Surviving the Pain (A Baby Saved Me Series Book 1) (25 page)

“Wh-what… What is wrong son?”

By this time, Trainor was rousing from his forced nap.
Didn’t hit him hard enough. That fucker should be dead. Just like me!
Whipping around, Sage grabbed Trainor by his arm and jerked it up behind his back, listening to the crack of bones in his hand and arm. A loud piercing yell of agony filled the room. He wanted to say it made him feel better, but it didn’t. Nothing would.

“What’s going on, Sage?”

“This fucker just told me that
you
are responsible for the death of my family, of my everything. He made the call, but you said to do it,” he roared. The betrayal that Sage felt at this moment squeezed him tightly in its unforgiven hold. This man was supposed to be better than his parents. But in the end, he was just like them.
Wasn’t he?
Maybe worse, if Sage were honest with himself. At least Collin and Donna never pretended to care. Sage knew where he stood with them right from the start. Rufus on the other hand, made him believe that he cared and that he had a family that he’d always dreamed of.

“Sage, I assure you, I never did anything like that.”

Squeezing the already broken hand of Trainor’s, Sage glared at him. “Start talking if you don’t want me to kill you right alongside this fucker!”

“The Foxes want you on their side. I needed money. They paid me to make you think that Rufus betrayed you so you’d join their team. They killed your wife. They told your parents about Hudson.”

“How did they know about my son?”

“I don’t…” Sage pulled up on his arm, and Trainor screamed in agony. “I told them. Rufus looked at you like the sun shines out of your ass. I’m his real son. I’ve been here for everything, and he doesn’t even think to include me on anything. I’m just a fucking peon in his game.” He spat.

Sage didn’t need to hear any more. He threw Trainor through the glass window, and he landed hard against the wall before falling to the floor with the shattered remains of what used to be privacy for Rufus. Sage turned back on Rufus. Huffing and puffing, he made his way toward the man that he hated with everything he had right at that moment.

“Now, calm down, son.” Rufus tried to soothe Sage. Sage laughed cynically. There was no soothing him. The only thing he had that grounded him was gone… forever.

“You promised me, you’d protect them with your life. Yet, they’re gone, and you’re standing here,” Sage growled.

“Wait,” Rufus held up his hands, his eyes wide with panic. His mouth was moving, but nothing was registering with Sage. He was frozen. Afraid to breathe. Loss squeezed his heart so tightly that he fell to his knees.

“Ember,” he cried, as visions of her beautiful smiling face danced before his eyes.

He fell forward, his hands catching him before he hit the floor. All the grief, all the pain, it flowed out through him and escaped from his eyes in the form of tears. He could still feel her small arms grabbing him around the waist, begging him not to leave her.

“You begged me to stay,” he wept. “But you left me. You both did.”

A hand touched his shoulder, and he tensed and balked away from it. He didn’t want anyone touching him. He didn’t want anyone near him. Sage knew at that moment that there was nothing left of him. All that mattered to him was long gone.

Moving quickly, he grabbed Rufus’ secret gun from the bottom of his desk. “I’ll be with you soon, my love.” Sage closed his eyes and pictured her intoxicating beauty and his son’s precious face. With a small smile of both relief and of knowing he’d see them soon playing on his face, the last thing Sage heard was the gunshot.

Creighton
ran into the building. He just had a feeling that something was off. It was a gut instinct you could say. Something bad was about to happen. Something, he feared, they had set in motion. From the moment he lost his family, he’d never felt panic and fear as he did now. When he met his chosen family, he knew he’d do anything in the world to protect them. But what he really had done was inexcusably given that same pain and devastation to a man that he considered more than a brother. Sage had been like the second half of him. As if they were twins separated at birth. The minute he met Sage, he recognized the sadness right away. Though, breaking into his circle – you could call it – was a lot harder than he’d thought. But when he’d finally managed to earn – what Creighton had realized quickly was rare – his trust, he watched the man crumble.

It was then that Creighton found out how much of a hole took residence in his brother’s heart. To be honest, he’d always known that pain fueled his aggression and pure perfection in the ring. However, it wasn’t until that day that’d he seen just how deep it had gone. Ember had been his world. How much Ember had understood of his home life, Creighton didn’t know, but he knew how it was. He’d witnessed it when his parents had found him about a year after meeting him.

In the past month, Creighton had noticed – when he could get Sage to let him anywhere near him – that he’d truly fallen away. He was lost even to himself. Hell, there was a time when he sat in his library and fingered the few books that sat on a single shelf and talked to Ember as if she was still there with him. Maybe she was, to him. If that’s what he needed at that moment, he wasn’t going to judge him on that. After all, Creighton himself had done some crazier shit to make up the hole that took up where his heart used to be.

