Refrain (Soul Series Book 3) (24 page)

Bristol breaks.

Her face crumples, tears streaming over her cheeks. Marlon palms her head and presses her into his chest. She grips his elbows and shakes against him. The same guilt that’s eating me alive gnaws at her. It’s an intimate thing, witnessing someone fall apart, and I almost wish I hadn’t seen it. Bristol’s the strongest of us all. I wouldn’t be able to do half of what I do without her, and to see her trembling unnerves me. Even the strongest needs someone to be weak with. I had no idea Marlon was that for Bristol.

I only knew that’s what Kai is for me.

“You know,” James Pearson says, startling me with his presence beside me at the window. “I may not be a preacher any more, but I can still believe. I still have faith. Do you have faith in anything, Rhyson?”

“Her,” I whisper, my breath fogging the window. “Just in her.”

This is not the time for fucking tears to burn my eyes, for me to have to blink to keep them from falling. I can’t let them fall in front of the last man I want to see my weakness. The weak man who abandoned my girl and her mother. I bang my forehead against the glass and slam my fist into the thick pane.

“Faith!” I snap at his reflection beside mine in the window. “Ask me for something else. Ask me for money. For position. For fame. I can give you all of those things if you want them. But none of them will help her now, and you ask me for the one thing I don’t have.”

“You may have more than you think,” he says quietly, apparently unfazed by my outburst.

“Yeah?” I turn to face him, my anger and pain for his inspection. “You want me to pray for Kai? You want me to send money to some preacher in exchange for her life? Or go to some confessional and leave a big check so things can be right? Just tell me which self-serving religious practice will save my wife and daughter, and I’ll do it.”

“How do you know it’s a girl?”

You know those sunshowers? The weather phenomenon when it rains while the sun is shining? That’s how incongruous his question seems to me. I’m using a pointless philosophical debate on religion to distract myself from how I fucked everything up inviting a madwoman to our concert, and he asks me that shit.

“What . . . huh?” I shake my head as if to clear it, when actually maybe he’s the one whose head needs clearing. “What does that matter?”

“You just sound so certain.” James tilts his head and squints at me like I’m one of his Bible verses vexing him. “And earlier when you were talking to Dr. Haddow you wanted him to tell you your
girls
were going to be okay.”

“I don’t see how this—”

“It’s too early to tell, right?

“Too early?”

“In the pregnancy?” One side of his mouth gives in to a grin. “It’s been a long time, fifteen years, but they didn’t know at four weeks that Cassie was a girl. Has technology evolved that much now?”

“No, we don’t . . . well, they don’t know, but—”

“But you do,” he says. “You know.”

“Yeah. It’s a girl.”

“How do you know?”

“I just . . .” I shake my head again, and it has less of a clearing effect than it did even a few minutes ago. “I just know.”

“No, a fact is something you know.” James pats my shoulder. “Faith is, well, it’s something you
believe
so strongly it feels like fact to you. And it’s obvious to me you have a great capacity for it.”

“The doctor’s coming,” Bristol says from across the room where she and Marlon are seated.

I tear my eyes away from James, wishing I had more time to digest what he said, but eager to hear from the doctor. Finally.

“She’s out.” Dr. Haddow crumples the surgical mask in his right hand and pushes the left over a face haggard with fatigue. “We got the bullet. She was really lucky because it just grazed an artery, but it was enough to cause all the blood loss.”

He levels a glance at James.

“We needed a lot of blood,” he says. “You and your daughter really came through for her. She could have hemorrhaged, but it never got to that point. She’s in recovery now.”

It’s like we all breathe a collective sigh of relief. We exchange tentative smiles. I’m so grateful. It all sounds good so far, and I’m afraid to ask all the questions that burn my tongue. I’m afraid of the answers.

“So she, um, she’ll be all right?” I brace for his response.

“She’s not out of the woods yet,” he says cautiously. “She’s still on a ventilator. The chest tube is creating suction and removing air pressure from the lung cavity. That helps to keep the lung re-inflated. And there’s always the risk of blood clots moving toward the heart with situations like this. Those are extremely dangerous and move fast, but we’re monitoring her.”

Hearing about chest tubes and blood clots scares the hell out of me, but they’re monitoring her. It’s under control. Now that I feel a little better about Kai, I force myself to ask the question consuming my mind.

“And our baby?” I watch Dr. Haddow’s expression for any sign before he speaks. If our baby didn’t make it, I’ll still be immeasurably grateful that Kai did, but I won’t get over it any time soon. Neither would Kai.

“As of now, still viable.” A weary laugh rattles in his chest. “It’s a little bit of a miracle. The odds weren’t good, but the baby seems to be fine. We’ll do an ultrasound to know for sure.”

James and I exchange a glance at the word “miracle.” I don’t care if it’s faith, kismet, or a stroke of luck that saved our baby. I’ll take it.

I sit down on the armrest of the nearest chair. Relief weakens my knees. They’re okay. Not out of the woods, but alive.

“Can I see her?”

I need to replace the last image I have of Kai. The bluish tinge to her skin. The blood running from her mouth. The tube invading her throat. Looking closer to death than life.

Dr. Haddow offers me another one of those rare smiles before responding.

“Soon.”

While we wait, I realize I have missed calls from my father. Of course he’s probably seen this all over the news. I’ve been so tuned into Kai and the baby, I’ve tuned out everything else.

