by T. R. Ragan
Then let out a breath.
It was only a tree branch brushing against the side of the house.
The curtain fell back into place.
Breathing easier, she readied her cup and saucer and then double-checked the alarm her husband and Beast had set to go off if anyone came near the house. The light was red. Good. That meant the alarm was on.
She checked her phone for messages. There were none. She thought about calling Jana before deciding against it. Her daughter was pregnant and finally home with her husband. The last thing Jana needed right now was her mother calling her to fret over every little sound.
There it was again.
A door slamming shut? Or had another tree branch fallen?
The Fitzpatricks lived across the pond. It had to have come from that way. Although she couldn’t remember ever hearing the neighbors coming and going before.
Stop it. Stop it. She was getting herself all worked up over nothing.
The teakettle whistled. Her nerves were shot. With a trembling hand, she took her time opening a tea bag and pouring hot water into her cup. She breathed in the aroma, even went to all the trouble to slice a wedge of lemon and fresh ginger.
Everything would be fine.
Russell and Colton would be fine. Faith and Miranda would be home soon.
She headed for the family room, surprised when the phone rang.
As she rushed back that way, teacup still in hand, hot water sloshed over the edges. She set her cup down and picked up the receiver on the third ring. “Hello?”
“My name is Robyn Price,” a woman said, her voice quiet, cautious. “I’m trying to get a hold of Faith McMann. Do I have the right number?”
The name sounded familiar. Lilly repeated the woman’s name in her mind. Robyn Price. Robyn Price. Where had she heard that name before?
“Are you there?”
“I’m sorry. Yes, I’m still here. Faith isn’t home at the moment, but I’m expecting her anytime.”
There was a long pause before the woman said, “I’ve been trying to track her down for a while now. It’s urgent. It’s about her children.”
“Do you know where they are?” Lilly asked hopefully.
“No. No, of course not—nothing like that. I shouldn’t have said anything. In fact, I never should have called.”
“No. Please. If you have any information you think might help Faith find the kids, you must—”
Click. The line went dead.
Lilly set the receiver down. Robyn Price. What did the woman know about the children? Why would she call and then hang up? It made no sense.
With the wind picking up and causing a racket outside, her nerves were now shattered to hell. Her hand still trembling, she reached for her tea. She brought the fine china to her lips and savored the first sip, hoping it would calm her. Before she could take another taste, the alarm went off.
Someone was here.
She put her cup down with a clank and headed for the front entry. Before she took more than a couple of steps, the sliding glass door leading into the dining area exploded around her, glass shattering, small pieces spraying across the carpet as a man dressed all in black rolled across the floor.
Her adrenaline spiked as she held back a scream.
Another man entered behind him. His face was covered with a dark knit cap. It was pulled down past his chin with two holes where his eyes peered at her. Her gaze fell on the gun he carried.
Her feet felt as if they were glued to the floor. It took her a moment to get moving. She ran, lost both slippers on her way up the stairs. She made it to her bedroom, slammed the door shut, and locked it. She tried to push the dresser in front of the door. It was too heavy, wouldn’t budge.
In a panic, she looked around, tried to think.
It would not serve her well to hide under the bed. Instead, she grabbed the Taser from the top drawer next to the bed and then ran to the bathroom. No sooner had she locked herself in than she heard shouting followed by a resounding crash as someone came through the bedroom door.
TWENTY-FIVE
Rage followed Beast into the house. Little Vinnie was stirring something in a giant pot on the stove. He looked right at her, then dropped the ladle and rushed toward them. “What happened?”
Rage and Beast had spent the second half of their day at the hospital. The cut on her chin was deeper than she’d realized and had ended up needing stitches.
Beast rubbed both hands over his head and then disappeared in the other room, leaving Rage to deal with his dad. “Something smells awful good,” she said.
“Don’t you dare try to skirt around this. Every time you come through that door lately, you’ve got a new injury. What happened?”
“I’m starved. Is that what I think it is? Homemade clam chowder?”
“Have a seat and start talking while I get you some.”
She followed him into the kitchen and took a seat at the small kitchen table. “Remember Fin, the tattoo artist?” she asked. “The guy being held in Faith’s garage in her Granite Bay home?”
Little Vinnie grabbed a bowl. “You were going to see if you could get him to talk. Did he get loose? Is he the one who did that to you?”
“He was definitely afraid of someone, which is why he wouldn’t talk. He finally gave us two phony names, so Beast let him go and we followed him home, to an apartment building off Truxel.”
Little Vinnie paled. “I saw the whole thing on the news. A bomb went off on Truxel. You were there?”
“Yeah. A little too close for comfort. Four stitches and my ears are still ringing, but I’m OK.”
Beast returned from the other room with his computer. He took a seat across from her and started clicking away at the keyboard.
Rage knew him well enough to know that something else was going on inside that big head of his. Although he was a man of few words, he expressed himself in other ways. For instance, she knew something was up whenever he walked around with a permanent scowl on his face. The truth was, ever since she’d been unable to finish their morning run, he’d been acting strange. Thinking she’d been killed today seemed to have been the last straw.