Sage was falling far, though. Revenge was even eclipsed by the grief-stricken man that sat before all them the day that Sage was told about Ember and Hudson’s death. Actually, he’d laughed. He thought they’d been joking. When he saw that neither Rufus nor he had a smile on their faces, he flew up from his chair and screamed. He screamed at them for joking about something like that. When Sage had realized they were not joking, he crumbled to the ground and shattered, a feeling that Creighton was all too familiar with. He and Rufus cried with Sage.

As he rushed up the steps, he replayed the voicemail that Sage had left him early this morning. From the way he was breathing, Creighton was pretty sure that Sage had just finished killing himself in the gym. It had been routine for him. Honestly, they were all just glad that he was still doing something rather than wasting away. They had thought he might eventually pull himself through it all, but then Creighton got the voicemail. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

I don’t know how you did it. How did you move on? How were you able to just move past them and continue to live and care for people? You are a lot stronger than me, brother. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t. She was my everything and my son… I can’t do it anymore. I love you, man. Bye.

Creighton didn’t know what made him think to come here, but again he just followed his gut. Shoving the heavy metal and glass door open, he ran past Rhonda – the receptionist – and ran down the long corridor toward Rufus’s office. Even from that distance, Cray could hear Sage’s booming voice. What he heard was more than anger. It was devastation. Then a vaguely familiar voice followed not long before the glass to the office was shattered and Creighton had to skid to a stop and shield himself from the flying glass shards.

When he ran the last bit of the distance, he was shocked to see Sage in such a state and the pale white face of Rufus. Rufus loved Sage as if he was his own. Even went as far as adopting Sage. However, he believed that in a way Rufus had steamrolled this. He’d started a train wreck, and now they were all powerless to stop it.

“Wait,” Rufus spoke his hands still in the air. “There’s a lot you don’t understand, son. But if you’ll calm down for just a minute I can explain everything to you. I can’t very well…” his words died on his tongue as Sage quickly grabbed Rufus’ gun from under his desk and pointed it at himself.

“I’ll be with you soon, my love.” He breathed as he closed his eyes, contentment starting to fill his face.

Panic hit Creighton hard and fast. He looked around the room for anything that he could us to stop this. Seeing what looked to possibly be a broken piece of chair, he flung it at the hand that Sage held the gun with.

<<<
BANG!
>>>

The discharge of the gun had stopped everything in the room. At that point, Creighton was afraid to be breath. Dust even seemed to stall in midair. Nothing was moving and life seemingly froze at that second. The only thing that continued seemed to be the echoing of the gun firing. He couldn’t get his brain to focus on what had happened. His heart almost seemed to stop beating. Had he done the right thing? Or had he just screwed everything up?

Ember
sat off in a secret security office in Rufus’s building. It sat right behind his regular one. She could only assume that it was for when shit hit the fan. She was so excited to see Sage again. When they told her that he had to think they were really dead, it killed her. She prayed that he’d forgive her for not coming out sooner. But they needed him to grieve, to be in real pain, for all this to work out.

Actually, she wasn’t even sure what all Sage knew and what he didn’t know. Ember’s leg continued to shake. He wasn’t going to forgive her. Sage was going to hate her for lying about so much. All she could do was pray that he saw the reasoning behind it, and they didn’t have to hurt for long.

She gripped her son’s hand. He looked up at her with a smile on his face. Even though his mouth smiled, his eyes shone with fear and sadness. Ember knew exactly how he felt because she was feeling exactly the same way.

“Daddy will understand, won’t he?”

Sighing heavily, Ember’s whole body deflated against the back of the chair she sat in. “I don’t know, honey. If it were me and I thought you two were both dead, I think I’d be very hurt and angry.”

“But we did it to protect him, didn’t we?”

“Yes, baby. That’s what Grandpa Rufus explained. But daddy has had no one for a month honey. He’s been alone thinking that all he had was lost to him forever. Daddy may not see the good in it all right away. He may be furious with us.” Knowing she needed to be completely honest with her son, she told him the full truth. “He may leave us for good, honey.”

“But,” his lower lip began to tremble. “But, we just wanted him safe.” He cried.

She knelt in front of her son’s chair and pulled him into her arms. Though there was a high probability of Hudson making a full recovery, he was still in a wheelchair for now as he worked to regain the ability to run and play and all that on his own again. However, as Ember saw it, she was just glad he was still alive.

