Page 189 of Carrick
“She’s grieving,” Jax said softly. “Everyone does it different.”
“She’s punishing herself,” Maddy snapped. “And maybe punishing us a little, too.” She looked at me when she said it, eyes sharp and hollow. I didn’t argue. Couldn’t. She wasn’t wrong.
“She’s punishing me,” I muttered, and the words tasted like rust.
The table went still. Jax sat back in his chair. “You think she blames you?”
I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t need to. “She screamed it in my face, Jax,” I said. “You were there.”
“She was in shock?—”
“She wasn’t wrong.” That stopped everyone. Even Maddy looked away. “I told her I’d protect him,” I said. “I told her I’d bring him back.”
“And you tried,” Sully said, voice low. “You didn’t fail her, Carrick. The Dom Krovi set him up from the start.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He died before he even knew what hit him. I saw it. I saw the fucking rocket before it hit him, and I was still too far.”
Silence followed, heavier than any weapon I’d carried.
“You’re thinking it’s Martinez all over again,” Niko said.
I stiffened. He’d been quiet until now, sitting in the corner of the room like a shadow with teeth. His voice was casual, but hiseyes weren’t. They were hard. Focused. Like he was laying out the one truth no one else wanted to touch.
“You keep going over it in your head,” he said. “Every step. Every breath. What if you’d moved faster? What if you’d pulled him sideways? What if you’d told him no? Just like Martinez.”
My stomach clenched. I stared down and said nothing.
“Only difference is,” Niko continued, “Martinez was yours to command. Rayden wasn’t.”
“He was Bellamy’s,” I said, quieter than I meant to.
“Yeah,” he said. “He was.”
Jax closed the laptop with a quiet snap. “So what do we do now?”
“We figure out how the fuck they got their hands on a military-grade weapon,” Niko said flatly. “That’s not black market. That’s D.O.D. stockpile. There’s no way a street-level hit crew got their hands on an RPG without someone high up moving strings.”
“It was clean, too,” Jax said, finally shutting his laptop. “Professional-grade. No trace. No drag net. No prints. No heat signatures picked up by any of our contacts. You don’t get that kind of erase-without-a-trace unless you’ve got real fucking access.”
“Which means,” I said, “The Dom Krovi isn’t just monopolizing real estate and shaking down old geezers. They’ve got their fingers in some serious shit.”
The words hung in the air. They didn’t surprise anyone. But that didn’t make them easier to say.
Maddy sat down finally, her hands shaking as she set the mug on the table. “Do we tell her that?”
“Not yet,” I said. “She hasn’t asked.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“She will.”
No one argued with me. Because we all knew what she was made of. How sharp grief had carved her. How much fire she was holding in a body too small to contain it. She wasn’t going to disappear. She was going to explode. And when she did—I was going to be the one standing in the fallout. I wouldn’t let anyone else carry that weight. Not again. Not this time.
Dinner sat cold and untouched on the table. No one said it, but we all felt it—this wasn’t about food. It hadn’t been since the moment we sat down. The tension in the room didn’t come from empty plates or low blood sugar. It came from absence. From the weight of silence pressing down on all of us, a shared unease that tonight might stretch into tomorrow, and the day after that.
Sully sat hunched in his chair, shoulders curled forward, his massive hands shredding a paper napkin without even realizing it. Across from him, Jax had been cleaning his glasses for ten minutes—slow, meticulous circles that had nothing to do with smudges and everything to do with his need to do something. Niko paced behind the island like he was tracing invisible lines into the tile. Controlled. Coiled. Ready to snap.
And I—I just sat there, arms folded, trying to pretend I wasn’t just as twisted up as the rest of them. But my lungs were burning. My skin felt too tight. I’d never been good at waiting. And this? This kind of stillness—it wasn’t just waiting. It was watching something die in slow motion.
