Page 58 of The Wolves Come at Night

Taylor stowed the phone in her vest pocket, hailed the TBI team, and, grabbing a couple of packs, led them back up the trail.

Twenty-Eight

New Haven

Avery wanted to scream.

She wanted to hit.

She wanted to rend the two startled men in her living room limb from limb until their shattered bones and dripping skin littered the floor and painted the walls.

She wanted to go to Richard’s grave and demand answers.

She had never felt so impotent in her entire life.

She was an ER doctor. She knew pain. She understood it better than most. She knew exactly, empirically, what was happening in her somatic system, how she was overloading, how she was shutting down. How the grief was overwhelming her ability to think, to breathe.

She’d lost her husband. Her life.

And now her daughter.

The fractures developed, deep inside. Shards of ice, slicing through skin and bone and tendon. Her hands were numb. Her vision spotty. Her breath coming in panicked little sips.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

Stay together. Hold it together, damn it. There’s still a chance…

The shrewd, nasty, subconscious monster who lived inside her, the beast who gave her powers and strength few possessed, who held her upright nightly in the face of hideous disasters, blood and gore, cruelty, silent killers, plagues and pestilence, all the horrors unimaginable to regular people, that monster inside her laughed.

Oh, get a grip. There’s no chance; there never was. Your baby has been dead for days, deep in the earth, and you’ve known that, you just haven’t wanted to admit it. And these people, these horrible people who have invaded your life, who have stolen your husband and now your daughter, they are to blame.

The stark words rose unbidden.

We have your daughter.

Two million.

No cops.

Why in the name of God would a murderer bother to make a ransom demand if he’d planned to kill Carson anyway?

The note said no cops.

You failed her, Avery. You failed your only daughter. Over and over again, you failed her.

All of this in a moment, an instant of delineated pain, and she realized there was a guttural scream filling the room, and it was coming from her, and she was crumpled on the floor with the arms of two men she used to love folded around her, her neck was wet from their tears as they cried together, a ball of confusion and agony and despair. Their loss was a bitter chasm; she would never find her footing again.

Just when she’d agreed to never come out, to stay in this Stygian place forever, her daughter’s gentle eyes and sweet smile shone from within that darkness, and the barest whisper of a breath caressed her cheek.

“Get up, Mommy. Get up.”

No no no no no.

“You must.”

Avery came back to herself slowly. Carefully, carefully, finding the edges of her psyche, raw and sharp and burning, and yanking them together as one does the opposite sides of a billowing jacket on a cold windy day, until she was sheltered, only a bit, but enough to be able to shake off the men crouching with her, the men who’d loved her daughter as their own, and stand.

The breath she managed was great and shuddering, and her lungs reluctantly obeyed. Her heart beat once again. Her eyes cleared.