I was helpless against the maelstrom of my own tears, seeing that and knowing my best girl was fighting for her life on an operating table.
Because of me.
Me, me, me.
I buried my head in my hands, inconsolable as I sobbed and sobbed until I felt sick. I’d thrown up twice since we arrived at the hospital, the force of my sobs upheaving everything in my stomach.
I couldn’t stop.
Not when Loulou wrapped her cherry-scented arms around me, not when Cressida stroked my hair, and not when Harleigh Rose sat at my feet, wrapping a long arm around my legs to brace her cheek against me. Lila tried and Maja and Hannah and Tayline.
I could not be consoled.
Priest was out hunting for the killer with Kodiak, following whatever trail they could find back at the crime scene along with Lion and a select group of RCMP that Zeus cursed out as idiots for thinking the crimes would stop when Owen Burns was hospitalized.
But I doubted even he could comfort me.
I doubted he would even know how to try.
But maybe that was the point.
The shared grief and sympathy for my guilt were overwhelming. I didn’t deserve their grace, and the heaps of it they lay at my feet only made me feel like some false saint.
I needed the intensity of Priest’s fixed gaze to tether my restless, fighting spirit, the hard edge of his love to wear down my self-loathing like a whetstone.
My grief, though, was nothing to Bat’s.
He’d arrived at the hospital on a chorus of shouts, yelling at anyone and everyone to tell him what room his wife was in.
She wasn’t in the emergency room, a poor male nurse had to tell him. She was in the morgue.
I’d never seen a bomb explode, but I imagined it happened like that.
Bat grew so still with vibrating tension the air around him began to pulse as if he was collecting all the energy in the room to him.
We braced.
Not a single person moved. Not even Zeus, who knew him best.
It was obvious why the moment he shattered.
With a warrior’s cry, he bent to one of the chairs bolted poorly to the wall and started to rend it from the wall. To my shock, it yielded to his brutal force, tearing from the wall with a spray of plaster and dust. Loose in his hold, Bat swung it like a baseball bat into the wall above the empty space it had inhabited, banging it again and again until rubble littered his feet, the chair was a mangled mess, and a hole the side of a child was blown through the wall.
He stood there then, heaving in a breath like he was a man in a burning, smoke-filled room, fired with rage so he wouldn’t drown in grief. His eyes rolled madly around the room as he panted, looking for a place to lay his grief.
Harleigh Rose, once abused and now keenly scarred by male violence, shifted behind my legs in a small gesture of fear.
It was Dane, not Zeus, who stood to wave a red flag in front of The Fallen’s stuck boar.
He stood slowly, unraveling the long, broad expanse of him. There was nothing meek in Dane Meadows, every inch of him a well-honed human weapon, but the way he stepped forward was a gesture in submission to Bat’s rage. He didn’t mean to douse that fire, his body language screamed, he only meant to contain it.
Bat growled as Dane drew closer, searching madly now for someplace to run or hide, something to destroy with the fixed point of his rage. As Bat lunged for another chair, Dane lunged too, tackling him hard to the cracked linoleum. They struggled powerfully, Bat throwing a brutal punch to Dane’s jaw before he could be pinned then rolling expertly as soon as he was prone so Dane was on the defensive.
These were two men skilled in the art of war and combat.
They brutalized each other.
No one stopped them.
Zeus stood at one point, ready to interfere if he had to, but he held up a staying hand when Nova tried to do the same. A nurse picked up a phone at the nurse’s station to call the cops, but King was there suddenly sweet-talking her into letting this scene play out.
Bat had just lost his wife, and his twin boys had just lost their mother.
For a man like him, a brother of The Fallen and a war vet, the knowledge he hadn’t been able to protect his woman no matter the flaws in their relationship was toxic to his system.
So he fought.
And Dane let him take it out on him.
It felt like hours, but it was probably only ten minutes by the time Bat stopped moving almost violently, his still so sudden I gasped. Dane was behind him, having tried to secure him in a headlock, but the moment he felt his friend’s motionlessness, he stopped too.