“Does Faith know about any of this?” Little Vinnie asked as he set a bowl of soup and a spoon in front of Rage.
“She and Miranda went to have a look around the hotel in San Francisco,” Rage told him.
“Eat,” he said. “You’ve lost too much weight.”
“That’s because I’m dying. Your innards don’t work the same way when you’re dying. Meat and fat no longer stick to your bones.”
He made a tsking sound with his tongue. “You know I don’t like it when you talk like that.”
When she’d first been diagnosed with stage four astrocytoma, Rage had been happy to let Beast and his father tiptoe around her, fulfill her every need, and treat her as if she were a fragile china doll, but her time on this earth was running out. She could feel it in every breath she took. Every move she made was a reminder of how sick she was. Her bones ached, her knees wobbled, and her hands trembled at times. But these two wonderful men who had taken her in when she had no one refused to believe there would come a day when she would no longer be around to argue with Beast or taste Little Vinnie’s cooking and tell him what the concoction needed to make it just right.
These two big boys were in big-time denial.
Denial had been fine in the beginning, sort of a stage she figured most people went through. But lately all the things the three of them didn’t say to one another were wearing her down at the seams. If she didn’t get some of it out, she thought she might burst wide-open.
She reached for Little Vinnie’s hand before he could head back to the stove. His fingers were like sausages, his skin weathered and dotted with age spots. “I’m dying,” she said. “And the only thing I will miss, besides never getting to lay eyes on my sweet boy, is spending time with you and your son.”
Beast looked up from his computer.
Li
ttle Vinnie opened his mouth to say something, but she stopped him. “Don’t say it,” she told him. “I’m dying. It’s a fact, and you both know it. And if you don’t let me say what needs to be said, then I won’t be able to die peacefully when the time comes.”
Neither of them said a word.
Beast couldn’t seem to make eye contact, so she kept her gaze on Little Vinnie. “I love you both. You changed my life in so many ways. If Beast hadn’t found me in that ditch and scooped me into his arms and brought me here, I never would have gotten the chance to appreciate the little things in life. Like the beauty of a sunflower.” She looked into Little Vinnie’s glistening eyes and squeezed his fingers. “Do you remember that day?”
At first he didn’t move one muscle, but then he nodded. It was a subtle nod, but she saw it.
“I was mad at you about something or other, and you pulled the old truck to the side of the road. You even bothered to turn the engine off, and I can still hear it sputtering and sizzling like it does before it shuts down.” She let her gaze roam over every familiar line in his face. And then she smiled at him. “I thought you parked at the side of the road because you were going to give me one of your famous lectures, but that wasn’t it at all. You sat there and waited patiently until curiosity got the better of me, and I uncurled myself from a fetal position on the backseat. When I sat up, you pointed a crooked finger at the field next to us. I looked that way, but it took a full five minutes for me to understand what you were pointing at. And when my head cleared and I saw those flowers swaying with the summer breeze, the sky as blue as ever, I cried from the sheer beauty of what you were showing me. The field was vast and never ending. I had never seen so many flowers in one place. Do you remember?”
Another nod.
“You called it a sea of sunflowers. That’s right. Not a field but a sea. I’m not kidding, though. In that moment, it felt as if I’d gone through my entire life without seeing the beauty in the world. I mean, sure, I wasn’t dealt the best hand when it came to families and life, but I never knew an ocean of sunflowers could be so beautiful. I thought a lot about that day since and how lucky I am to have you both in my life.”
Beast pushed his chair away from the table; the legs scraped against the floor before he got up and walked back to his bedroom.
She started to get up, but Little Vinnie shook his head. “He’ll be fine. He just needs a little time to himself.”
Hardly two minutes passed before Beast reappeared, wearing a thick coat. He grabbed his keys from a side table and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Little Vinnie asked.
“I’m going to take a drive to check on Faith and her mom. The alarm is going off, but she’s not answering her phone.”
Rage jumped to her feet, grabbed her gun from a drawer in the kitchen, and said, “Wait for me. I’m going, too.” Then she kissed Little Vinnie on the cheek and headed outside after Beast.
The ride to Loomis was quiet, and the tension between Rage and Beast was thick. It wasn’t until they were approaching their destination that Rage turned her attention to the matter at hand as she realized something could be really wrong. “Faith’s dad and her brother are in Mendocino. If someone has found a way into the house, we don’t want them to see us coming.”
“True. What do you have in mind?”
“Before you get to the driveway, there’s a turnoff. We’ll park there and make our way to the house by foot, through the backyard.”
Beast did as she said. He made a left where she pointed, drove the truck into a clearing, and turned off the engine.
Rage examined the gun she’d brought with her and made sure it was loaded. Beast strapped a hunting knife around each leg and climbed out of the car.
The wind was strong, pushing against them as they walked. The trees creaked as they bent forward, then backward, branches swaying every which way. Rage and Beast had been to the house enough times to know which way to go, even in the dark. They came around the pond from the back, walked past the large shed they had been using as a command post since Faith’s children were first taken.
