Page 76 of Carrick
The call that could shatter me. Or save me. Or do something worse—something in between. A maybe. A limbo. A piece of news that wasn’t good but wasn’t bad, and left me stranded in the purgatory of not knowing.
And then I heard him.
Carrick.
His voice came low and steady, like he was trying to keep a cornered animal from bolting. “Bellamy? It’s time. Quinn is on the line.”
I nodded and stood slowly, my joints protesting with the stiffness of a body too long spent braced in silence. My knees cracked. My spine ached. The book slid from my lap and thudded softly onto the bench, forgotten. My hands hung at my sides, blood returning in a slow, prickling crawl.
The moment I moved to follow him, the house seemed to shift with me—like it felt the change, like it knew something was about to give.
The hallway stretched long ahead of me, and with every step I took toward the living room, the air grew heavier, pressing close against my skin. Heat crawled up the back of my neck. My pulse thudded behind my ribs. My fingertips were cold, even as sweat gathered beneath my collar.
I felt like I was walking underwater. Or into a battlefield.
And maybe I was.
I reached the threshold and stopped just short of stepping inside. They were all there—positioned like chess pieces. Quiet. Still. Composed in that way people get when they’ve done something too many times to feel it anymore.
Jax sat on the couch, elbow braced on the armrest, jaw tight with effort. Sully was beside him, his posture half-sprawled, but his body was coiled like a spring beneath the surface—ready to move the second someone gave the word. Maddy sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the coffee table, spine straight, shoulders square, her eyes fixed somewhere that wasn’t quite the phone but wasn’t far from it either.
Deacon lounged in the armchair like stone made flesh—still, deliberate, unreadable. One boot propped on his knee. Hands clasped. His stare forward, unfaltering. He looked like a man sculpted to weather storms and silence in equal measure.
Niko stood in front of the window, the light behind him outlining the edges of his frame. The phone was already in his hand, thumb hovering just above the screen. He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t blinked. But I could see it—beneath the layers of control, there was tension in his stance. Not visible unless you knew to look. But I knew. I’d been watching him for too long not to notice.
I stepped into the room behind Carrick, my feet barely making a sound on the hardwood floor, but it felt deafening in my ears all the same. Like every creak of my body, every shift of fabric was too loud in a space this still.
I didn’t sit on the couch. I couldn’t.
Instead, I perched on the armrest, close enough to count as present but far enough to make a fast exit if I had to. My hands rested in my lap, tight around each other, fingers folded in an attempt to keep myself intact.
I didn’t know if I could survive what was coming.
Niko tapped the screen, the tiny click loud in the stillness, and lifted the phone.
“Quinn. You’re live.”
His voice was steady. Composed. The kind of tone that made my skin crawl because I couldn’t understand how anyone could sound that calm when everything might be falling apart.
Quinn’s voice crackled through the speaker, grainy but sharp.
“Was just about to call,” he said. “We got something.”
My breath caught. Froze.
Carrick moved then. Just a subtle shift in weight, a straightening of his spine, but I felt it like a ripple across the room. Jax leaned forward slightly. Maddy blinked and stilled. The air thickened, the silence stretching taut.
Before anyone else could speak, my voice broke free.
“Rayden?”
The name slipped out small, like it had cost me something. Not jagged. Not desperate. Just… fragile. Like the syllables were made of paper.
Quinn didn’t pause.
“We picked him up on a traffic cam downtown. Footage was time-stamped last Tuesday. Facial recognition hit ninety-two percent. It’s him.”
I blinked, the air knocked from my lungs.
