Page 128 of It Must Be Fate

“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 handover 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 weredead.” 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 lifebegging 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.

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