Where Lightning Strikes (Bleeding Stars #3)(108)

Sirens blared in the distance.

I pulled open her door.

“Kenzie.” It was a plea.

Lights blinded me from behind and paramedics came stampeding forward. Pushing me out of the way.

Suddenly, a flashlight was glaring against my eyes. It twisted me in knots, the look in the cop’s eyes as he took me in.

Suspecting.

Adding.

Kenzie.

Her name was the only thing I could think.

I batted the flashlight out of my face.

Another officer was ordering Baz to get out of the car. Sebastian resisted, a snide “Fuck off” sliding from his mouth.

Next thing I knew, I was being shoved to the ground. Face down on the pavement.

“Stay down,” a hard voice shouted as he stepped on the back of my neck when I fought to get to my feet, boot cutting into the skin, arms being wrenched behind my back.

My eyes were locked open wide in horror. Lights flashed and flashed and flashed, a dizzying whorl of colors and blips of sirens and pounding feet.

“Kenzie,” I kept screaming as paramedics moved by, voices obscured and lifted and drowned out by the panic still ringing in my ears.

“Kenzie!”

Next to me, Sebastian was face down on the pavement, too. Wrists cuffed behind his back. The cop standing over him pulled the bags out of his pockets, one by one, at the same time another was patting me down.

Discovering my guilt.

Someone was reading me my rights, but the words were garbled together like I was hearing them underwater. Didn’t care if they locked me up forever. Didn’t f*cking care. Just needed to know she was okay. That he was okay.

The officer dragged me to my feet.

“Kenzie…please…Kenzie. Please…just tell me she’s okay. Please.”

Please.

Hours passed. Each minute excruciating. Every second complete torture. In a holding cell, I sat on a bench with my back propped against the block wall, knees pulled to my chest, eyes closed in a silent prayer I didn’t have any right to pray.

In it, I bartered my life.

As if it was worth anything at all.

The hands on the round clock sitting high on the far wall told me more than twelve hours had gone by since they’d left me in here without a word. Without any idea of what’d happened to either of them. Left me to my thoughts and self-hatred and fear.

Agony.

Hadn’t slept in close to two days, and that low after my high was begging me to find sleep. To curl up so maybe I could just die.

Fighting the fatigue, I banged my head against the wall and shouted out another unheard plea.

“Kenzie.”

Startled, I jumped when the lock buzzed and the heavy door gave.

I scrambled to my feet.

“Got a visitor, West. Let’s go.”

They shackled my wrists in the front, leading me down one long hall then another, before they ducked me into a small room, the walls the same dingy white like the cell.

But this one had a table in the middle, a single chair on the side closest to me and two on the other.

Doug Cartwright sat in one of the far two chairs, brown hair sticking up all over the place like he’d run his hands through it a million times, cheap suit wrinkled, tie loose, eyes red.

Dread shook me to the core, and my knees went weak. I stumbled. The guard huffed and grabbed me by an elbow, forcing me up and shoving me forward where I slumped into the chair facing Doug. I closed my eyes, throat so f*cking thick and dry I was pretty sure it was going to strangle me.

“Tell me they’re okay.”

I begged it against the blackness of my lids, unable to look at Kenzie’s father if he told me anything different.

There was a charged silence before he finally spoke, his voice rough, reticent. “They both made it.”

There was nothing I could do. My entire body collapsed forward, bones dislodged in relief. A sob erupted from a place so deep, so intense, I felt it ripping from me, fracturing as I expelled the pent-up, festered agony. It echoed off the walls, torment and relief as my forehead rocked against the cold table.

Didn’t care I probably sounded like a sniveling bitch.

That I knew Doug was watching me crumble into a million splintered pieces.

Disintegrating.

Viewing it with disgust.

I forced myself to find a breath, to sit up, to look at this man who’d done everything in his power to keep me away from his daughter.

How could I have ever blamed him?

He cleared his throat, though everything coming from him was still craggy and pitted with grief. “They took Brendon by C-section. He was born at 6:12 this morning. He had no issues other than mild fetal distress, probably brought on by Kenzie’s trauma. They delivered him and transitioned her straight into surgery to repair her abdominal wall.”

His bottom lip trembled. “Inch lower, and they’d both be dead.”

My eyes dropped closed again. Thinking if I closed them long enough, it might set time in rewind. Take me back to where it all started. To that one decision I’d made.

One mistake.

All it took was one mistake for the world to fall down around you.

One mistake to set you on a collision course with yourself.

Knew it all along.

Kenz didn’t belong in my world, hard as I’d tried to keep her there.

Doug leaned forward. Anger eclipsed the sorrow and exhaustion that’d sagged his shoulders just a minute before. He rammed his index finger into the table. “One inch, Lyrik…one inch and you would’ve killed my baby and yours.”