Page 90 of Carrick
Even Jax had stopped his lazy lean and looked like he might actually step in.
I turned to the rest of them, voice rising.
“You’re allcowards. You hide behind protocol, and chain of command, and your precious rules. You treat me like I’m some fragile vase you can’t put too close to the edge of the table, and I’mdoneplaying along. I’m not your responsibility. I’m not your houseguest. I’m hissister.”
Sully set his mug down with a hard clink. “Bellamy. We know you’re scared?—”
“Scared?!” I cut him off. “You think this is fear? Iwishit was. I could work with fear. This isdespair. This is fuckingfury. My brother might be dead in some alley. He might be screaming for help while you sit here, waiting for just the right moment to make a move.”
Deacon’s voice came low. “And if we move too soon, we lose the chance to find him alive. You think this isn’t killing us too?”
“You still have each other,” I said. “You still have your rhythm, your inside jokes, your five-man brotherhood and your tactical plans. What do I have? A borrowed bed and a countdown.”
No one spoke.
Not one of them moved.
Not until Carrick did.
He stepped in again, slower this time. Measured. Controlled. His hand came up like he was going to reach for me?—
I slapped it away.
“Fuck you, Carrick. Don’t touch me.”
“Bell—”
“I saiddon’t. You don’t get to touch me like that unless you’re going toshow upin the ways that matter.”
The room held its breath. So did I.
I didn’t mean to say it, but it came out anyway.
“I think he’s dead.”
Four words went off in the room like a bomb.
Even Carrick, always controlled, always grounded, went rigid. And I—God, I couldn’t take it back. The words hung there, vibrating in the air like a sparking wire. Electric. Ugly. True.
I turned away fast, arms wrapped around my torso, because if I didn’t hold myself together, I was going to shatter.
“That’s not helpful,” Sully said gently.
“I don’t need it to be helpful,” I choked. “I need it to bereal.”
“You don’tknowthat,” Deacon said from near the window, voice quiet but firm. “You’re guessing. Out of fear.”
“No,” I said. “Out ofgut. Out of the silence. You all keep telling me to hold on, to wait, but it’s beenweeks. He wouldn’t have gone this long without contacting me. Not if he could.”
“I know what the numbers say,” Jax muttered.
I turned. “Excuse me?”
He stood slowly, picking up the pen he always fidgeted with. His gaze was sharp now, cutting. “You want to talk statistics? Let’s talk. You’re right—after twenty-one days, the odds of finding a missing adult alive drop below 8%. But that’s not aconclusion. That’s astatistic. It doesn’t account for variableslike witness protection entanglement, interference by organized crime, or law enforcement corruption, which, by the way, are all factors inthiscase.”
He began pacing now, fast and restless. The pen danced in his fingers. “I’ve been pulling APB records, cross-referencing hospital admissions, and analyzing facial rec patterns on traffic and security cam loops in a fifteen-mile radius. I have three separate data sets running right now—through a filter I built from scratch—looking for anomalies in movement patterns that don’t match known criminal or pedestrian flows.”
The room was frozen.
