Chapter 35
Quinn
Ican’t believe I have a desk. I’m with Maddie and Lily in an office on the opposite side of the corridor from the one Reid shares with his brothers. We arrived late after Reid took extra special care of me in the shower, and we have to leave in an hour for my doctor’s appointment.
I’m sitting at a small meeting table, small enough for Maddie to reach over and give my hand a squeeze. “Are you worried about the ultrasound?” she asks when she catches me checking my watch.
“No. I mean, yeah. Obviously, I want to know that the baby hasn’t been affected by everything that happened,” I explain.
I’d been checked over after returning from the compound, but I don’t take anything for granted.
“It’s just that I’ve been at home for weeks, and I feel guilty about turning up here, only to disappear again. ”
“A bit like the last time you were here,” Lily says with a smirk that gets wiped off her face when Maddie glares at her. “What? Too soon?”
“I think you’ve been around Mace too long,” Maddie says.
“That man is a bad influence on me,” Lily agrees, then turns to me. “Sorry.”
I surprise myself by laughing. “If you’re able to joke about what I did, it actually makes me feel better.”
Maddie shrugs. “It was some trick you pulled, and I thought I was the only crazy one. I suppose we’ve all got to be a little bit crazy to marry a Griffin.”
Lily clears her throat and points with her eyes to me. I laugh again. “We haven’t talked about marriage yet, but I think I’d prefer to wait until after the baby’s born.”
I smooth my hand over the desk, touching wood. So many assumptions wrapped up in one sentence. I might be healing, but I’m still reluctant to look too far into the future. I’m content to survive one day at a time.
“Back to business,” I say, aware I have to leave soon. “My specialty is project management, so if you have work for me, I’m in.” I flick through some of the files Maddie’s been showing me. “How many women are you trying to help?”
“Eighteen from the raid on Ilya’s compound alone,” Maddie says.
“And there’s no trying to help,” Lily adds. “We give all the women who get referred to us the means to rebuild their lives. We’re also creating a support network so there’s continued aftercare, such as treatment for addictions, trauma therapy, that sort of thing.”
“The things my sister would have needed. I just wasn’t enough to save her on my own.”
Lily twists her coffee cup in her hand. “When I lost my brother, I saw it as my failing too, but he was an adult, and so was Blake. We’re not responsible for their deaths, just like we weren’t responsible for every decision they ever made.”
“I know you’re right,” I reply, wishing it were that easy to let go of my guilt. “And I’m sorry about your brother. I didn’t know.”
“I lost my brother too,” Maddie adds. She clears her throat. “In fairness, he didn’t die soon enough, but that’s another story.”
“And one we don’t need to get into now,” Lily says as she looks through the offices to where Reid and his brothers have been gathered around their conference table. “I think something’s wrong.”
My chest constricts when I see Reid’s stricken features. His hand covers his mouth as he stands. Ash gets up to put a brotherly hand on his shoulder, but Reid’s already moving in my direction. I race out to the corridor to meet him.
I’ve witnessed enough horrors to know that whatever has drained the color from Reid’s face is going to be bad. “Just tell me.”
“You should sit down,” he says, taking my elbow. “We’ll find an empty office.”
I shrug him off. “Tell me now.”
His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. “The feds recovered a lot of bodies in and around Ilya’s compound, and not just the men who died that night,” he begins. “The explosions exposed a number of graves.”
“They found Blake.” I say it as a statement of fact. Why else would Reid need me to sit down?
He puts his hands on my hips, holding me steady as I fight to stay upright. Blake’s dead. She’s not coming back.
I realize in that moment that I’d been clinging to one last, desperate hope that Ilya’s last move was another mindfuck – that maybe he’d sold her like he did so many others, and he didn’t want me distracted with another endless search.
“It’ll be a while before they can identify her officially,” Reid says. “They’re relying on DNA records and they won’t have yours on file to make the link.”
“But you do?”
Reid strokes my back as his arms encircle me. “When you caught me taking a strand of your hair the first time we met, I took another I’d spotted on your shoulder.”
The confession might have made me laugh, or hit him under other circumstances, but not today. Today it’s the reason I get to bring my sister home. “Can we find a way to get her body back?”
“Mace can make it happen.”
I take a breath, thinking that’s the worst of it, but Reid’s looking down. When his gaze comes back to me, the pain in his features has only intensified. He’s making my legs tremble for the second time today.
“Quinn, the autopsy showed she’d been dead for at least a year.”
The violent stab to my heart has me swaying. I’d fall if it wasn’t for Reid holding me up. “Ilya must have killed her not long after our argument.” My horrible, nasty words would have been ringing in my sister’s ears when she died.
When Reid shakes his head, I’m too absorbed with grief and guilt to process his warning. I’m not prepared for the next shock.
“Strider questioned the timelines, so Mace took a look at the AI chat Ilya set up to trap you,” Reid says. “The very first conversation was from a year ago. It was your argument with Blake. It wasn’t real, Quinn.”
My body jerks as if I’ve been physically struck. “No!” I gasp. “It can’t be.”
“She was already gone.”
As my world tilts, I try to wriggle free from Reid’s grasp, but he doesn’t let me go.
“Your sister wanted to escape, but Ilya was never going to let her go,” he says softly. “All those things you thought you said to her, you were saying it to a computer-generated ghost, nothing more.”
I fist his shirt, pulling almost hard enough to pop the buttons. “It doesn’t matter! I still wanted to say them. If anything, this is worse. I said all those horrible things… I said she was dead to me… And she already was.”
