Chapter 29

Surely not everybody was Kung Fu fighting?

-Cobie to Dante

Dante

Six hours later, they were dragging the river.

Four hours after that, they called a halt in the search until daylight returned.

***

The five men and one woman standing in front of me looked exhausted.

As exhausted as I felt, yet here we all were.

I was standing in the hospital corridor.

“Daddy,” Janie pleaded. “His phone is about six miles downstream. I swear to God, he’s there.”

Janie’s father, James, looked at his daughter with sad eyes.

“They’ve already swept that area, Janie. He’s not there.”

“He has to be there,” she replied stubbornly.

I felt a cold hand slip into my own, and then Cobie wrapped herself around my body.

She’d gone to get us some coffee and something for Mary to snack on when she woke.

Mary was in my brother’s arms in the waiting room, and Cobie had stopped there with her spoils before finding me.

She handed me my coffee, and I gratefully took a sip before wrapping my arm around her shoulders and pulling her close.

The last ten hours had been bad.

So bad, in fact, that when Mary, Cobie, and the baby got checked out, I’d gotten checked out, too.

I had been having pains in my chest. I was still not fully recovered from the rhabdomyolysis. My electrolytes were still a little out of balance, but the ER doc said the pain in my chest was likely due to the stress over the last few hours, but I was to be careful.

Hence why I nearly choked when I tasted the decaf coffee Cobie had somehow thought she could slip by me.

I looked down at my woman, and she batted her eyelashes at me. “They said no coffee or anything that’ll cause you undue stress for two weeks.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I didn’t.

Instead, I turned to stare at Janie, who was now openly crying.

“Fine,” Janie snapped, pushing away from her father. “I’ll do it myself.”

James followed after her, leaving the four remaining men of Free standing in front of me.

“Did you hear Drake’s confession?”

I gritted my teeth.

I had.

I’d been standing in the hospital doorway as he laid out his plan—which was to have a reduced sentence for kidnapping and attempted murder—if he gave up the four men who were involved with him in this scheme to steal retired inventory from the military and resell it.

Four men who were not only still active duty, but were also high-ranking.

“Kind of hard to understand him through his broken jaw.”

I looked over at Sam, who was staring at me with open appreciation.

“I didn’t much think about it,” I told him. “I just saw him standing there, and meant to knock him into the water. I didn’t much remember that I had a car barely attached to the back of my truck until it was swinging around to cut off his exit. And by cutting off his exit, I mean it was slamming into him. He’s lucky all he got was a concussion and a broken jaw.”

“What we do know is that the ADA—assistant district attorney—is going to give him that deal. They really want to know who exactly is behind these thefts. They didn’t just stop at guns and old inventory. They’ve stolen military secrets and intel that could lead to world war three if we’re not careful,” Max muttered, his eyes on the door down the hall where Janie and James had disappeared.

“I don’t know…”

A loud ‘CODE BLUE’ call sounded over the loudspeaker above our heads.

Cobie stiffened beside me.

“What does that mean?” I asked just as we saw a ton of doctors and nurses running into Drake’s room.

“That’s the crash team,” Cobie murmured, her eyes on the scene down the hall. “That’s the team that comes around when a patient has either lost a pulse or is straight up dead.”

A doctor came rushing chaotically out of the room, his white coat flapping behind him in his haste to move, and rushed through the door of the stairwell.

The same door that Janie had pushed through a few moments earlier.

The elevators at our sides chimed, and I turned just in time to see Rafe stumble out of the doors before they closed.

I let go of Cobie in my haste to catch him before he fell.

I wasn’t successful.

Rafe fell in a heap at my feet, and I rolled him over to his back just in time to see his eyes roll back into his head.

“Oh, fuck.”

Cobie was down on her knees beside me, pressing her hand against his throat, and cursing all in a matter of seconds.

“Dante, go get help!”

I did as she’d asked, hurrying in the direction of the nurses’ station that was right past Drake’s commotion-filled room.

But what I saw as I passed—a doctor calling Drake’s time of death—wasn’t reassuring.

***

“Do they expect him to be okay?”

I looked over to find Cobie standing beside me, but she answered the young woman’s fear-filled words with brutal honesty.

“He had no recollection of what happened, how he got here or even his own name when the doctors asked,” Cobie replied gently. “Will he be okay? Yes. Will he regain his memory? I believe he will, eventually. For now, though? We just don’t know if when he wakes up, his memory will have returned. He has a brain bleed from the concussion of the stun grenade that went off in our house. It affected the part of his brain that controls memory. So it’s likely, at least for a while, that he won’t remember anything.”

With that, Janie turned to go into Rafe’s room, leaving me alone in the hallway standing with Cobie.

I dropped my head down to hers.

“This was a bad day,” she whispered.

It had been.

I couldn’t even put voice to the words that churned through my brain.

Scared. Frantic. Thankful.

I was feeling everything all at once, and I couldn’t freakin’ breathe when I thought about it too hard.

“I’m sorry.”

I pulled back and looked down at my woman.

“For what?”

“For… not protecting her better.”

I framed her face.

“When I was in basic training, they gave us training on how to handle a stun grenade attack without losing all of our focus on our surroundings,” I told her. “It wasn’t easy. Even the best of soldiers became disoriented. You, my dear woman, did everything that you could’ve done under those circumstances. I don’t blame you, and I don’t blame Rafe. I blame Drake.” I blew out a breath. “I just want to put this behind us. With Drake gone, and everybody accounted for and on their way to being okay… I want to just be us. I want to enjoy my life with you. I want to be fucking over the moon and sharing the fact that our baby is the size of a fucking banana or avocado. What I don’t want to be doing is living in the past. The past is just that—the past. I’ll always be thankful for it, but it’s time for me to take a step into the future.”

Cobie’s hand went to my face, and she pulled me down to brush a kiss against my lips.

“I think I can do that.”

I growled against her lips. “Good.”