Chapter Seventeen
She’d died in his arms.
The thirty seconds in which he hadn’t felt her pulse as the EMTs raced to intervene had been the longest of his life. Blood and water had soaked through his clothing, but the thousands of glimpses of their life together that’d crossed his brain in that half a minute shattered him.
Callen was still trying to put himself back together as he tracked her breathing from the chair beside her hospital bed.
Maeve had woken a couple of times when the painkiller had worn off, then dropped back into unconsciousness.
He wasn’t sure she even knew he was here, but he wasn’t leaving.
No matter how many times police and nurses and his mother tried to drag him away. He wasn’t leaving her.
The low pulse of her heart rate tracked across the monitor by the bed, nearly putting him to sleep.
The bullet had ripped apart the right side of her stomach but thankfully missed her lung, esophagus and any other internal organ, including taking pieces out of her ribs.
In reality, the injury could’ve been so much worse, but he didn’t like her being here either.
The stubborn, vibrant, challenging woman who’d thrown herself in front of a bullet to save him wasn’t here.
She was buried beneath drips of painkiller, unconsciousness and bruises he’d memorized in the days since she’d been brought in, like the ones down the sides of her hands he imagined came from throwing herself against his storage container door.
Thirteen hours of surgery and a slow rotation of physicians had finally removed every piece of shrapnel, but the recovery would be long and hard.
But, knowing Maeve, she’d hate her new diet more.
He intended to be there every second. He owed her that much.
“Any change today?” Helen Russell handed off a cheap cup of coffee that smelled of burning.
It was the same hospital-made garbage she’d been trying to tempt him with day after day since he’d called her from the emergency room, sloughing off the ER nurses’ attempts to evaluate him for hypothermia and Springdale PD’s need for answers.
His parents—hell, even Cieron—had arrived within four hours from Salt Lake to help.
Though he wasn’t sure there was anything any of them could do.
“No.” He took the coffee as she pulled one of the other chairs closer to the bed.
If he was being honest with himself, it’d become more palatable over the last few times.
The offer wasn’t much, but it was something for him to focus on instead of all the times he’d failed the woman in front of him.
Not just in the past couple of days, but since Lauren had dragged Maeve into his life.
Callen forced himself to swallow a mouthful of the tar disguised as coffee.
The liquid almost scalded the top of his mouth, but he’d found the more taste buds he killed, the more likely he was to actually finish it and all the crap his parents shoved at him from the cafeteria. “Just you today?”
“Your dad and your brother thought it might be a little overwhelming if she woke up to find the entire family staring at her.” His mom took a drink of her own coffee, wincing at the taste or the temperature, he didn’t know.
Either way, she cupped the thin, flimsy plastic-coated cup in both hands in her lap.
“For that to happen, though, she’d have to wake up, wouldn’t she? ”
Pain lanced through his chest. He hadn’t given himself a lot of time to think of anything more than the shooter who’d pulled the trigger—a shooter who’d evaded a police search of the area—and tracking which nurses and physicians came into the room, but when he did, all he could think about was the fact she hadn’t woken up. Not really. “Yeah.”
“Did you sleep at all?” Helen sat back in her chair.
He bought himself a few seconds with another mouthful of black garbage. “What do you think?”
Helen sucked in a sharp breath through her nose, a sign she was already preparing herself for today’s uncomfortable talk. Just as he had the day before and the day before that. “There’s a pullout couch over there. I can sit with her if you—”
“No.” He shook his head
“Callen, honey.” Her hand slipped over his forearm braced against the chair he’d slept in, ate in and waited in.
He knew that tone, and he didn’t want to hear it.
Not from her. Because she would be right, and he would be forced to see her logic.
“You can’t take care of her if you’re not taking care of yourself, and she’s going to need you now more than ever to get through this. ”
He knew that. “I want to be here when she wakes up.”
“You’ll still be here. You’ll just be lying down over there.” His mother pointed to the other side of the private room, where a long bench seat took up position beneath the window. “Don’t make me get a nurse to sedate you.”
Callen couldn’t summon the energy to laugh.
She’d do exactly as she threatened if she thought it would help.
The problem was the knot tightening in his chest at the thought of putting any more distance between him and Maeve.
Which was ridiculous. Because for the past year, he’d ensured there were at least a couple hundred miles between them at all times, but that’d been before she’d pulled him out of that truck.
Before she’d stepped in front of a bullet for him.
Before he’d learned his sister wasn’t ever coming home. “It should’ve been me.”
“You’re going to feel that way for the rest of your life.
” His mother’s hand shook as she swiped at her face, and suddenly the years piled into her face, exaggerating the frailness he hadn’t noted before, the hollowness in her cheeks.
