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“I don’t know.” Dr. Brennan shook his head, his kindly eyes filled with distress. “I just don’t know, Margot.”
Margot’s fingers clenched in Davis’ shirt, a ragged cry escaping her lips.
“Margot, don’t let her ignore this loss,” Dr. Brennan advised her heavily. “Though to be honest, I don’t know if we’ll ever have Alyssa as she was, back.”
Alyssa’s physician had cared for her since she was a baby. He knew her, had seen her through childhood illnesses and a young woman’s development. The girl he’d seen at the end of summer wasn’t the same girl who had come to him before she left.
“How long before you’ll know what happened?” Davis asked, and in his voice Margot heard the grief and the love he’d already extended to his grandson.
“A few days, no more,” the doctor promised. “Just a few days.”
A few days.
Alyssa was nearly five months along. Margot had felt her daughter’s child move as Alyssa held her hand to the slight mound of her stomach, felt its strength. And she’d seen hope in her daughter’s eyes that hadn’t been there the day she returned from Spain.
And now, that life they had been so looking forward to, was gone.
Alyssa wouldn’t have the child she so desperately needed to hold the pain at bay. Margot wouldn’t have the grandchild she’d found herself loving as she’d felt it moving beneath her palm.
Alyssa had screamed for the bastards who had given her that child, Margot thought. Screamed, begged them not to take her baby. To help her. And there was nothing Margot could do to make them pay she thought as she pulled from Davis and moved into her daughter’s bedroom, to the grandchild she would never know, the child whose loss might be the final one that stole her child as well.
God help her, how would Alyssa bear this?
SPAIN
The howl of enraged fury brought Lucien and Alberto racing through the house to the front room where Sebastian had been earlier.
Like the howls of an animal, demented from pain, the sound echoed through the halls again as he heard his mother cry Sebastian’s name from upstairs.
Running to the front room, they found him standing; how he was standing, as drunk as he was, Lucien didn’t know.
“Sebastian.” Alberto gripped his shoulders, jerking him around before pulling back from his son in shock as Sebastian swung out at him with a powerful fist.
Sebastian went to his knees, his lips pulled back from his teeth as his head tipped back and another of those enraged howls of complete agony tore from his lips.
“Sebastian.” Tabitha was racing for him, ignoring her husband as he tried to stop her, going to her knees in front of her younger son and gripping his face in desperate hands. “Sebastian. What is wrong? Tell me, now! Sebastian!”
Making it to his feet, he stumbled from her and fell into a table, his arm swiping out and throwing the lamp, the antique picture frames, to the floor.
“I’ll never forgive you!” Turning on them, his eyes so black they were like the pits of hell, burning with rage. “Never.” Going to his knees again, he stayed there, shaking his head, his breathing ragged. “Alyssa…,” her name whispered from his lips. “Siren—”
Toppling to the floor, he passed out, the weeks of drinking, of raging, catching up with him until there was no fight left within him.
Slowly, Tabitha crawled to her son, her arms going around him, her sobs destroying Lucien.
“Find out what happened to the girl,” his father ordered, his voice heavy with fear. “Now, Lucien. Find out what happened to her.”
Across the room Tabitha held her unconscious son to her, sobbing, whispering his name, crying the tears Sebastian couldn’t shed for the woman he couldn’t have.
TEXAS
Trying to find Shane was an exercise in futility in most cases, Murphy knew, but when his brother had torn from the house, screaming the girl’s name, his mother had sent Murphy to stop him. As drunk as the younger Connor was, breaking the terms of the blackmail could be easily done.
The sound of his voice when he’d slammed from the house, the broken, hollow rage, had been terrifying. The fact that he was actually able to start the Viper parked in the driveway and race from the house sent horror racing through Murphy.
The months-long drunk Shane and Sebastian had been on to keep themselves from Alyssa had appeared to be working but it couldn’t continue. Until she stopped dying inside, Shane had explained, his voice slurred, when Murphy had raged at him. Just until he couldn’t feel her dyi
ng inside.
