Chapter 24

Loki.

Someone was moving me… No, shaking me. The pain exploded in the back of my head on the tail end of that realization. I cracked my eyes, so that I could look at whoever shook me as I yelled at them, but the words died in my throat. The first person I saw was Asire, but she wasn’t the one touching me. She knelt by me and her hands were clearly visible.

The person shaking me was Billy. Once our eyes met she hopped back up and said, “Told ya that would do it.”

Asire smirked. “Yeah, nothing like rattling a concussed brain to wake someone up…”

I groaned and sat up.

The world didn’t spin, so I must not be concussed like Asire said. Even with the back of my head throbbing in time with my heartbeat. There was a moment of confusion for me, but then I remembered, distinctly, Ella coming into the room behind me and something smashing into the back of my skull.

“Dare I ask what happened?” I looked at Asire and then Billy.

Asire had risen to her feet and was halfway across the room, leaning against the wall. She had been acting strange all morning. Or at least different than what I was used to. I didn’t know her well enough to judge what her usual behavior was.

“It appears,” Sunbeam said from the doorway to the dining room, “that you’ve been clubbed.”

Despite the levity of their voices, there was something off about all three girls. I glanced around me and saw Henrik in a similar state on the floor. He had his head bowed and was rubbing the back of it. The way he was carefully not looking at anyone helped my assumption that something wasn’t right. At the table, Wynn and Shade were slumped over in their chairs. Shade with his chin resting on his chest and Wynn with his forehead against the cool surface of the table. The latter was snoring quietly while Shade was just still as death. If I couldn’t hear his heartbeat and his breathing, I’d have been concerned.

“Drugged, it looks like,” Asire said from her position on the other side of the room. “You and Henrik were knocked out. None of the children saw you, though. It’s okay that the TV babysat right? That’s a good precedent to start.” The words, while harsh, were clearly not directed at me or the other men.

“I take it that you couldn’t find the child?” I asked, fighting to get to my feet. The room spun, but I knew I was steady on my feet. If it weren’t for Asire’s sharp glance, I would have assumed no one could tell.

She didn’t say anything about that. What she did say brought me up short. “Oh, we found her. However, I couldn’t count that as a success. I can’t even count it as a failure, but a disaster.”

“Why?” I asked, but I had a sneaking suspicion that I already knew. I couldn’t see either of the baby’s parents. Somehow, I didn’t think Asire would let it go that they knocked me out. Even under all the stress they were under. The fact that they weren’t getting chewed out right now…

“Alain is dead,” Asire said. “That would be Millie’s father. Shot through the head.”

Before I could say anything, the blue haired girl breezed through the room. “Reggie’s pulling up outside,” she informed us. “I took care of the hotel. Nothing but dust now.”

Asire nodded. “I’ll go talk to Reggie. Maybe it’ll keep her from getting homicidal.” She didn’t sound like she believed it. Not that I could blame her. I’d met Reggie and I was fairly certain that woman could bring down this city in a week if she had the right motivations and minions.

I plopped down in the chair, suddenly too tired to keep standing. This technically wasn’t my fight, but it was still hard to accept that not only did I get knocked out by allies, but one of those allies died. And now a child only had one… “What about Ella?” I asked. “Did she survive her mate’s death?” I kept my voice neutral, even when my chest hollowed out. That feeling of emptiness coming back for the first time in days. Along with it came the memory of waking up after my mate bond was ripped, violently, out of my chest. Leaving me nothing to hold onto, but not doing enough damage to kill me and put me out of my misery.

Billy and Sunbeam’s eyes were both sad when they looked over at me. Like they could tell what I was thinking. Of course, how could I think of anything else but Eve? She had been my light and now I was left in the dark.

“Yes,” Billy said. “And she’s going to survive the shock, as well.” A shrug. “If she wants to live, then she will.”

I almost laughed bitterly. If she wanted to live. That was a joke. None of us wanted to live after losing something so special. None of us… But some of us were stubborn enough and strong enough not to give into the impulse to stop fighting in the middle of a battle. To cut into our fragile flesh. To put a bullet through our heads. And some of us, like me, were just lucky or unlucky enough to have a family more determined to make you live than to let you die.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“In her room, upstairs,” Sunbeam said. “She woke up just as we brought her in.”

I glanced over at Wynn and Shade. They’d most likely be fine, but I didn’t want them to sleep it off at the table.

Henrik hauled himself off the ground, staggered, and then managed to catch his balance. It looked like the blow he had taken was worse than mine. There was dried blood on his neck. The skin around his eyes was tight with barely controlled anger and his fists were clenched. His voice, when he spoke, had a growl to it. “I’ll help the girls get them to their rooms,” he offered.

I nodded my thanks and left the dining room. Reggie, Regory, Dovie and Asire were walking toward me when I exited. Asire was in the middle of recounting the day’s events, all the while dodging Regory. He spent most of his life in my Family worrying about this girl. To learn that she had been in a fight and he wasn’t there? Yeah… So he checked her over for injuries while she assured him she was fine and batted his hands away.

Reggie stopped and pinched the bridge of her nose. “This,” she declared. “Is getting ridiculous. We’ll wait for the rest of the Orphans to come home from work and form search parties. Maybe we’ll get lucky tonight.”

Neither of them looked optimistic.

Reggie strode forward, leaving Asire behind to fend off Regory. As she passed me, she glanced over and said, “Are you coming?”

Normally, I’d take offense to her tone, but she’d had a rough day, so I followed her. I had a rough day too and wasn’t in the mood for fighting with her.

