The headlights of a car shine over us, bright and blinding. With the squeal of tyres, a vintage Porsche comes to a wild halt beside us. Jared is at the wheel. The car is ridiculously small, something we constantly give him shit for, but that tiny piece of machinery can move.
“What did you do?” I shout, getting in Travis’s face.
Jared opens the door, unfolding his big body from the tiny car. “What the hell? Now is not a good time for a girly pow wow!”
“Fuck you, Jared,” I yell, not looking at him as he walks toward us. My eyes are on Travis. “What did you do?” I whisper.
A painful beat of silence surrounds us. Jared breaks it. “Aw hell, Trav.”
Travis swallows, stoic. “He deserves to know. They both do.”
Jared’s jaw clamps shut and he looks away. He can’t look at me either.
“Now is not the time for confessions,” Casey says. “As much as we all know Mac can take care of herself, she can probably do with some backup right about now.”
Jared turns disbelieving eyes on his brother. “He knows?” Then his gaze cuts to Casey. “You know?”
Casey shrugs.
“Would you all just shut the hell up and tell me what every other motherfucker seems to know but me?”
Travis looks at me and speaks. “That day we came and got Mac, we were in an accident. The car rolled four times before landing upside down in an embankment.”
Jared was behind the wheel that day. I turn to look at him. His face is whiter than snow. “I was driving too fast,” he admits. “I lost control of the car.”
My mouth opens and snaps shut. “Why the hell did no one tell me?”
“That’s not all,” Travis interrupts. Jared bends his head and rubs the back of his neck. Casey steps up beside me, his shoulder brushing mine. “Mac was … She …”
My heart is pounding harder than a jackhammer. “Spit it out, Travis.”
“Mac was pregnant and she suffered a miscarriage from the impact.”
My lungs squeeze and blackness edges my vision. The world slowly tilts beneath my feet.
“She was going to tell you about the baby, Jake.” Travis keeps talking but it’s hard to hear over the buzzing in my ears. “But you never gave her that chance.”
“I never gave her that chance?” I whisper.
“She was about to tell you when we turned up to collect her.”
And it’s my fault because I sent her away. The guilt overwhelms me. I drop to a crouch and hold my head in my hands, unable to stand the weight of it.
Mac was going to have a baby. My baby. My heart is breaking, and I can’t breathe over the pain. “Why didn’t she ever tell me?”
“She tried,” Travis chokes out. “In the hospital when she woke, she asked for you. She wanted you to know. She wanted you there. We …” He lets out a shaky breath. “We told her that you knew. That we’d told you.”
My eyes burn. Mac, who never needed anyone, needed me and I wasn’t there. Because I didn’t fucking know. I rise slowly to my feet. My hands fist by my sides, but I hold my chin high. “You goddamn interfering motherfuckers,” I bite out. “You let her think I knew?” My voice rises to a shout. “Why? Because I was never good enough and this was your chance to shut me out of her life for good?”
“We thought it was for the best,” Jared says, his voice low and gruff.
“You.” My nostrils flare as my eyes cut to him. “You were driving the damn car and you just lost control?”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, taking a step toward me.
My back stiffens and my voice comes out broken. “You killed our baby.”
Jared clamps his jaw shut, his breath coming out in harsh puffs through his nostrils. He’s on the verge of losing it but I don’t care. I’m caught in a world of pain. Nothing can stop it. It’s a freight train slamming into me without warning.
Casey puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezing. “Jake—”
I shrug him off and back away from all of them. “Don’t touch me.”
My breathing is heavy as my mind traces over our every interaction since the day she left. Mac’s hostility. Her anger. It all makes sense. It’s a testament to her strength that she’s still standing, putting one foot in front of the other each day. That she even speaks to me at all.
She’s the only person I’ve ever loved and look what I did to her. What we did to her. She was going to be a mother. We were going to be parents. A family. And now we’re nothing at all.
The stab of loss is excruciating. A sob climbs my throat. I swallow hard in an effort to keep it down.
“Jake?”
The sound comes from far away.
My head swings slowly. Casey has hold of my bicep. He’s saying my name as he drags me toward the car. His lips are moving. “Mac needs you,” they seem to say.
He opens the passenger door of Jared’s Porsche. I slide inside. Numb. He shuts it behind me. Jogging around the front, Casey slams into the driver’s seat and guns the engine, roaring off before he even has the door fully shut.
“Jared is going with Travis in his car,” he explains without me asking the question.
Good.
I can’t be around the Valentine brothers right now. Violence simmers under my skin, ready to unleash on any one of them without notice. A single punch to each brother in the face will make me feel better. Every day. A punch a day, until they add up to the number of days since they started this shit.
My eyes focus outside the window. The night is dark but the traffic lights are bright. I stare, watching them blur into each other as we speed through the quiet streets.
“Where is she?”
Casey glances across at me. I feel his concern. It’s like a thick fog blanketing the interior of the car. “I don’t know.” At least he’s honest. “But we’ll find her,” he vows.
The light of dawn is hitting the horizon when we finally get a break on Mac’s location, though it isn’t the kind of break we’re hoping for. A phone call between Casey and Travis confirms that Evie, supposedly on lockdown at the duplex where we’ve been living on the seaside suburb of Bondi Beach, has gone rogue.
Mac clearly taught her well. Evie disappeared just a half hour earlier, spiriting her car out of the driveway, along with the gun Mac keeps in a locked box on the top shelf of her walk-in robe.
At least we have her on GPS. All the manpower we had tracking down leads is now zeroed in on Evie’s Hilux truck.
I glance at the speedometer on the little dashboard. The speed limit is eighty. We’re doing a hundred. “Can’t you go any faster?” I bark at Casey.
Casey shifts gears with a grim expression and pushes his foot down harder. We’re hitting one-twenty when his phone rings, the sound barely audible over the growl of the engine. It’s sitting in the centre console and lights up showing Jared’s name.
“Answer it,” Casey orders, his eyes glued to the road.
I pick it up and hit the green button. “You’re on speaker,” I say to the phone and rest it back in the centre.
“He’s got Evie.” Jared’s voice is hoarse. “He has my sister and now he has Evie.”
I tip my head back against the seat, eyes unseeing. It’s impossible to think about whether Mac is hurt or dead. And now Evie. I can barely function as it is.
“Dammit,” Casey mutters.