Page 78 of Carrick
“And if he’s not?” I asked. My voice didn’t shake this time. It flattened. Lead-heavy. “What if he’s dead?”
The question hollowed out the room.
No one moved. Not even Niko. No one wanted to be the one to say it—to fracture the silence that had become its own kind of fragile hope.
So I did it for them. And it felt like splintering.
Carrick’s voice came next, clean and certain. “I don’t believe that.”
No fanfare. No drama. Just facts. Like a sunrise. Like gravity.
I turned toward him, needing to see something—anything—in his face. Conviction. Faith. A crack of light in the dark. But he didn’t waver. His gaze held steady, unmoved by the chaos. A man on a battlefield, standing still when everything else had begun to fall.
And maybe that should have steadied me. But it didn’t.
Because I wasn’t standing. I was drowning.
The numbness started slow—just a tingle at my fingertips—but it spread like frostbite, climbing my spine, curling tight around my chest. Cold. Quiet. I could feel it settling in, that hollow kind of survival that looks like composure but feels like dying.
Quinn kept talking, his voice as even as ever. “We’re continuing to comb known associates, surveillance footage, anything we can get our hands on. We’ve got eyes. Just no movement.”
“That’s not a plan,” I whispered, my voice low and thin, barely even mine.
“It’s the only one we’ve got right now.”
Niko’s exhale was soft, but final. “Keep us posted.”
“Will do.”
The call ended without warning. No resolution. No reassurance. Just the sharp, hollow absence of sound where something solid should have been. Where hope should have lived. The silence that followed wasn’t passive. It pressed in, dense and unforgiving, the kind that echoes like a slammed door or the final thud of a casket. They’d called it a lead, but it wasn’t. It was a memory, seven days old and already fading like smoke, vanishing before it could mean anything.
I stared down at my hands, palms damp, fingers twitching with a tremor I couldn’t will away. I tried to still them, to breathe slow and deep, but the shaking only moved higher—into my arms, my chest, the hollow behind my sternum that should have held breath and instead held panic. It felt like drowning with my eyes open, like screaming inside a vacuum where nothing could break through.
No one spoke. The room held still, as if bracing against the weight of what hadn’t been said. Jax tapped the edge of hislaptop, not typing. Sully leaned forward, elbows on his knees, gaze downcast and unreadable. Maddy’s fingers twitched toward her glass before she stilled again. Deacon didn’t move, didn’t blink. He just watched me with the kind of quiet that saw too much. Carrick stared at the table where the phone had been, like he could summon a different outcome by sheer will alone. And Niko still held the phone, jaw tight, neck rigid, looking like he had something to say but couldn’t find the words. Or didn’t believe they would help.
I stayed frozen, because somewhere between that call and the silence that followed, the team had shifted into something else. The change was subtle, but it was there—in the way their gazes turned inward, in the way they stopped looking at me and started looking ahead. They were slipping into mission mode now, and I wasn’t part of the plan. The grief belonged to me. The strategy belonged to them.
I wanted to scream. To throw something. To break the stillness and demand they acknowledge what I couldn’t bear to name aloud. My brother might be dead, and they were already breathing around it like it was acceptable. Like it was survivable.
I stood too fast. The movement scraped against the quiet like flint against steel. Jax looked up. Maddy flinched. Niko’s brows pinched like he might stop me. And Carrick pushed off the wall in one smooth motion, like his body had tracked mine on instinct alone.
Still, no one spoke.
I walked. Not fast, not slow, just forward. Toward anything that wasn’t this room, this silence, this ache. And as I passed Carrick, I reached out without thinking and caught his elbow. Not rough. Not gentle. Just… certain. My hand wrapped around the solid line of his arm like I was claiming something. Not him. Not the moment. Just a truth I could hold on to that wouldn’tdissolve beneath me. He was warm under my palm. Steady. Real.
I didn’t look at him when I spoke. I couldn’t. My voice came low, hoarse, cracked down the middle. “I need to get out of my head.”
The words barely made it out. But Carrick didn’t flinch. Didn’t ask. Didn’t press. His reply came, quiet and even, the voice I trusted more than my own.
“Say less.”
16
Carrick
She didn’t knock.She never did when it was like this.
I’d asked for an hour to prep the space. She’d agreed. But the room hadn’t needed it—I had. I needed time to level out, to breathe past the weight of everything I couldn’t say. To let the anger cool enough that it wouldn’t burn her when she walked in. Because I was pissed. Not at her. At all of it. The silence around Rayden. The way caring about her had made me care about him, too—not just as a mission or a mistake, but as the last living tie to someone I was falling for.
