The Hail You Say

by Lani Lynn Vale

  “Did you know they have a healthy set of twins on the maternity floor?”

  I wanted to cunt punch her.

  “Unlike you.” Caria grinned, showing a row of perfectly white teeth.

  I wanted to see those white teeth scattered on the floor after I slammed her head into the concrete a couple of hundred times.

  “Unfortunately, they’d taken the boy of the twin set to go get his wiener skin chopped off—which might I add is a barbaric practice. I hate seeing circumcised men nowadays. So anyway, I had to find another.”

  I shouldn’t have said it. I knew it, yet it came out anyway.

  “You probably wouldn’t like Reed all that much then,” I told her. “He’s circumcised. It doesn’t affect the feeling in his dick at all, though. I’d say he’s perfectly functional down there.”

  Caria screamed an inhuman scream and came down two steps, leaving the bag that’d been at her side on the landing.

  Something was off about it.

  Was it moving?

  Before I could so much as glance at it, though, Caria came down two more steps.

  “You think you’re cute, don’t you?” She sneered. “Well, let me tell you something.” She took another step. “You’re not.”

  And she swung her right fist at my face.

  I ducked, but once I was down, I couldn’t get back up.

  ***

  Reed

  I couldn’t wait to stop feeling those twinges that would remind me that I wasn’t in the top shape that I used to be.

  I would be one day, though.

  And wouldn’t be winded by climbing a simple flight of stairs.

  Well, technically, it was two flights. Ten stairs a piece that led to the second level. Twenty total.

  There’d been a power surge of some kind that had caused the left bank of elevators that led to the floors above to stop working. That meant that the right bank of elevators was backed up with people waiting to get on it.

  Anxious to get to Krisney and the boys, this delay led to me taking the freakin’ stairs when I didn’t really want anything to do with them for the time being.

  I used to take these stairs in a flash as I made my way into the hospital and up to the labor and delivery floor. Now I was taking them so slow that I was sure I looked like an old man.

  “Oh, man.” I groaned.

  The pinch was setting into a prominent twinge, which was what caused me to pause at the top of the first flight of stairs and take a short breather.

  My eyes were trained ahead as I looked up at the number two painted on the wall above my head when I heard the screams.

  “You stupid, no good whore!”

  My head tilted to the side, and I leaned over the stairs to look up.

  I couldn’t see anything.

  I could hear voices, though.

  The voice sounded familiar, but with the way that the stairwell contorted voices, I couldn’t even begin to tell you who, or what floor they were even on.

  I started up to the next landing, the voices getting louder, and paused when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

  I reached in and pulled it out, seeing that it wasn’t my phone, but Krisney’s.

  I pressed the green accept button and put it to my ear just as another screech rent the air.

  I leaned over the stairwell again, looked up, and immediately brought my head in just in time for a body to come flying over the stairwell.

  The body screamed on her way down—and it was a her because I could see her long hair streaming upwards as she fell—to the ground at basement level.

  My mouth fell open.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed, the phone to my ear.

  “Krisney?” the woman on the other end of the line said.

  “Uh, no,” I said. “This is her fiancé, Reed. Mom?”

  I didn’t know what to do.

  The minute that my mom asked for Krisney, I knew that she was working. The other nurse had said she worked opposite shifts from my mother, meaning that my mom was there. Where Krisney should be…

  “Reed,” my mother breathed.

  I looked down at the body that was writhing two floors below, then up, still seeing nothing.

  I climbed two sets of stairs, my suspicions getting to the point of screaming inside of me.

  “The babies both had bouts of apnea today,” she said, making my foot stall on the third floor. “Both of their lungs collapsed. The right one on Baxter, and the left one on Dash.”

  At the same time?

  My eyes went up, and I froze.

  Krisney was down on the ground, crying.

  Her eyes met mine.

  I looked over the landing again and studied the woman on the ground.

  Caria.

  My eyes flicked back up to Krisney.

  “Are they okay?” I rasped.

  There was so much going on that I didn’t know what to do. Who to go to first.

  One part of me was wanting to run up to Krisney, while the other wanted to run down to the NICU where my babies were. The other, and this was a very minute part, wanted to go all the way down the flight of stairs and see to the woman—Caria—who had fallen.

  “We were able to get the lungs reinflated…” she paused. “You know that this is pretty common in premies, correct?”

  “Yes,” I croaked.

  What else was common in ones so young? Brain bleeds. Digestive problems. Mental delays.

  The list went on and on and on, and I had tried really hard not to think about that. To think about the fact that these babies had such a hard road in front of them.

  “Okay,” she said. “Today, they’re restricting visitation due to the problems, but I’ll keep you updated, and let you know if anything else goes wrong, okay?”

  “Yeah, Mom.” I croaked. “Thank you.”

  She hung up, and immediately I got a text from her, but I didn’t have time to look at it.

  After shoving the phone back into my pocket, I took the last eight steps that led me to Krisney, and looked down at her.

