Page 72 of Carrick
“So, what?” I rasped, voice dragging up from something hollow. “We’re calling silence a good thing now?”
“No,” Quinn replied. “We’re just not assuming the worst.”
I stared at the phone. At nothing. At everything. “You don’t even know if he’s alive.”
This time, the pause was heavy. Final.
“No,” Quinn said quietly. “We don’t.”
The breath left me in a slow, collapsing drift. Not a sob. Not a scream. Just the quiet exhale of someone who’d held on too long. My lungs folded inward like paper soaked through with grief.
I stood without meaning to. The chair dragged sharply across the floor, a sound that split the air like a warning shot. I didn’t apologize. Didn’t explain. My legs moved because sitting felt like surrender—because every second I stayed still felt likecomplicity. Like I was agreeing to this silence. This purgatory, dressed up as patience.
“That’s not holding,” I said, and the words came cracked and raw. “That’s notanything. That’s waiting to hear that he’s already gone.”
Carrick looked at me then, full-on. His body turned toward mine, like his instinct to protect activated on a cellular level. He didn’t speak, didn’t reach—not yet—but I felt him bracing. Like he was ready to absorb the impact if I shattered. Like he already knew I would.
But I didn’t want to be caught. Didn’t want to be calmed. I wanted to scream until the walls shook. I wanted to throw a chair through the window and make the silence bleed.
“You want me to sit here?” I said, louder now, my voice rising with the heat under my skin. “Smile? Eat dinner? Pretend the world isn’t rotting from the inside out while you feed me updates that mean nothing?”
Quinn’s voice remained level. “If we escalate without evidence, we risk letting the Dom Krovi know he’s under police surveillance.”
“And if we don’t?” I snapped. “We riskeverything else.”
Deacon spoke first—quiet, but firm, his voice carrying the weight of something that couldn’t be ignored. “This isn’t sustainable,” he said, each syllable deliberate, like footsteps across a frozen lake already beginning to crack. Maddy’s voice followed, softer but no less steady. “Bellamy isn’t okay. She’s barely holding it together, and expecting her to just sit in that without release? That’s not fair. She deserves the space to break if she needs it. You’re asking too much.”
I couldn’t look at either of them. Not with the burn rising behind my eyes, not with my throat cinching tight around the shape of ‘thank you’s’ I didn’t know how to give. Gratitude wasn’t supposed to hurt, but in that moment, it sliced deep,sharp and unwelcome, like being seen too clearly when all I wanted was to disappear.
Carrick moved beside me, just a shift of his hand toward the small of my back—nothing forceful, nothing loud. Just presence. An offering. But I couldn’t take it. Not when my whole body felt wired to explode. I stepped away before his fingers could find me, sharp and sure in a way that had nothing to do with strength. “You don’t know what this feels like,” I said, the words ragged with grief and fury. “You don’t know what it’s like to imagine your brother on some concrete floor, a gun pressed to his head, while everyone else sits around parsing data like it’s just another puzzle to solve.”
From the phone, Quinn’s voice crackled through the tension. “I understand that it’s difficult not having any new information. Trust me, we’re all as frustrated as you. As soon as we?—”
“No,” Carrick snapped, slamming a palm flat on the table so hard it echoed like a gunshot. “You don’t get to feed her silence and call it strategy. She deserves better than this—than waiting in the dark while you play it safe. So tell her something, Quinn. Tell her something real. Or I swear to God…”
Deacon leaned forward, breaking the silence that followed Carrick’s outburst. “This isn’t just about Rayden,” he said, voice like gravel and steel. “It’s about whether we still remember why we do any of this. We protect people. Even when it’s messy. Even when it’s not protocol.” His eyes flicked around the room. “So either give her something—or admit we’ve stopped doing the one thing we’re supposed to be good at.”
Another pause. Longer. Careful.
Then Quinn said it again.
“We’re in a holding pattern. Until something shifts.”
It felt like being sealed in a room with no windows, like the air was thinning with every breath and no one else noticed. That word,holding, echoed through my skull like a death knelldisguised as mercy. Not strategy. Not comfort. Just grief with the brakes on. Pain shackled in place. The stillness of something dying before anyone’s willing to name it.
They were holding. While Rayden might already be gone.
And I was coming apart, minute by minute, cell by aching cell. I turned from the table, lungs locked, vision gone hazy. I didn’t look at Carrick. Couldn’t. One glance at that quiet, too-honest gaze of his, and I’d collapse in front of them all. So I walked. No excuse, no explanation. Just motion—my boots hitting the floor like gunshots, echoing down the hall like proof I was still moving. Still here. When he might not be.
By the time I hit the corner, the first tear had fallen—no sob, no sound. Just heat down my cheek, the slow betrayal of a body that had finally stopped pretending to be fine. I swiped it away, rough and angry, not because I was afraid, but because I was alone in a house full of people—and no one else was screaming.
I didn’t realize where I was going until I was already there, my hand braced on the study door. I gripped the knob before I could second-guess myself, shoving it open too hard, the hinges groaning in protest as I stepped inside. I slammed it shut behind me. Not to make a scene. Just to send a message:Don’t follow me.
But of course he did.
The handle turned without warning; the door opened with a whisper instead of a knock. Carrick didn’t say a word. Just crossed the threshold like he’d been waiting for the silence to give him permission. He stayed near the door, his presence calm, unthreatening—like he knew I wasn’t human yet. Not really. Just exposed nerves and animal instinct, volatile and feral, aching for a place to fall without breaking on the landing.
“I don’t want to be comforted,” I said without turning around. My voice cracked at the edges, dry and tight, but I didn’t try to fix it.
