Sweet Retribution (Rydeville High Elite #3)(104)
“Not me.” I wrap my arm around Charlie, feeling fiercely protective. “Help him.” I plead with my eyes, looking to Kai and Drew. Together, they gently lift him off me, placing him on the floor. I crawl to his side, pressing my fingers to his neck, almost fainting in relief when I feel the faint thrumming of his pulse under the tips of my fingers.
“He’s still alive,” I whisper with tears in my eyes. Kai rubs my back, but no one says anything.
Things have been fractured with Charlie for a while, and I’ve wondered if he’d completely lost his way.
But today, I know he hasn’t.
That there is hope.
That the Charlie I know and love is still in there somewhere.
Because he risked everything to save me.
And I pray he pulls through, so I get to tell him how grateful I am.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Law enforcement officers swarm the stage, and paramedics take Charlie away on a stretcher. I want to go with him, because he has no one, but I don’t want to leave Mom. Besides, the FBI is insistent on speaking to us, so I reluctantly let him go. Kai sends one of his security guards in the ambulance with Charlie, giving him firm instructions to keep us regularly updated, and I kiss my husband, proud of his selflessness.
A couple of armed FBI agents escort us upstairs to our suite. The female agent takes my bloody clothes as evidence, and we are all officially processed when a team of crime scene investigation personnel arrives. Then we are checked out by a team of medics, but we all only have superficial injuries with no permanent damage to our ears, thank fuck.
As soon as the formal shit is done, I grab a quick shower and get changed. When I step out of the bathroom, the whole crew is here, including Mom and Sylvia, along with four FBI agents and the local sheriff.
We sit down and tell them everything. Confirming what Keven Kennedy has already explained. Thank God for his intervention; otherwise, we might have found ourselves getting arrested. An FBI technical team is going through the CCTV footage from the auditorium, which will back up our version of events. However, we’re well aware of how suspicious it looked when they first arrived. I was especially worried for Jackson, because he shot and killed Trent, but they accept it was self-defense.
Mom explains who she is and where she has been the last ten years. They have already sent a team to the medical facility, and the kidnapped patients are being processed and moved to a private government medical facility where they will receive the right kind of care.
While they are free, there is a lot of red tape to go through, especially since a lot of them are deemed to be dead, and most of those patients have been heavily medicated for years. They weren’t as lucky as Mom to have someone on the inside who gradually weaned her off the drugs and then helped her hide it. These people will have to be weaned off their medication gradually and in a carefully monitored way.
The special supervisory agent in charge informs me they have arrested Dr. Lacy, along with the other medical personnel, and they are being held for questioning. With the evidence Xavier compiled on Dr. Lacy, I know he won’t see the light of day ever again.
They are also trying to identify who set the bomb to go off in the auditorium, but I’m guessing it was my father, Christian, or Denton because they’d have insurance in place in case things didn’t go their way.
They pepper us with questions, and we do our best to answer them. Kai has his arms around me the entire time, and Mom holds my hand on my other side.
It’s late when we finish up, and we’re all exhausted, but none of us want to stay here a second longer, so we pack our stuff up and head out.
Downstairs, officers mill around, and the entire facility has been shut down pending local and federal investigation. Elite members are being brought out in handcuffs and thrown in the back of large black vans.
Drew and I trade a relieved look, but it’s somewhat short-lived.
“Fuck,” Kai says, pulling me back into the lobby as we were just about to leave. “Can you turn that up?” he shouts to the girl behind the reception desk, and she raises the volume on the TV.
We crowd around it, and I go to Mom and Drew, placing my arms around them.
CNN is reporting from outside our house in Rydeville. What’s gone down here today has been playing on a loop on all the TV stations because we sent a summary of some stuff to the major news outlets. We hung Judge Penn out to dry, and he’s been the scapegoat for the elite. We couldn’t risk sending everything to reporters, in case it damaged any criminal proceedings, but the scandal is enough to ruin the judge’s life irrespective of any charges brought.
But that’s not why Kai called us back.
The house I grew up in, the house Mom grew up in, is highlighted on the screen, engulfed in flames, the dark sky above the house coated in a foggy layer of billowing smoke that shoots upwards in a steady stream. The reporter explains that an explosion rocked the basement of the house and then a raging fire whipped through the mansion.
“Oh no.” Mom’s lower lip wobbles as she watches her ancestral home burn to the ground. I’m grateful I removed everything of mine from that house months ago and that all my personal possessions and mementos are safe, but poor Mom has lost everything of sentimental value. I hold her tighter, pressing a kiss to her temple as we watch.
“That fucking bastard,” I seethe, instantly knowing Father is somehow behind this. He must have left instructions for someone to destroy the vault and burn the property should anything happen to him. “All that evidence is gone now. Goddamn it.” Frustration trundles through me at the knowledge that most elite members are going to come out of this untarnished. “We don’t even know where he was keeping those young girls, and now, we’ll never find out.”