Page 26 of Brax (Voodoo Guardians #36)

“It was somewhere along here,” muttered Ines to herself. “I know it was along here. She was driving straight for me. There’s nothing here. This can’t be right.”

Realizing that she was only driving further from the point at which she’d seen Stephanie before, she decided to attempt to turn around. Unfortunately, the road was incredibly narrow, with only two lanes to maneuver in the rain.

To top it off, her mobility was seriously limited, and attempting to turn her arms with the wheel of the car was nearly impossible. Stopped in the middle of the road, the rain pouring down around her. She laid her head against the steering wheel and began to cry.

Ines wasn’t sure how long she’d been there when someone tapped on her driver’s side window.

“I’m moving. I’m moving,” she said.

“Ma’am, please roll your window down,” said the voice. She shook her head, crying harder.

“Please, just let me turn around. Please.”

“Ma’am, we don’t want to hurt you,” said the man.

With tremendous effort, she raised her head and saw more than thirty men surrounding her car. She was going to die.

“Ines?” The soft female voice caught her ear, and she turned her body slightly to look in the direction of the voice. It was coming from the passenger side of her vehicle. “Ines. It’s me. Stephanie.”

“I’m imagining this.”

“No. No, you’re not,” said Brax. “We truly want to help you. I won’t let you harm Stephanie, but we have a medical team that would like to try and help you.”

“No one can help me. It’s incurable at this point. I only hoped to be more comfortable.”

“Let us try,” said Stephanie.

“Why? Why would you help me? I shot at your car. I didn’t mean for the car to flip. I only wanted you to stop so I could explain what I needed.”

“No offense, ma’am,” smiled Brax, “but there were easier ways of doing that.”

“I-I know,” she said, rubbing her head. “I’m sorry. I have a terrible headache. I think I need to lie down.”

“Cruz!”

Ines could hear the footsteps of men coming toward her and knew this was the end for her. She was going to die. In truth, she was ready for death. Life had not been kind to her. The world had not been kind to her. Death would hopefully show kindness by taking her swiftly.

She could hear voices of men and women. They were using medical terms. Terms that were so technical only scientists or medical professionals would know them. Was she in a hospital?

She honestly didn’t care.

They weren’t laughing.

The team did something that they hadn’t done in more than a decade. They closed the clinic, not accepting any patients at all for the foreseeable future.

“How is she?” asked Stephanie. She’d willingly donated blood, bone marrow, stem cells, anything that was asked of her.

“Nothing has changed, honey,” said Riley. “We can’t expect that it will. We’ve taken her to the pond twice while she was unconscious, and it’s done absolutely nothing. She’s too far gone.”

“What can we do?” asked Victoria.

“We can make her comfortable, and we will. Mama Irene and Claudette are making one of the cottages ready for her now. We have a wheelchair for her to make it more accessible, and the medical team will be taking turns to help her with day-to-day things,” said Gabi.

“I’ve never seen anyone that looks like that,” said Stephanie.

“It’s pretty horrible. Whatever he did to her is creating this irreversible damage to her internal organs. We’ve all seen calcification of the heart, arteries, liver, and other parts of the body. But this is happening on a grand scale,” said Suzette.

“We found a photo of her from ten years ago. Nothing that you see now was visible then. She may have known it was happening, but it moved fast,” said Gabi.

“I feel horrible,” said Stephanie. “I was hoping that I could help her.”

“You can,” said Doc. “You can help her by being a friend. A true friend. I doubt very seriously if that poor woman has ever had a friend stand beside her.”

“I’ll see if I can help get the cottage ready.” She kissed Brax, turned with Victoria, Marilisa, Katelyn, and Chelsea, and walked away. He waited until they were out of earshot.

“Level with us,” he said, standing with the other men.

“She’s got maybe a few days. That’s all,” said Doc.

“Damn,” muttered Mav.

“Listen, no one else needs to know this, but the x-rays and scans showed just how brutal he was with her body. When he put her under to take what he wanted, he must have put her under for days or weeks until she healed. She has at least a dozen scars from surgery.”

“He performed surgery on her?”

“He opened her up and took pieces of her,” said Wilson, standing beside his friend. “Pieces of her femur, hip, ribs. That doesn’t even include the pieces of her internal organs that he stole. Part of the reason she can’t heal is because she’s not whole. He stole that from her.”

“Fuck,” muttered Brax.

“Boys? Come with me,” said Matthew.

“Where are we going?” asked Saint.

“We’re going to give a woman her final wish.”