“I’d love nothing more than to yell at Ella,” Reggie told me on the way up the stairs, “She did something really stupid and deserves to get yelled at. However, her daughter has been kidnapped, her mate’s dead and her emotional state is so fragile that not even my bitch meter can go high enough for me to say something to her. At the same time, I’m not certain I can be polite. It was her and Alain’s own stupidity that got him killed. It may sound harsh, but that’s the way the City of Orphans works. There is not time for coddling, understand?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Good. So I’m bringing you. You run a Family and have a lot of experience with delicate people. I’m trusting you to say something brilliant because all I’ve got are insults.”

She didn’t bother knocking on Ella’s door. She threw it open and let me in first. She marched in, her heels clicking against the hardwood floors There were dark circles under her eyes that her makeup couldn’t quite cover anymore, but she was composed and in control.

Ella…was not. The woman lay on her bed, above the covers. Tears stained her cheeks and temples. Her hands were limp by her sides and her legs stretched out before her. Those bloodshot blue eyes barely glanced our way. She was pale and I could hear the stutter of her heart. She would live, Billy said, if she wanted to. If we wanted her to… I looked back at Reggie and leaned in and spoke so that only she would hear. “You need to get a watch going on her.”

Reggie nodded. “Working on it. When we’re done here, Lixa’s going to sit with her. Maybe that’ll help…” She didn’t sound convinced. She shouldn’t. I knew what was going on inside Ella at that moment. There was nothing but darkness and emptiness.

Reggie walked further in and knelt by the bed. “Ella?” she asked. “I will find your daughter. I promise you that I will find her.”

The woman didn’t respond.

Shaking her head, Reggie rose to her feet and moved away. Her eyes found mine and I knew what I was supposed to do, even if I didn’t believe it would make a difference. My turn to comfort the woman who couldn’t care less. I chose to ignore Reggie, because otherwise the words would never come to me. “The hollowness is the worst,” I finally said, without looking at the woman.

She jerked on the bed, like I had slapped her. I knew she was staring up at me, but I couldn’t bring myself to meet her eyes. “At least, after the knowledge that you’ll never see them again. The emptiness…mocks you. As if you need the reminder that they’re gone. As if you don’t feel it every day when you wake up and they’re not there. Every day when you think of something they would have laughed at or go to make dinner and find you can’t bring yourself to cook their favorite.”

She choked on a sob, so I knew she was listening.

“After a while, you grow used to it. The sadness is still there. The hollowness never really goes away. But you grow accustomed to it, you see,” I explained. “And no one will know how bad it is except for you.”

Another sob. She coughed out words that I knew Reggie wouldn’t be able to understand because I couldn’t either. It didn’t matter with me. I knew what she was saying. She didn’t want that. She wanted to die. She was begging for us to just kill her because she was too weak to do it herself.

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. “I won’t,” I told her.

She broke out into another sob and I heard her words this time. “Why? You understand! Please… Don’t make me go through it… Please… I can’t. I can’t. I just can’t.” I still wouldn’t look at her, but in my peripheral I saw her raise her hands and cover her face and her wet eyes. The smell of the room was despair and tears. Worse, underneath her misery, the scent of her mate still lingered in the bed. In the clothes that he brought. On her.

“No,” I said, as gently as I could. “Because this desolation and pain… Doesn’t last,” I whispered.

She hiccupped and then sobbed again.

“It ebbs after a while. A long while, but it does ebb. I lived for my Family,” I told her, only slightly lying, “and it was the right thing to do. It would have been…cruel to make them lose me as well. You see?”

Finally, I looked at her again. There was something to be said for despair. It could take away everything you were before, but it could also show you everything you could be. Looking at her, I saw that she was torn. She wanted to die so badly, to join her mate. But there was a gleam in her eyes, a sharp light that screamed defiance. It was that part of her I was trying to reach. Because otherwise… There’d be another orphan in this city.

Time to play dirty. “Your daughter probably wants nothing more than to see you again,” I told her.

She tensed.

“She wants to come home. She wants her mother. If you aren’t here for her, then she’ll be coming back to nothing.”

Ella raised those shaky hands to her face again and shook her head. But not before I saw that gleam get brighter. Get more defiant. It didn’t mean she was out of the woods. It just meant she saw something to live for. There wasn’t much I could to do make her decide Millie was worth her continued existence.

Because if she didn’t think that now, about her own child, then I couldn’t lie and convince her she deserved the child. My entire Family was made of people whose parents didn’t want them. Abused, neglected, abandoned by the people who should do everything to protect them. Even Wynn, whose parents were by all accounts the best any of us ever had. Until his father died and his mother decided he wasn’t enough to live for.

I’d seen the damage that kind of thing could do to a person. And if she did that to Millie, then I wasn’t sure I could muster enough goodness in my soul to think well of her.

Ella dropped her hands and those crazed blue eyes met mine. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, she went into shock. The wave hit her hard. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she went utterly limp on the bed, her hands falling where they were. Her heart stopped beating and her lungs quit drawing in air. Her face went slack.

Reggie rushed forward, but I was already moving her. I got her onto the floor and Reggie knelt beside the woman. She set her hands against Ella’s chest and started compressions. I tilted her head back and blew air into her lungs. It only took a couple of minutes before she came back to life. Her heart pounding once more and her lungs sucking in air.

Reggie picked her back up and tucked her into bed. “I’ll get Lixa,” Reggie said. “You can go relax until we start searching tonight.”

“Okay,” I said, too tired and hollow to do anything but what she asked of me.

Ella would have recovered on her own, but leaving her to do so was dangerous. It could cause permanent damage in the long run. I remembered the shock waves. It was when the magic that created a bond was trying to grow back. It shuddered through the body and the only warning it was about to happen was your temperature dropping. Then, once the magic was back, it automatically reached for the mate that it had already bonded with. When the magic doesn’t find that person, it snuffed out, leaving the body to recover. If their vitals returned to normal the first time it happened, they’d live. If it didn’t, that desperate search for their mate would kill them.