  “Kris…”

  “She had a gun.”

  “What?”

  Krisney gestured to the side where Caria had plunged down from, but her eyes were on the bag that was two steps up on the landing.

  “She had a gun.” Then she tilted her head. “Reed, I think there’s something alive in that bag.”

  The bag was one of those boho bags that crossed over the shoulder. A huge monstrosity that did appear to be moving.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Go look.”

  I reached into my pocket and handed her the phone. “Call 911.”

  “Were you talking to your mother?”

  “Yeah,” I croaked. “The babies…their lungs collapsed. Mom said that they’re okay now, stable. But they’re restricting visitation for today until they can be sure that they really are stable before letting us in.”

  Her head dropped. “I was so scared. That’s why I’m in here…Reed, I think that she was on her way to the NICU floor. I don’t know what she was going to do, but I feel like she was headed to our babies.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I continued to make my way to the bag.

  “She didn’t make it,” I growled, then dropped down on one knee to look into the bag.

  My heart literally stalled in my chest when I saw skin.

  Then a hand. A head. Two heads. Two more hands.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  ***

  “The babies have sensors on their feet, usually around one ankle,” I murmured, looking as the parents were reunited with their healthy babies. “Caria had access to the tools needed to take them off without setting off the alarm. She’s put them on multiple times before.”

  My heart wasn’t in the explanation, though.

  No, it was upstairs with my own children who were, as of right now, stable. However, they couldn’t have an
y visitors. The doctor said if all went well through the night that we would be able to visit in the morning during regular visiting hours.

  “Can you give me any more information?” Detective Cree asked.

  I shook my head.

  “You’re free to go, then.” He gestured to the door with a flick of his hand. “I’m going to question Caria.”

  I didn’t give one flying fuck what she said. The cameras in the stairwell disproved any wrongdoing on Krisney’s part, and the damning evidence of Caria walking out of the maternity floor with a bag that just happened to have two newborn babies in it was effectively going to put her away for quite a long fucking time.

  Though, she could possibly be paralyzed from the waist down, so there was that, too.

  And I couldn’t find it in me to care.

  “Let’s go,” I said, holding out my hand for Krisney.

  She placed her hand in mine, and together we walked out of the hospital.

  ***

  Two hours, and hundreds of questions later, Krisney and I were sitting on the couch in my living room.

  “We need to order some baby stuff,” I found myself saying.

  Krisney shook her head, and I looked at her. “I don’t want to get anything. I want to…wait.”

  “Krisney…”

  “If they…if they don’t make it…I don’t want the reminder that they didn’t.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that.

  I couldn’t come up with anything that would make her feel better, because she was right.

  Getting baby stuff meant that they were coming home, and there was a slight possibility that they wouldn’t make it.

  They were so young.

  So, so young.

  “Okay,” I murmured.

  “That’s stupid,” Dante said.

  I blinked, surprised to find him standing in my kitchen doorway.

  “You’re already writing them off,” Dante continued as if we’d argued with him. “They’re Hails. Fucking fighters. Don’t write them off. They’re gonna be here. They’re gonna come home, and then you’ll feel stupid because you should’ve started to buy shit for them and didn’t.”

  “Can I hold her?” Krisney asked.

  Dante didn’t hesitate.

  Where he did with the rest of us, me included, he handed Mary right over to Krisney as if he’d been doing it from day one.

  Dante had always had a soft spot for Krisney.

  They’d bonded over ice cream one day and had a special connection ever since.

  I didn’t understand it and never pretended to.

  “She’s gotten so big from the last pictures you sent me,” Krisney murmured, surprising the shit out of me.

  “He’s sent you pictures?”

  Krisney frowned. “Yeah, he has. Why?”

  I looked over to Dante to see that his expression was entirely closed off.

  Whatever.

  I sighed and rubbed my hands over my eyes.

  “You’re getting baby shit.” He paused. “And I went through your woods with a few friends. Found two more traps. Don’t think there are any more, but I’ll spend some time out there every once in a while, to make sure.”

  On that, we were agreed.

  I’d already gone out there myself and did a sweep of the area after Pepé had died. I had planned on doing it again myself every spare chance I had, but then Caria carried out her plan to rid me of my pesky family. So, if Dante was offering to head out there again to look around, I’d take him up on it.

  I never, not ever, wanted to see that expression on Krisney’s face again.

  I didn’t want to ever see her hurt again.

  “Speaking of that old place,” Dante continued as if we’d had this discussion hundreds of times.

  I immediately shook my head. I didn’t want Dante to say anything more. Not yet, anyway.

  “Where was Rafe?” I asked.

  “Rafe had a little accident last night,” Dante said, looking away.

  “What kind of accident?” I questioned, tensing.

  “The kind where he’s incapacitated at the moment.”

  “What?”

  Dante looked away.

  “Dante,” I growled. “What have you gotten yourself involved in?”

  Dante grimaced. “It’ll be okay.”

  Call me crazy, but I didn’t fucking believe him.

