I moved through the house, clearing rooms out of instinct. Living room: clear. Kitchen: clear. But the dining room… the rug was gone. The hardwood floor was wet. Someone had scrubbed it, but in the moonlight filtering through the window, I could see the dark stains that the bleach hadn’t quite lifted.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, shattering the silence. It was a number I didn’t know.
“Is this Hunter?” a voice asked. It was deep, professional, and tired.
“Speaking.”
“This is Detective Miller. You need to get to St. Jude’s Medical Center. Immediately.”
—————-
The drive to the hospital is a blur in my memory. I don’t remember the traffic lights. I don’t remember parking. I only remember the cold air hitting my face as I sprinted toward the emergency room doors. I flashed my military ID at the nurse’s station, breathless.
“Tessa Hunter. My wife. Where is she?”
The nurse looked at me with pity. That was the second warning. When the nurses look at you with pity, it means there is no good news.
“She is in the ICU, sir. Room 404. But you should know… the family is already there.”
The family.
My stomach twisted. Tessa’s family wasn’t like mine. I grew up with nothing, scrapping for every meal. Tessa grew up in a fortress. Her father, Victor Wolf, was a man who owned half the real estate in the county and the souls of the politicians who ran it. And then there were her brothers. Seven of them. Dominic, Evan, Felix, Grant, Ian, Kyle, and Mason.
The Wolf Pack, Victor called them. They were loud, arrogant men who treated the world like it was something they could buy or break. They had never liked me. To them, I was just a grunt, a government dog who wasn’t good enough for their princess.
I turned the corner toward the ICU waiting area, and there they were. It looked like a blockade. Victor was sitting on a bench, checking his watch like he was late for a board meeting. The seven brothers stood in a semicircle around the door to her room.
When they saw me, the atmosphere shifted. It wasn’t grief I saw in their eyes. It was annoyance.
“Finally,” Victor said, standing up. He smoothed his expensive Italian suit. “The soldier returns.”
“Where is she?” I growled, stepping forward.
Dominic, the oldest brother, stepped in my path. He was a big guy, a gym rat with vanity muscles and soft hands. He put a hand on my chest.
“Easy, Rambo. She’s not in a state to see anyone right now.”
I looked at his hand on my chest. Then I looked at his eyes.
“Touch me again, Dominic, and you’ll be in the bed next to her.”
He hesitated, the bully’s instinct recognizing a predator, then stepped back. I pushed past them and opened the door.
The sound of the ventilator was the only thing in the room. Whoosh. Click. Whoosh.
I walked to the side of the bed, and my knees almost gave out. If the name on the chart didn’t say Tessa, I wouldn’t have known it was her. Her face was swollen to twice its size. Her jaw was wired shut. One eye was completely sealed, a bulbous mass of purple and black. Her beautiful blonde hair had been shaved on the left side to make room for stitches that ran across her scalp like a railroad track.
I reached out to touch her hand, but it was in a cast. I touched her shoulder instead—the only place that didn’t look broken.