Reid hooks one arm around me while his fingers hook under my chin, forcing me to hold his gaze.
Forcing me to still. “Listen to me, Quinn. The AI prompts Ilya used for the conversation were to provoke you into an argument. I know you’ve spent a long time fixating on what you said in that call, but the AI Blake said some pretty foul things to you first. You can see the transcript if–”
“No, I can’t… I can’t endure that again.”
“That’s OK, I don’t want you to go through it either. But I’ve just read it,” he explains. “Do you trust me?”
As I nod, the first heavy tear trickles down my cheek.
“Then take my word for it. The conversation was designed to escalate. You were being primed to say things you would never have said to your sister. You and she didn’t have that argument.
You would never have had that argument. She didn’t die thinking you hated her.
She died knowing you were right to tell her to get away from Ilya,” Reid says, his voice scratching.
“She knew you’d go to the ends of the earth to save her. And she knew how much you loved her.”
I don’t want to accept what he’s saying. I want to suffer the punishment I think I deserve, and if anyone else had tried to convince me, I’d refuse to listen. But this is Reid. At this moment, I trust what he’s saying more than I trust my own judgement.
“Tell me I’ll be able to forgive myself,” I beg. “Because I just can’t feel it yet.”
He rests his forehead against mine. “You will,” he promises.
I tip my head and Reid’s lips find mine. I let him kiss me, and as he relaxes into it, so do I. His grip moves to the back of my legs and as he scoops me up, I wrap my arms and legs around him. I kiss him until I run out of breath.
“You deserve to be loved, Quinn,” he whispers as he carries me down the corridor. “Your sister loved you. I love you. My family loves you. And our baby’s going to love you too.”
I blink away my tears. “We have to get to our appointment.”
“Already on our way.”
The gel is cold and I hold my breath as a doppler is pressed to my stomach. Reid grips my hand tightly as the grainy image we’re watching on screen shows little more than a snow storm.
“You’re allowed to breathe,” the sonographer says. Katie is middle-aged, and I imagine she’s carried out hundreds of these scans, but her eyes light up when she finds a dark blob. “There’s our baby.”
Goosebumps prick my arms as I turn to Reid. “Our baby,” I repeat.
Reid’s eyes glisten as he nods.
Neither of us speak again as Katie continues with the scan, freezing images and taking measurements. She’s smiling when she’s done. Turning her attention to us, she points out a tiny pulsating blob on screen. “That’s baby’s heartbeat.”
Reid leans against the examination bed so our faces are almost touching. “Is everything OK?”
“All is as it should be at this stage. Baby’s limbs are growing, and he or she is developing facial features,” she says, tilting the doppler.
We both tip our heads to one side at the same time, trying to make sense of the image.
“You might just have to take my word for it at the moment,” Katie says, laughing. “But yes, everything’s fine. You can relax your grip on Quinn’s hand now.”
Continuing to use my false identity had been an easy decision. I created Quinn Jamieson as the woman I wanted to be. Strong and determined. And it was Quinn who Reid fell in love with. She’s the version of me I’m learning to love too.
Reid relaxes his white-knuckle grip, and I flex my fingers to let the circulation flow back.
“Sorry,” he says to Katie, “but keeping tight hold of her is a habit I’ve no intention of breaking.” Leaning in closer to me, he whispers in my ear, “Everything I could ever want is right here.”
“We’re all done for now,” Katie says, standing to give us some space.
“Actually,” I say before she has a chance to wipe the gel from my abdomen. “Do you think…” I point with my eyes to the door.
She blushes. “I did notice your little fan club,” she admits. “They’re pretty hard to miss, so if you want to invite them in, we can put on a quick show.”
I’m expecting Maddie and Lily to be first through the door, but it’s Hunter and Mace who crowd around Katie, much to her delight.
Maddie and Lily are close behind, as giddy as their husbands, and Ash is last to make an appearance.
He takes up a spot nearest to me and Reid, the gentlest smile on his face as Katie begins to explain what we can see on screen.
“Are you OK?” he whispers to me.
“It’s like I’ve just stepped out of a nightmare and into a dream.”
Ash puts his hand on Reid’s shoulder. “It’s been a while since I considered our lives as anything close to a dream. It’s good having someone else’s perspective occasionally so we can appreciate how fortunate we truly are.”
“Can you tell if it’s a girl or a boy yet?” Hunter’s asking Katie.
“Not from this scan, no. Maybe in a few weeks.”
“I think it’s a boy,” he says.
Maddie steps closer to the screen. “No, it’s a girl.”
“Would you like to place a bet?” he challenges his wife.
“What’s the prize?”
Hunter smirks as he whispers something in her ear. Maddie blushes. “And if I win?” she asks. He whispers again and she slaps his chest. “You can’t say things like that when there’s a baby in the room.”
Her husband shrugs. “The baby didn’t hear.”
“I did,” says Lily. “And it seems like Hunter wins either way.”
Mace snorts a laugh. “In that case, maybe we should make a bet too.”
“OK, that’s enough,” Reid interjects. “Everyone out.”
Ash leans in to kiss the top of my head. “It was nearly a beautiful moment, but you can always trust at least one of my brothers to fuck it up.”
I can’t quite believe these are the same men I was so scared of when they raided Ilya’s compound. “It was a beautiful moment,” I correct Ash. “Thank you.”
He’s ushering the others out the door when he pauses. “If you want to thank me, then you know who to name as godfather.”
Reid closes the door on the argument that Ash has just sparked, and beams a smile at me. “Welcome to the family.”