minutes after they told her about Emma to pick up Addie from school.”
“I’ll head over to her house now. If she’s going to run, she’ll probably need to stop there first.”
“No, you need to get me those files. I’ll get Nash to head over to her house and have Stone and Hawk go to Addie’s school. We cannot let Natalie and Addie get away until we understand what’s going on.”
* * *
Emma watched Sebastian pace back and forth in her room, concern etched all over his face. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t watch him look at her with such pity and guilt.
He was so quiet, his gray eyes never leaving hers as the heart rate monitor connected to her beeped faster, betraying her warring emotions. The chair squeaked as he lowered his body into the seat, and his hand hovered near the edge of the bed, almost as if he wanted to touch her, but was afraid to.
“How do you know Addie is Luna? What happened that night at Natalie’s?”
“I-I don’t know. I don’t remember. Everything is fuzzy and warped when I try to think about what happened.”
“But you told Gage that Addie is Luna.”
“I can’t tell you how I know that, Seb. I just do. It’s just there, this single piece of information floating in a sea of misty clouds.”
His eyes searched her face. “You don’t believe me,” she said.
“Of course I do. I have everyone making sure we get Addie and Natalie.”
She couldn’t breathe, the weight of everything crashing down onto her chest. His eyes never left her. Just a constant stream of unrelenting pity pouring from his gaze. Her body was covered in bandages, but she knew what was underneath them. Not only was she unable to give Sebastian children in the future, but now she was a monster. Nothing more than the scars the would soon cover her skin.
“Breathe, Em. Just breathe.” His warm hand slid under hers, but instead of it bringing her calm, she found she couldn’t stand it.
“I don’t want you here anymore, Seb,” she whispered. “You have to go.”
He looked like he’d been punched in the gut. “What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly what I said. I. Don’t. Want. You. Here. I don’t want you to see me like this. And I don’t want to be forced to see the pity in your eyes every time you look at me.”
“No, Em?—”
“Don’t you dare try to tell me it’s not there, because it is, Sebastian. Every time you look at me, your eyes scream your pity at me. And I don’t want it. You need to go.”
“Am I allowed to say something before you banish me?” He stared at the side of her face as she shrugged. “You need to look at me, Sprinkles. You need to look into my eyes while I say this. And if you still want me to go at the end, then fine. I’ll go.”
Her face turned towards his and she knew he’d see the tears sparkling along her bottom lashes.
“I love you, Emma. And I promise you, there is no pity in my eyes when I look at you. There is awe, for how incredibly strong you are. There is overwhelming thankfulness, because you are here and you came back to me. There is joy, for all the things we will still get to experience together. There is regret, that I wasn’t able to keep my promise to you, to protect you from that monster. But there is not one ounce of pity.”
“But I’m scarred now. Every inch of my body is the hideous reminder of what he did to me. He’s made me a monster.”
“Stop, Emma. Stop that right now. Each and every one of those marks will fade. There are excellent treatments available now to reduce the appearance of scars and I can have the best doctors in the world flown in to treat you. But don’t think for one minute that all these marks make you any less beautiful. They make you a warrior. A goddess. They are a reminder of your strength, your resiliency, your determination to be the victor. Those marks will fade with time, but your courage and your strength will not. You are not his victim. You are a survivor.
“I want to spend hour upon hour kissing each one of those marks, worshiping your body through them, because they remind me how blessed I am that you are still here. I will spend every night for the rest of my life pouring my love into each and every one of these marks until I erase every last memory of them being from him and you only associate them with the love I have for you. Until the only thought you have when you look at them is that your body is a temple I’ll be worshiping at until my very last breath on this Earth.”
“I can’t give you kids,” she whispered.
“And? I don’t care about that one bit, except for the fact that I know it hurts you so deeply.” He wiped a tear from her cheek. “If you want to have kids with me someday, and god, I hope you do, then we’ll foster or adopt. I don’t care one bit if our child has our DNA or not, Em. They will still be ours. And they will be loved with everything in our hearts no matter what. If you want to be a mom again, I’ll do everything in my power to make that happen.”
“I was never a mom before.”
“Yes. Yes you were. And yes you are still. You’ll always be Luna’s mom, and I promise I will never stop looking for her. I won’t give up until she’s back in your arms.”
“I love you, Sebastian. I don’t want you to waste your life on me.”
There was so much pain in his eyes, Emma had to look away. It was clear that he had more to say, but thankfully his phone rang before he could.
“I have to take this, Sprinkles. But I’m coming back and you are going to listen to what I have to say.”
She didn’t have the strength to even nod. Closing her eyes, she heard him move towards the window in her room.
“Yeah, Tracker, go ahead.”
Gage. Her eyes opened, locking on Seb’s. “Put him on speakerphone.”
“Gage, Emma is listening in too.”
“Em, I haven’t located them, yet. But I will. I promise.”
“Just get to why you called me,” Seb growled.
“Yeah, Cap. Listen, the FBI finally got a hit on one of their database searches from Emma’s sketch. Apparently Dr. Giovanni Sears, Natalie’s husband, is the same man Emma knows as Marco Santoro.”
Natalie’s husband. She’d opened the door, and Marco was standing there. Addie ran into his arms.Her whole world came crashing down. Emma screamed as the memories from the night Marco attacked her came flooding back.
“Fuck! Em? Sprinkles…come on now, breathe.” If Emma wasn’t in a full panic she might have laughed at the way Sebastian threw his phone to the ground and ran to her side. But all she could hear as her ears rang was the sound of Marco’s knife gliding across her skin. Each mark on her body burned as the memories of that night washed over her in a tsunami of grief. “He isn’t going to get you, baby. I promise. I promise with everything I am, Em, he’s never going to hurt you again.”
Her wails bounced off the sterile walls of her hospital room as her heart felt like it was going to crack out of her chest. Sebastian looked like a lost little boy, and in that moment she could perfectly picture what he looked like at eighteen, going off to join the Navy.
“P-please, Seb. Have them s-sedate m-me again. Please,” she begged. The memories were just too much for her to handle. Her brain was starting to shut down on it’s own, but she didn’t want to wake up in a minute, or even in an hour. She wanted to sleep, to be in nothingness, until this nightmare was over.
Sebastian pushed the call button and yelled for a nurse. Before she could focus on his face, a blur of dark colored scrubs was in the room, pushing something into her IV. She felt the pull of darkness calling to her, and she didn’t fight it.