Page 135 of Every Broken Piece
I shake my head. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this defeated. My sons in the hospital with a fucking gunshot wound and my girl’s gone.Gone.
Because I didn’t send a car to pick her up. I didn’t walk her to the restaurant. I left that up tomy son.
“Stop beating yourself up. That’s not helping anything,” Jack says, reading my mind.
The doors open and he leads me down a silent hall. It’s two in the morning but the nurses don’t stop us as we make our way to Pax’s room.
Jack pushes the door open and lets me enter first. I pause to take a deep breath, not ready to see him laid out on a bed after surgery from beingshot.
Fucking hell.
I take a step in and stop. He’s on his back, his arms at his side, eyes closed, so damn pale that it scares the shit out of me. I have to brace a hand on the wall to keep from falling to my knees.
“He’s still a little out of it from the anesthesia,” Jack says.
I find the closest chair and sink into it. Elbows on my knees I lean forward and clasp my hands together studying the monitors that beep a comforting rhythm.
“What now?” Jack asks quietly. “What’s our next move?”
“Find her.” I hope to hell wecanfind her. I hope she’s not hurt, or worse. I grind the heels of my hands into my burning eyes.
Helplessness is a feeling I lived with for years and eventually overcame. It’s not a place I want to go back to.
“I called Hardwick,” I say softly so as not to wake Pax. I keep my eyes on the up and down motion of his chest and my ears tuned to the steadybeep beepof the monitors. “She’s calling Chicago PD to see if they have eyes on Carter.” I know they don’t because he’s here and he has Tess and I don’t know where the hell they are. They could be out of Denver by now. Out of Colorado.
Pax’s eyes flutter open and he turns his head. I push out of the chair.
“Dad?”
“Right here, bud. How’re you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been shot.” He grins but it’s too soon for me, although if I know Pax he’ll make the most out of this for a long time to come.
“Nothing major was hit. You’ll heal like new.”
“Think I ruined my chances at the Olympics?”
A few of the cracks in my heart heal a little at his joke. “Maybe you’ll run faster.”
His eyes are clouded with the pain meds, but they suddenly widen. “Tess? Did you find her?”
I draw in a deep breath. “Not yet. But a whole lot of people are working on it.”
His eyes fill with tears and his bottom lip trembles just like it did when he was a little boy. “I’m so sorry—”
“Pax—”
“No, Dad. You don’t understand. I know what she means to you. I haven’t seen you this happy in forever and I was supposed to protect her for you, and she ended up protecting me for you.”
I never once told him to protect her, but the fact that he felt the need to breaks me a little more. “That wasn’t up to you, son. She’s my girl. My responsibility.”
A tear drips down his cheek, and I lean forward. “This isn’t your fault, Paxton. Bad people wanted her and were willing to kill you to get her. You couldn’t have stopped them.”
His eyes widen and he lifts his head, digging his elbows into the bed to sit up, then groans and flops back on the pillow.
I put a hand on his chest to keep him still.
“Her phone,” he says to the ceiling. “You can track her phone. I put her on our family tracking app when I set up her new stuff.”
