Chapter 42 #2
Knox flinched like my voice had physically hit him, but he still didn’t tell me. That scared me more than if he had. My big brother, who had spent my entire life answering questions before I asked them because he knew I hated not knowing, looked me in the face and kept the truth behind his teeth.
“No,” I said, backing away from Aura and Charm’s hands. “No, don’t do that. Don’t you do cop voice with me. Where is Cade?”
Dad moved in front of me. “Bug, listen to Knox.”
“I am not listening to anyone until somebody tells me where he is.”
My voice cracked on the last word, and there was no part of me left to be embarrassed by it. The old me would have made a joke. The old me would have reached for something shiny and stupid so no one had to see the panic bare on my face.
But there was no joke. There was nothing shiny left. There was only Cade somewhere inside The Furnace while my brother asked if he was breathing.
Knox said into the phone, “Stay with him. Do not leave him. I’m calling you right back.”
He ended the call before Ryan could answer.
“Knox,” Ryker snapped.
But Knox was already answering another call, and the second he did, something about him changed again.
Worse.
Which seemed impossible.
“Detective Bennett.”
Not my brother… Detective Bennett.
The part of him that belonged to the law stepped forward while the rest of us stood in the cold with our hearts in our hands, waiting for the world to tell us what it had taken.
Knox closed his eyes for half a second. It was quick, maybe nothing to anyone else, but every Bennett saw it. Every one of us knew what it meant when Knox stopped looking at the world.
He was bracing. Not as a cop. Not as the brother who always had a plan. But as someone about to hear something bad enough that even he needed one stolen second to survive it.
“Yeah,” he said, voice scraped raw now. “I’m here.”
My pulse beat once.
“What?” I whispered.
Nobody answered.
Knox looked toward the arena doors like he could see through concrete, steel, people, distance, everything. “No. I’m outside with my family.”
Another pause. His gaze flicked to me, then away so fast it felt like a slap.
“What?” I said louder. “Knox, what?”
His jaw worked once. Then he said, “You need me to identify him?”
Ryker moved first. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Dad’s hand dropped from my shoulder. “Identify who?”
Knox didn’t answer them. He listened, his face going harder with every word coming through that phone.
Then he said the name. “Luke Dempsey?”
The parking lot fell out from under me. No sound came from my mouth at first. Just the hard, empty shape of a scream that hadn’t found its way out yet.
Cade was hurt.
Luke needed identifying.
Those two facts tried to exist in my mind at the same time, and my brain rejected every version where Cade did not walk out of that building alive.
Because if Luke was there, if Luke had found him, if Cade was bleeding because of the monster I had finally stopped obeying, then the math became unbearable.
It became a kind of cruelty I could not survive.
Cade had loved me in public and Luke had answered in blood.
Cade had kissed me through glass and Luke had found a hallway.
Cade had made me feel safe enough to smile, and somehow that safety had become the thing Luke punished.
No.
My body went hot and cold at the same time. My hands tingled. My lips felt numb. The arena doors blurred and doubled, then snapped back into focus with terrible clarity.
Life had become a language I didn’t understand.
I shoved past my dad and ran toward the arena doors. I didn’t think. I didn’t decide. I didn’t weigh safety or logic or the fact I was still not fully healed from what Luke had done to me days ago. I ran because Cade was inside and my body knew only one thing. Get to him.
Ryker caught me around the waist before I made it far, hauling me back against his chest so hard my feet nearly left the ground.
“No!” I shrieked, clawing at his arm. “Let me go. Let me go. Cade is in there!”
“You’re not going in there,” Ryker said, voice breaking against my ear. “Bug, you’re not going in there.”
“Let me go!”
Students stopped all around us now. People stared. Someone said my name. Someone asked what happened. The whole parking lot started changing shape around the panic, excitement curdling into confusion as the sound of my scream cut through the postgame high like a blade.
I twisted hard in Ryker’s arms, pain ripping through my ribs, but I didn’t care. My body barely registered it. Pain belonged to another universe now. Pain was a thing that happened to people with time to feel it.
I didn’t have time. Cade was inside.
“Ryker, please,” I sobbed, trying to pry his arm from my waist. “Please, please, please. I have to get to him. He’s alone. He’s alone in there.”