Beast put a hand out to stop Rage from going any farther. The sliding glass door had been broken; shards of glass spread across the patio like crystal snow.
A high-pitched scream sent them both darting forward. Beast’s long legs and sour mood powered him ahead, and he made it to the house in record time, disappearing inside. Rage rushed to keep up. A piece of glass cut through the bottom of her left shoe.
Shit!
She bent forward and was able to pull it out before it went too deep. She grabbed her cell phone, called 911, gave them the address, and told them to hurry before she hung up on the woman with all the questions.
Inside were broken chairs. Framed picture frames had fallen from the mantel and were broken on the stone hearth. The coffee table had been turned on its side. The scream had come from upstairs, where she could hear a commotion.
Beast was way ahead of her.
With a tight grip on her gun, she hurried up the stairs. Two slippers lay abandoned on the third and fourth steps. All sorts of sounds came from above. A crash, a thump, then crunching and cracking and groans and moans.
She rushed onward, praying they weren’t too late.
The door to the master bedroom hung from one hinge. Splinters of wood sprinkled about the floor in the hallway. A man lay bleeding in front of the doorway. He rolled to his side, whimpering like an injured dog, his bloodied hands wrapped around his middle. Rage kept her gun pointed at his head as she stepped over him and entered the bedroom.
Beast had a hold on another man, one big arm wrapped around the guy’s scrawny neck as he dragged him across the room. The man’s arms and legs flailed when Beast picked him up. Beast held him straight up over his head before he tossed the man through the large-paned window. Glass shattered, and the man dropped out of sight.
“Watch out!” Rage cried as a third assailant charged from the bathroom, the blade of his knife glittering in the semidark.
Beast pivoted on his feet and tossed his hunting knife at the dark shadow as if he were playing darts, hitting a bull’s-eye. The thug stumbled backward. But Beast wasn’t done with him. In fact, he was just getting started.
Rage looked around the room, her heart racing as she ran to the other side of the bed, wondering why she hadn’t yet seen Faith’s mom. Her insides churned when she spotted Lilly Gray on the floor, half-hidden beneath the bed, her pajamas covered in blood.
It was hard to tell if she was breathing.
Rage knelt down next to her and wrapped her fingers around her frail wrist to feel for a pulse. She couldn’t feel a thing. But then one of Lilly’s eyelids fluttered. At first Rage thought she’d imagined it. Then it happened again.
Rage got down lower and put her head against Lilly’s chest. There it was—the faint beat of her heart. She cradled the woman’s head in her lap while she gently moved the hair out of Lilly’s face. “You’re going to be OK.” She thought of Faith and all she’d been through. “Don’t even think about dying—do you hear me?” Her next thought was of Beast, and she wanted to cry.
TWENTY-SIX
Faith and Miranda arrived at the hospital a little after midnight.
Since receiving the call about her mom, Faith had barely been able to see straight. Nobody would give her a straight answer. She had no idea how badly Mom was hurt. She spotted Rage and Beast sitting in the lobby and ran that way. She grabbed hold of Beast’s arm, her hands shaking. “I came as quickly as I could,” she told them. “What happened?”
Rage stood. “Beast had an alert on his computer that said the alarm at your parents’ house had been set off. You weren’t answering your phone, so he called your mom. Since there was no answer there, either, we went to have a look around. The sliding glass door had been busted through. There was glass everywhere. Turned out there were three men inside. Beast took care of all of them, but not before they got to your mom. The poli
ce are at the house now.”
“What about Mom?”
“Your sister is with her. The doctor said she’s going to be OK.”
About to head off to find Lilly’s room, Faith stopped when Rage reached out and took hold of her arm. “You should know she’s been beat up pretty bad. Her face is swollen.”
Faith didn’t know what to think, let alone say. It made her sick to think of what Mom had gone through. She nodded at Rage and then turned and walked toward the elevators.
“Where have you been?” Jana asked as soon as Faith entered the room.
Faith went to the bed where her mom was lying. She appeared to be asleep. Bandages and gauze covered her head around her ears and under her chin. Her eyes were tiny slits, hardly visible through the purple mass of bruises and swelling. Her left arm was in a cast, and there was a brace around her neck.
Monitors beeped all around them.
“Dad,” Faith said to Jana. “Does he know what happened?”
“Steve has been trying to contact him and Colton. No luck there, but he got a hold of someone at the Mendocino County sheriff’s office. They said they haven’t been in contact with either of them since they first arrived. The sheriff checked the parking lot, though, and told Steve that their truck was still there.”
Faith sighed. “Rage told me the doctor said Mom would be OK.”
Jana frowned. “Does she look OK, Faith? So far there are no signs of internal bleeding, but they’re keeping an eye on the swelling around her brain.”
It was quiet for a moment before Jana cut through the tension with sharp words. “You should see the X-rays. She has a deep gash on the top of her head.”
Faith slipped her hand over her mom’s.
“This has to stop,” Jana went on.
Faith looked at her sister. “What do you mean?”
“It’s time to let it go, Faith.”
Wishing Jana would go away, Faith traced a finger over Mom’s fragile skin, noticing how slender and long her fingers were.