In the blink of an eye, he was looking at the woman who’d lost a daughter a year ago, that same grave pallor leeching color from her face.
“And I’m sorry for that, but we both know Maeve will do whatever it takes to prove she’s good enough for this family, even if it means sacrificing herself.
There wouldn’t have been anything you could’ve done to stop her. ”
Cutting his attention to Helen, he wanted to lash out, to scream, to hit something. Hard. Callen settled for an inhuman growl and turned back to his ex-fiancée. “She’s always been good enough. Throwing herself in front of a bullet doesn’t change that.”
“Do you really believe that?” Dark eyes—the same color as his—settled on him.
Not with hardness or blame, but an exhaustion he felt deep in his bones.
“Because I seem to recall you cutting her out of your life as though she never existed. I recall the words you used to describe her after she told you what had happened to that evidence, and I remember you ignoring her calls and messages until you finally blocked and deleted her number. At what point after Lauren disappeared would she have believed she was good enough to be part of this family?”
Shame and a heavy dose of self-hatred burned through him as effectively as the coffee he’d forgotten about.
Callen white-knuckled the arms of the chair, not really feeling the pain in his bandaged wrists anymore.
The wound in the side of his head from where he’d hit the driver’s-side window was another story.
“She admitted to compromising Lauren’s case. I was angry. I…overreacted.”
He knew that now. Hell, he’d known it the moment he’d come home to the apartment to find her stuff gone, but he’d…
he’d been too prideful to apologize, to ask her to stay, to admit he needed her.
Too devastated facing the knowledge Lauren was gone, that the one thing that could’ve helped find her had disappeared right along with her.
What he wouldn’t give to take it all back.
To have Maeve smile at him when he came in a room like she used to, to burrow into her warmth on cold winter nights when no amount of blankets did the job.
To feel her wrapped around him in every way and hear the breathless moan she made of his name between the sheets.
“Do you know why your father and I started going to therapy?” Getting to her feet, her purse hanging off her arm, Helen rounded the side of the bed and set her coffee on one of the side tables.
She skimmed manicured fingertips across Maeve’s forehead, shifting all that long, dark hair out of her face.
“You said Maeve talked you into going because the grief around losing Lauren was too much.” Something he hadn’t known about until recently.
And something he might not ever be able to repay Maeve for.
Despite his despicable treatment, she’d stepped in to hold his family together when all he could think about was finding his sister.
She’d done the hard work. She’d put his parents first and ensured they made it through to the other side in case her private investigation failed.
And maybe that was why he felt the need to stay right here beside her bed as she recovered, but part of him knew the truth.
She’d made a mistake in Lauren’s investigation, but he’d never stopped caring for her.
The past few days had stripped him of the wall he’d built between them brick by brick.
Exposing everything he’d tried to deny over the past year. He still loved her. Wanted her.
“Part of that was true.” His mother trailed her fingers across Maeve’s brow, but there was no response from the woman lying unconscious in the bed. “But, really, we went for her.”
That didn’t make sense. Callen shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“This girl has witnessed unimaginable violence in her life, with no one to help her through it. Her mother left when she was just a toddler, and her dad… Well, we both know she saw more of what happened than she tells us.” Shock only had a split second to sink in before Helen Russell raised her knowing gaze to his.
“Don’t get me wrong. She’s learned to cope and compartmentalize because she has to.
It’s part of her job. She steps into the lives of people who have suffered like she has, in hopes of turning out a different outcome.
She faces danger with no thought of herself, but when Lauren disappeared and you ended the engagement, Maeve was broken. ”
His attention cut to Maeve, but he couldn’t reconcile the woman who’d stood up to him on the trail over the skeletal remains of his sister with the woman his mother was describing.
Maeve was a federal agent. She came home every night after chasing serial offenders—working her way up through the FBI—with a smile on her face the moment she stepped over the threshold and jokes she’d heard at the office.
This was the woman who’d cried in front of him only once, at her father’s funeral, and went out of her way to ensure he wasn’t stretching himself too thin.
The same woman who’d directed Cieron through Narcotics Anonymous and acted as a victim advocate on her days off.
Not once had she given him the impression she was capable of anything close to the word broken.
That wasn’t the agent who’d stood up to him these past few days, and it sure as hell wasn’t the woman he’d planned on spending the rest of his life beside.
But his mom had never been a liar, and she had no reason to start now.
Callen leaned forward in his chair, stiff and exhausted and angry and exhausted some more. “What are you saying, Mom? That Maeve asked you and Dad to come with her to therapy?”
“No, dear. We were the ones to force her to go.” Defeat weighed heavily on his mother’s shoulders, and her purse shifted down her arm. “After she goaded a suspect she had in custody into stabbing her.”