  Chapter 23

  I like to have my cake and eat it, too. I also like to have your cake and eat it, too.

  -Krisney to Reed

  Reed

  During the days, I spent half of them at work, half of them in the NICU, and my nights working on my secret project.

  It was a bonus that my brothers were helping, too.

  The progress we were making meant that we might have a new house to bring our children to rather than bringing them to my place, and I was honestly quite excited by the prospect.

  It’d been four weeks since the day that our children had a setback, but ever since, we hadn’t had anything else go wrong on their end. They were thriving.

  And today, we were finally, finally going to hold our children without the eight thousand cords and tubes attached to them.

  As of eight this morning, they graduated from the endotracheal tube and the CPAP, which forced air down their windpipes into their lungs, to just a nasal cannula. The next step would be them breathing without any assistance.

  I couldn’t fuckin’ wait.

  There was practically a skip to my step as I made my way down one flight of stairs. Each day it came more and more easily until one day I was no longer getting winded. My body didn’t feel any different than it had before I’d donated my kidney and half of my liver to Krisney, and I was grateful.

  That pain was a constant reminder of what had almost happened to her, and it fuckin’ hurt to think about. Hurt to breathe. Hurt so bad sometimes that I woke up in the middle of the night with sweat drenching my body.

  “Heard you had a big one!”

  I looked up to find another labor and delivery nurse headed my way from upstairs.

  I grinned. “Sure did. Eleven and a half pounds.”

  “Yikes!” She giggled as she passed. “Not the biggest, though.”

  No, it hadn’t been. The biggest this hospital had ever seen had been a thirteen-pound baby.

  I’d just delivered a baby who was two weeks late and looked like the fuckin’ Michelin Man compared to my own, but he was absolutely adorable.

  I wondered if our kids would one day have rolls like that. Sure, they were finally starting to get some fat in their cheeks at an adjusted age of thirty-eight weeks, but they were nothin’ compared to this baby who had just been delivered—naturally.

  Grinning, I stopped at the scrub station and washed up before putting on a gown and a pair booties which were stored there.

  Once I was covered from shoulder to mid-calf, I headed inside and grinned at my mom.

  “How are they doing?” I asked as I looked around for Krisney.

  “She’s getting lunch,” Mom said, then sighed. “Reed, I’d like to talk to you while she’s not here.”

  I frowned.

  My mother and I hadn’t had the best of relationships lately.

  She felt bad for how she’d acted. I could tell. Yet, I couldn’t quite forgive her. I couldn’t get over the fact that she tried to guilt me into choosing myself over the woman that everyone knew I loved.

  It’d been six weeks, and she was avoiding the issue. She was going on with life like she hadn’t said such hurtful things.

  “What about?” I asked, moving to the closest baby which happened to be Baxter—who was now in an open-top radiant warmer bed that made handling the babies so much easier while still helping to maintain their body temperatures.

  It was a big step.

  Dash, though, was still in his incubator, but they expected him to move to a convertible wa
rmer any day now.

  “Heya, Bax,” I spoke to my son. “Whatcha doin’?”

  He turned his head toward me, and I swear I saw a tiny smile grace his features before he craned his neck and squirmed the other way.

  Grinning, I moved back to Dash and reached my hand into the opening.

  Running my finger down the length of his arm, I smiled at his sleeping form.

  “You want to hold them now?”

  I nodded, excitement tearing through me, making me bounce in excitement once again.

  “It’s about feeding time, too,” my mother said. “Take a seat, and we’ll get Dash for you. When Krisney gets back, we’ll get them started on their bottles.”

  I stripped off my gown and shirt, knowing that they’d allow me to hold him skin-to-skin—what we called kangaroo care—since Dash still wasn’t able to maintain his own body temperature completely.

  Dash was just under five pounds, and Baxter was an even five pounds.

  Both boys were still tiny as hell, but they were getting cuter by the day.

  Once I was situated, my mother lowered the sides of the incubator and moved the baby out with practiced ease.

  My mother had been doing this for a very, very long time. She’d been in the NICU for as long as I could remember, but there was something about these children being her grandkids that changed her demeanor slightly.

  She was confident, sure, but she wasn’t as sure of herself as she would normally be.

  And I felt that it had a lot to do with me and Krisney rather than them being her grandchildren.

  She laid Dash on my chest and then immediately covered me up with a warm blanket, pinning Dash in between my chest and the blanket as she did.

  Once she situated his nasal cannula, she reached for Baxter.

  The two boys of mine loved being together.

  It was like they knew when the other was near, and this time was no different.

  Once I flipped the blanket back for my mother to place my other boy on my chest next to Dash, I looked down and grinned.

  “Damn, it’s nice not to have that big thing weighing your face down,” I told the two boys. “I can actually see your cute, little noses.”

  They felt like tiny weights on my chest, and I wondered if I’d ever get tired of this feeling.

  Probably not.

  My mother stopped at the side of my chair, and then ran her finger down the length of Baxter’s cheek.