Page 182 of Carrick
His breath caught. His eyes flared. And his hand curled into a fist at his side like the only thing left was rage, quiet and shaking and waiting for somewhere to go.
Nikolai stayed rooted, arms crossed, face carved from stone—but the storm beneath it wasn’t hidden. Not from me. His stillness didn’t speak of calm, but of control held on a fraying thread. His chest barely moved, each breath shallow, the muscle in his jaw ticking like a fuse. He didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t need to. The loss hung thick between us, heavy in the silence, already written in the way we carried ourselves back through the door.
The room held its breath. The silence wasn’t empty; it was saturated. Dense with the words none of us knew how to say. Grief had already arrived. It stood among us, invisible but crushing, pressing down on every chest like a vice. No one moved to break it. No one dared. We stood in it together like mourners before the casket had even been revealed.
Then from the hallway, she said my name. “Carrick.”
It wasn’t yelled or whispered. It wasn’t posed as a question. Just spoken—steady, certain. Not a call or a plea, but a verdict. A reckoning. Bellamy.
I turned.
And everything inside me stopped.
She stood in the archway—barefoot, small, almost ghost-like—drowning in my hoodie, the sleeves brushing her fingers like she’d climbed inside it just to feel something that still smelled like me. Her hair hung in a loose knot, strands slipping free, framing her face with the kind of neglect that comes when nothing matters anymore. But it was her eyes that wrecked me—red-rimmed, glassy, swollen. Not just from crying, but from something deeper. From the kind of pain no tears could touch.The kind that comes from knowing. From bracing. From living through a thousand versions of this moment in your head and praying—desperately—that none of them would be real.
But this one had.
She looked like someone who already knew. Like someone who had felt the moment he died; who had curled around that pain in the dark and waited for the world to catch up to her grief. Hope still flickered there—because it always does, long past its expiration. Hope is cruel that way. It digs in. Clings to the bones. Refuses to let go, even when your soul has already started to grieve. It stays until the truth no longer has the decency to wait its turn.
And I didn’t say a word. Couldn’t. I just looked at her.
And I watched her shatter.
It started in her knees. They gave out without warning, buckling like a structure hit too hard in too many places.
Maddy was there in an instant, catching her like she’d been waiting for this exact second. She eased Bellamy down onto the couch, her hands shaking, her breath gone. She held her like she was something fragile—already breaking. Like if she gripped too tightly, Bellamy might shatter. Like if she let go, Bellamy might dissolve.
Bellamy didn’t fight it. Didn’t speak. Didn’t sob. She just curled inward—arms wrapped tight around her stomach, like she was trying to hold herself together from the inside out. Like if she pressed hard enough, she could keep the grief from spilling out.
But her eyes never left mine—not once. Not when her body crumpled. Not when silence swallowed the room. Not when her breath hitched like it hurt to keep going. She held my gaze like it was either saving her or destroying me—I couldn’t tell which. And in that look, I saw everything she couldn’t say. Everyquestion buried beneath her ribs. Every scream trapped behind her teeth. Every unspoken plea.
Where is he? Is he safe? Did you keep your promise?Her stare pinned me in place, sharp and unrelenting, a blade to the chest. And I stood there, bleeding under it, because I had nothing left to give. No lies to soften it. No comfort to shield her. No miracle waiting in the wings. Only the truth. And the truth was a wound we were all about to bleed from.
Jax’s voice broke through the silence like glass underfoot. “What the hell happened out there?” It wasn’t loud. It didn’t have to be. The sound of it was enough to shift the air—fractured and brittle, like it had cracked on its way out of his throat. The room turned toward me.
I opened my mouth, but no sound followed. No whisper. No breath. Not even the truth I carried like a corpse rotting in my chest.
The words existed—I could feel them—jagged and brutal, wedged in my throat like glass. Every syllable sliced through me. Every sentence shredded itself before it could take shape. My jaw moved, trying to free them, but nothing broke loose. Nothing survived the weight.
I stared at the floor, searching for the anchor I’d dropped somewhere between the blast and the drive home. But it wasn’t there. The blood was still drying under my nails. My heart was still hammering against bone like it wanted out. And the words—fuck, the words weren’t mine anymore. They didn’t belong to language. They belonged to grief.
“He was dead before we hit the ground.”
The sentence dropped out of me like a body from a great height. It didn’t sound like me. It scraped from my chest in a voice I didn’t recognize—low, shredded, like it had been dragged over barbed wire and coughed out in blood.
No one moved. No breath. No twitch. Nothing stirred except the way Bellamy’s shoulders curled tighter around her ribs, like she was holding something in.
The silence didn’t settle—it strangled. Every chest in the room locked up, breath trapped mid-lung, as if we were all bracing for an explosion we couldn’t stop. So I kept talking. Because if I paused—if I let the silence speak—I wasn’t sure I’d find the words again.
“He met us at the location like we planned,” I said, voice splintered. “Industrial corridor. North end of the city. The kind of place the city forgot—no lights, no cameras, no reason for anyone to pass through. Even with all the abandoned shipping containers blocking sightlines, it felt secluded enough. Quiet.”
I paused, staring at a scuff on the hardwood floor, like maybe I could fall into it. “Too quiet.”
Behind me, I heard Quinn shift. The squeak of leather as he lowered himself into a chair, one hand bracing on the armrest. He let out a slow, pained breath through his nose, jaw clenched so tight I could hear his teeth grind. Deacon peeled back the gauze—now stuck to his arm by dried blood—and began cleaning the wound. Some small part of my mind wondered how many stitches he would need.
“He had something real,” I kept going. “Intel worth risking everything for. He’d managed to get some time in front of one of the higher-ups laptops, and copied a bunch of shit onto an encrypted flash drive. Most of it had to do with a shell company of some kind... Revenant Logistics. It’s a shadow operation, running alongside Alexei Borovsky’s legitimate business. Arms, cash, human trafficking, all funneled through a nest of dummy corps and untraceable routes.”
Jax’s voice came out like sand. Dry. Quiet. “You saw the intel?”