“You talked to Dad?” I ask Bristol.

“No.” She glances up from the statement about the shooting she’s preparing for release. “But I talked to Mom.”

Bristol and I have a little bit of a stare down. We both have complex relationships with our parents, but Bristol has a lot more tolerance for our mother than I do.

“Dad called, but I missed it.”

“They were
both
concerned. Mom just knew you wouldn’t want to talk to her.” Bristol closes her laptop and devotes her full attention to me. “Is it really fair that you’ve forgiven Dad, but you still hold everything over Mom’s head?”

“Dad didn’t get me hooked on prescription drugs and refuse to send me to rehab until I got him the next check.”

“Dad’s no saint.” Bristol compresses displeasure tightly between her lips.

“Did you get a hold of Grady?” I ask, ignoring her statement. It’s never productive when we talk about our parents, and I don’t have the emotional space right now to fight with my sister.

“Yeah, he and Em are coming tomorrow. They were on some couples’ cruise, and it’s the soonest they can get here.” She re-opens the laptop. “For this statement, do you want to refer to Kai as your fiancée or your wife?”

“Wife,” I reply decisively. “And just say we recently married in a private ceremony with close friends and family.”

“It was a beautiful ceremony.” An almost wistful smile teases Bristol’s lips.

I glance down at the golden thread tied around my ring finger. I can’t swallow. I press my lips against my teeth to control the emotions that overwhelm me. I almost lost her. Tonight I almost lost my whole world. I would have been like some pitiful Humpty Dumpty—irreparable and shattered. Nothing would have pieced me back together. Nothing would have ever been right in my world again. Aunt Ruthie once told me it was dangerous to love the way Kai and I do. I get that now. To be that vulnerable, to have everything hinge on another person drawing their next breath is the most helpless feeling in the world. There’s a part of you that just wants to shut it down, to find a way to harden yourself. To find a way not to love at all. But I know I could never do that. Not with her. I’d rather live on the razor edge of devastation every day for the rest of my life with her than even one day without her.

Never is that more clear to me than when I finally walk into her hospital room.

I thought when I saw her, still breathing, I’d feel reassured. I’m actually scared all over again seeing the IVs, the mask over her face, the chest tube running from her back and through the little hole they’ve cut in her hospital gown. I don’t know if it’s the culmination of everything that’s happened in the last few hours, or the sight of her like this, but any composure I have unravels as soon as I sit down in the chair by her bed. Kai is the one
I’m
weak with, and even though she’s not awake, my walls can’t hold with her this close.

I break down.

Like I never have before. Like someone who has been swimming upstream for hours, for days, for years, only to sink with the shore in sight. I’m drowning from the inside out. My heart thrashes inside my chest. Guilt, relief, fear. They swirl around me as I go down.

I press her small hand to my forehead and bathe her fingers in my tears as I contemplate how close I came to losing her, how close I came to a barren life without her. I’m undone. Any bravado I had, any semblance of control completely unspools at her bedside into this moaning, weeping, helpless son of a bitch who would do anything to trade places with her. Anything to take this pain away from her. That’s what hurts most of all. It should be me here with a hole in my chest. Me with a collapsed lung. With a bullet hole in my back. A bullet that was meant for me.

I wouldn’t even pause if I had to die for you, Rhyson.

Why did she do it? Did she think this would hurt me any less than a bullet ripping through my heart?

“I’m spanking you for this when we get outta here, Pep.” I croak out a tear-soaked laugh. “And not in a sexy way.”

The silence reiterates that she’s not well. If I close my eyes, I can still see her at our last-minute wedding. Glowing. Healthy. Whole. Happy. I want that back so badly. I want to wind time up and hurtle it back to the night I gave in and agreed to come to Vegas. I hate this place and we’re never coming back.

I reach across her prone body to find her left hand on the other side. They removed her engagement ring during surgery, but somehow that little gold thread remains tied around her finger. I search it out, stroke it like a genie’s bottle, and I have one wish. That she would come back to me.

The steady beep of the machine monitoring her heart isn’t what assures me she’s alive. It’s a different beat. The beat anchoring our melody, strong and percussive. I’m quiet and still until it thumps inside of me. Until I hear our love. That song, that refrain that hums through my very blood and inundates my soul until every note, every phrase, every measure drowns out everything else. Our song isn’t one I’ve ever written or sung. It’s the one that plays between our souls.

I look to her face, hoping our song has penetrated the dark quiet she’s in, and that she’ll be smiling back at me like nothing ever happened. That my love lured her from the deep sleep. Instead I see a small red line trickling from her mouth. The beep on the monitor skips and speeds, sending a warning that brings people wearing white coats and green scrubs rushing into the room with a large cart, pushing me out of the way.

“She was just fine,” I yell over the commotion. “What’s happening? Somebody tell me what’s wrong!”

None of them seem to hear me. Everyone focuses on Kai, hurling numbers and readings at one another over my head. I can only pick out two words that make any sense, and they pin me to the wall with icy fear.

Blood clot.

A red flat line onscreen levels me. Knocks all the breath from me like a body blow.

In the midst of chaos, I strain my ears for that beat always echoing from my heart to hers, that sound, that song I thought would connect me to her forever.

But there is no beat.

There is no sound.

There is no song.

It’s gone.