“He’s not alone.” Ryker sounded like he was trying not to fall apart while physically holding me together. “Ryan’s with him. EMS is with him.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I do. Knox just said—”
“I need to see him!”
Dad grabbed my face with both hands, forcing me to look at him. His eyes were wild. Terrified. Wet in a way I had seen only a few times in my life and never wanted to see again.
“Bliss,” he said, voice shaking. “Bug, look at me.”
“No. No, Dad, no. He’s inside. Cade is inside.”
“I know.”
“He’s hurt.”
“I know.”
“I have to go to him.”
“You can’t, Bug. You need to listen to Knox.”
That broke something. I fought harder, not because I thought I could beat Ryker’s hold or move my father out of the way, but because my body did not know what else to do with a terror this big.
It had to go somewhere. Into my hands. My feet.
My throat. Into the useless, frantic way I kept trying to turn toward the arena doors like love could outrun emergency responders and locked hallways and whatever blood Cade had already lost.
“I didn’t kiss him after the game,” I said, and the words came out fractured, hysterical, not connected to the right part of the conversation but suddenly the only thought my brain could hold. “I didn’t kiss him. I was waiting. I thought I had time. Dad, I thought I had time.”
Dad’s face crumpled. For one horrible second, he looked like I had cut him open.
“Oh, Bug.”
“I thought I had time,” I said again, my voice rising, breaking, turning into something I didn’t recognize.
“He was supposed to come out. He was supposed to come out and he didn’t, and I was just standing here talking about his stupid goal.
I was laughing. I was happy. I was happy while he was bleeding. ”
“No.” Dad’s hands tightened on my face. “No, listen to me. That is not yours. You hear me? That is not yours to carry.”
I made another sound, smaller this time, worse somehow because it came from deeper. From the part of me that had already lived through one monster and had just realized the cost of surviving him might be Cade.
Aura reached for me. “B.”
I jerked away so violently Ryker had to tighten his grip again.
“No! Don’t touch me unless you’re taking me to him.”
Aura froze like I’d slapped her. Regret flashed somewhere beneath the panic, but it drowned before I could reach it.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed immediately. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t be here. I can’t stand here. I can’t breathe out here.”
Charm was crying hard now, mascara dark beneath her eyes. “B, we know.”
“You don’t,” I said, shaking my head too fast. “You don’t know. He can’t die. He can’t die because of me.”
Ryker’s arms tightened. “Stop.”
“He came into this because of me.”
“No.”
“Luke was my problem and I had it under control.”
“No,” Dad snapped, and the force of it hit hard enough to make me blink. “Luke was never yours to deal with. He was a monster who chose this. Cade chose you. That is not the same thing.”
I stared at him, vision shaking.
Cade chose you.
Cade chose you.
Cade chose you.
The words should have comforted me. Instead, they almost destroyed me because Cade choosing me was the whole reason he was inside.
Cade chose me when he agreed to the project.
Cade chose me at my father’s table when he saw too much and stayed anyway.
Cade chose me in the dark when I finally handed him the truth.
Cade chose me in a hospital room when my face was swollen and my throat was bruised and I thought maybe the worst parts of me would make him look away.
Cade chose me through glass tonight in front of an entire arena.
And now, maybe, Cade had chosen me in a hallway with Luke Dempsey and a knife.
The realization went through me so violently my knees gave out even before Knox came back to us.
“Hospital,” he said.
The word was not enough.
I stared at him. “What?”
“Go to the hospital.”
“No.”
“Bliss.”
“No. I’m going inside.”
“You’re going to the hospital,” Knox said, voice sharp enough to cut because he had stopped being gentle and started being useful. “Life Flight is landing on the football field. They’re taking Cade to County. Meet him there.”
Life Flight.
The words did not make sense at first because Cade was not the kind of person Life Flight came for.
Cade was the person everyone stared at when he walked into a room.
Cade was the one who took hits, shook them off, smirked through pain, and made other men look breakable by comparison.
Cade was the captain. The future first-round pick.
The boy who had told me he loved me like it was the easiest truth in his body.
Life Flight was for people on the edge of not staying.
“No,” I whispered.
Knox’s face twisted. “Bug—”
“No.”