Just then, Ember could hear a commotion outside the room. She hurried to the window. Her heart sank when she looked into Sage’s eyes. There was nothing there. There was nothing left. He was empty. His light was gone. She remembered the twinkle in his eyes whenever he had a naughty plan. The way his eyes laughed before the sound actually came out of his mouth was one of her favorite things about him. His eyes. His eyes were what she noticed about him first. They told her everything she needed to know about him, about his heart. Ember’s mind wandered back to the first time he talked to her.

“Do you happen to know what time it is?” A deep, but scratchy voice said from next to her.

Jumping slightly, she’d been lost in her thoughts before his voice interrupted her. Looking at her watch, she told him the time, never taking her eyes off the book she was reading. Her heart was hammering in her chest, and she didn’t know if it was because of the book – that had just hit the climax of the story – or if it was because she could still feel this guy’s eyes on her. She tried to ignore him. She tried to focus on her book, but the intensity in his stare stole her attention away and soon she looked up into a pair of twinkling eyes that she knew she’d never forget. Yet, when she opened her mouth, she was shocked at what came out.

“I’m sorry, did you need second by second told to you,” she snapped.

His soft chuckle floated over her, warming her skin. “No, just wondered how long it’d take you to look up at me.”

“Well, aside from being a creep, do you usually bug people when they are trying to read?”

He plopped down on the grass next to her, bumping Ember’s shoulder. “So,” he said. “What are we reading?”

Huffing, she closed her book and looked at him.
Wow, was he ever cute and yet he’s here talking to her? What’s wrong with him, she wondered?
She eyed him suspiciously. That was when it hit her who he was.

“You’re friends with Grey Matthews, aren’t you?”

“Busted.” He grinned. “You know Grey?”

“Yeah, we’ve known each other for the longest time. Honestly, I don’t remember not knowing him. We’ve kind of grown up together.”

“You’re grown up?” He joked.

Feeling the heat rise in her cheeks, she dropped her head. “No,” she mumbled. Then she squared her shoulders and forced away her embarrassment. “But I’m a lot more mature than anyone here,” she signaled between them.

His hand clutched his chest as he pretended to be wounded. “Ow, that hurts.” Bumping her shoulder once again, he smiled. “Exactly how old are you, oh wise one?”

That’s when Ember had found out that he was actually older than her. But it never seemed to be a problem for Sage. Actually, she wasn’t even sure he thought of her as younger because of how she acted. Even still, looking at the broken man before her, she was reminded of the first time she’d saw what Sage’s parents were like. Ember remembered having to tend to his wounds because his father decided a sixteen-year-old boy was a better punching bag than an actual one. It was as she was cleaning his wounds and silent tears fell down her cheeks that they shared their first kiss.

From that moment on, there was no stopping their relationship. She loved him fiercely, and he returned it. Even as all the preppy girls at school tried to tear them apart, they had only grown closer and stronger together. Maybe that was why his sudden departure after he graduated killed her so much. They had been everything for each other. The reasons to keep moving. Then he changed it all without even asking her if she was okay with that. They could have made other plans. He didn’t have to leave that day, and he didn’t have to turn his back on her for five years. Well, it wasn’t five years. He tried, but she was just so hurt and angry she just couldn’t let him off the hook. The childish part of her wanted him to suffer as she had.

Now, as she stared at the completely empty – aside from the rage and despair that ran incredibly deep in his eyes – man before her, she wondered if Rufus’s plan was worth it. If they’d made the right decision. He’d made a valid point, though. Sage was bound to go off and take care of this himself. He’d get himself killed without even thinking about how heartbroken they’d be without him.

“Mom,” Hudson said with a frisson of fear in his voice.

Breaking her eyes from the sight and the noise before her, she looked at her son. He was pale as a ghost. It frightened her as she dropped to her knees in front of him, feeling his forehead and checking his pulse.

“He is broken, Mom. No, he’s more than that. He’s not going to forgive us,” he stammered out as tears fell down his cheeks.

Hugging him as tightly as he could handle, she tried to assure him that he’d understand. But at that point, Ember wasn’t sure who she was really trying to convince – him or herself. Pulling back when suddenly a crash sounded and then nothing followed. When she looked out the window, time seemed to freeze. Ember didn’t know if minutes were passing or if it really was going as slowly as she felt it was. She watched as Sage fell to his knees. Her name was on his lips. It was plain to read. The heartache in his eyes was enough to stop Ember’s breath. It was almost as if he could see her standing there. That he was looking right at her instead of whatever he was actually seeing. Then with horror, she read his lips once again as he grabbed a gun.