Page 286 of Cross Checked
“I can’t let him leave without me!”
That sentence broke open something so deep in me that for a second, I couldn’t see anything but my mother’s funeral. The horrible stillness. The finality. The way people kept saying things like she knows you loved her and she wouldn’t want you to hurt, as if love had ever stopped grief from splitting a person down the middle. I remembered being fourteen and learning that sometimes the world took someone before you were done needing them.
I was not done needing Cade. I had barely started letting myself need him.
I had just let myself believe I could have him. I had just let myself wake up in his bed and laugh in his kitchen and wear his name without flinching. I had just heard him say he fell in love with me like it was the easiest truth in his body. I had just started to understand that maybe love did not have to feel like fear, and now the universe had answered with helicopter blades.
My body folded around that thought.
Ryker caught me before I hit the asphalt, lowering with me while Dad dropped in front of us, one hand at the back of my head, the other gripping my shoulder.
“Please,” I sobbed into Dad’s hoodie. “Please take me to him. Please. Please, I’ll be good. I’ll listen. I won’t fight. Just take me to him.”
He made a broken sound against my hair. “I am. Bug, I am. I’m taking you to him.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“You promise he’s alive?”
The silence afterward ruined me. Dad didn’t answer fast enough. None of them did. I pulled back, and the look on his face told me everything he couldn’t.
“I can’t promise that,” he said, voice destroyed. “But I can promise we are going to him right now.”
Something inside me folded around those words and went cold. The arena doors opened behind us, and Cade’s guys came out.
I knew they were there because the air shifted, because Aura’s hand left my back, because someone said Easton’s name like it was a warning or a prayer. But they were blurry around the edges. Easton’s rage. Rider’s locked jaw. Briggs’s voice cracking when he asked if Cade was alive. Coach Little appearing and giving orders. Fury players spilling into the parking lot in suits and half-buttoned shirts, some still carrying duffles, some with wet hair, all of them changing the second Cade’s name reached them.
Because Cade was not walking out with them. That was the only thing my brain could hold. The night broke open with the sound of helicopter blades.
Faint at first, somewhere beyond the arena, a distant chop cutting through the postgame chaos. The sound grew louder until it filled the entire sky, until every voice bent beneath it, until the cold air itself seemed to pulse with the truth I did not want to know.
Life Flight was landing on the football field.
For my Cade.
The man who had told me he loved me like it was the easiest thing he’d ever done. The man who somehow ended up bleeding out in the building behind me. The man I hadn’t kissed after the game because I thought I had time.
I thought I had time.
That thought hollowed me out so completely I stopped fighting. Not because I was oka but because there was nothing left in me strong enough to fight with.
Dad helped me into Emmitt’s truck like I was little again, like I was his Bug with scraped knees instead of a grown woman wearing the jersey of a man who might be dying because he loved me enough to stand between me and the monster. Ryker climbed in on one side of me, Dad on the other, and I sat between them with my hands pressed to the MERCER across my chest because it was the closest thing to Cade I had.
His name under my fingers, his number against my ribs. The proof that ten minutes ago I had belonged to a future where he was supposed to meet me outside.
Aura and Charm did not climb in with me this time. They followed because my girls would follow me into fire, but this moment belonged to the people who had loved me before I knew love could turn dangerous. Dad held me against his side. Ryker kept one hand locked around mine. Knox appeared outside my window before we pulled away, his palm pressed to the glass, his face pale and hard and ruined.
I looked at him through the window.
Emmitt threw the truck into drive, and we tore out of the parking lot toward County with my family around me, Aura and Charm somewhere behind us, and the Fury following like a war party no one had trained for.
The helicopter blades faded behind us. Or maybe they stayed in my head. I couldn’t tell anymore. I pressed one shaking hand harder to Cade’s name across my chest and tried to breathe around the one truth I refused to let go of.
Cade is alive and until someone told me otherwise, that was the only thing I was willing to believe.
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