Page 67 of Storm and Tempest

“Sure. Stay on comms and meet at the elevators.”

“Got it.” Ramon headed off in the other direction.

Jax set off down the hall. “Maizie, you copy?”

“I copy.”

“So do I,” Zeyla said. “This latte isn’t good. And it cost me seven dollars.”

Jax turned a corner and found a hall of what had to be treatment rooms. “Any success getting into their computer system?”

“They have a whole lot of things behind a firewall,” Maizie explained. “The hospital itself has all their stuff in a database, but there’s a ton more data that I can’t see. So it has to be hidden from me. I’ll get into it.”

“Sounds promising.” Also like she was trying to prove herself and going overboard with it.

One hand on his gun, he opened the first door he came to. A hospital bed with no sheets. It could be where the photo of Kenna had been taken, but there was literally no way to tell. Nothing had been left behind but the basics, the bed linens in a pile on the floor with a pillow.

He left that room and tried one across the hall that was empty.

Jax told Maizie, “If you can’t access it, that’s not a problem.”

“We need to find out what they know,” she replied. “What information they’re hiding.”

“Okay, but even if we don’t succeed here, it was still worth coming. We’re all feeling the pressure on this one, and I don’t want you to feel like it’s your fault if we don’t get a result.”

Silence was the only response.

Then Maizie said, “We’ll see what I get.”

Jax figured there was more to say, but he was searching and she was working. He needed to make sure Maizie didn’t feel the weight of Kenna being missing with any sense of guilt for the fact they hadn’t found her yet. The only people responsible werethose who had taken her. And if—when—Jax got her back, he would see that justice was done.

He spotted Ramon at the end of the hall. The tall Hispanic man shook his head. Jax stepped into another empty room where a machine had been set up, one that had a monitor and a keyboard on a cart, and a wand in a holder beside the keyboard.

Some kind of radiology machine, or an ultrasound maybe?

He looked at the bed. An ultrasound.Kenna.Jax sucked in a breath. “Makes sense why they took her now and not before.”

“What’s that?” Ramon stopped by the door.

Jax didn’t want to say it. The idea had barely formed in his mind. “If Kenna is pregnant—or they want to get her pregnant—that might be why they wanted her now.”

Ramon kept his voice low. “Is this what you wanna talk about?”

“Of course not.” Jax went over to see what he’d noticed on the floor and crouched to pick up the dark scrap of paper.

An image of a tiny person, barely bigger than a peanut.

His eyes burned. “They’ve had her for two months. They could have done anything to her. She could be anywhere. Suffering. Tortured. Experimented on.”

Maizie said, “Jax,” her voice strained.

“She could be pregnant.” Jax blew out a long breath.

“I have their files,” she said. “I’m in the records. If they treated her, I can find out.”

Zeyla said, “I’ll help her. You guys keep searching.”

Jax stood, unable to take his eyes off the image. It was probably not even Kenna who had been seen here. This could be a picture of anyone’s child.