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“Good girl. And again.”
I suck in another breath and blow it out slowly.
“Better?”
I nod rapidly.
“Good.” He picks me up and sits me down on his lap as E and Creed crowd in on either side of me.
I look around the room and take in the faces watching me, not with anger but with concern. Zig and Oz sit with Salem between them, their little boy Aries asleep on her chest. Across from them are Crew and Wilder, and directly opposite us are Slade and Jagger, with Astrid sitting in Slade’s lap. I can’t meet her eyes. I don’t want to see the blame and hatred in her stare. I’m ready to beg for forgiveness when the door opens and Greg walks in slowly.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Zig asks as everyone stands.
Greg ignores them all and heads straight for me. When he stops, he takes in my tear-stained face and wraps his arms around me. And that’s when I cry another bucket-worth of tears. I’m going to end up dehydrated at this rate, but I’m just so glad he’s okay.
“I’m so sorry, darlin’. I was supposed to keep you safe,” he murmurs into my hair.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I tell him, pulling back.
“Come on, old man, come snuggle with me before you fall over,” Wilder teases, taking Greg’s arm and leading him over to the sofa he was sitting on.
“Old man, my ass,” he grumbles, but he doesn’t put up a fight.
“You overdo it, and I’ll take you back to the hospital myself,” Zig warns him, but Greg waves him off.
Zig’s eyes return to me. “I know this is hard, and you’ve been to hell and back, but we need to know all the details.”
“I’ll start,” Greg says, giving me a couple more minutes. “We were in the safe room waiting for news on Salem when James arrived with a bag from the bakery in his hand. I didn’t think anything of it. I just opened the door, and he pulled a gun from the bag and shot me.”
Astrid whimpers, but she doesn’t say anything.
“His blood was on the croissant,” I whisper, still seeing it in my head. “I watched it play out, but that’s all my brain managed to take in before James hit me with the gun. When I woke up, I was lying on a bed, but not like a hospital bed, like one you get in an ambulance. A gurney?”
Zig nods, so I continue.
“Emma was there. Um, Emma Snow.” I look at Creed, who reaches out and takes my hand. “She told me that they were going to impregnate me using eggs they’d harvested from me while I was having my wisdom teeth out when I was nineteen. Eggs that they had fertilized by an unknown male, most likely one that was gifted.”
Hawk goes rock solid underneath me, so I lean back into him, reminding him I’m here and safe.
“She did something earlier in the day that resulted in the kids getting moved to a safe house. She slipped me the paper with the address before telling me the keys for the interior doors and a gun were under my pillow.”
“How did she know you were going to be there?”
“They told her. They didn’t feel the need to keep information from her when they knew how to keep her in line.” I run my fingers along the slit in the knee of my jeans. “Emma was Bella’s mom,” I tell them. I’d already told E, Creed, and Hawk, of course, but the others had no idea what the little girl had lost. “They blackmailed her using Bella.”
“Fucking assholes,” Astrid curses.
I look up at her for the first time and stare into her pretty purple eyes. “When James went to visit his grandchildren, he was grabbed by the Division,” I tell her, charging the atmosphere in the room. “They put a chip in his head. I’m sorry, I don’t know all the details, but it basically turned him into their puppet.”
“He wasn’t a bad guy,” she says softly, not a question but a statement of fact because she knew and loved him.
“No. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just got caught in a bad situation. Anyway, he asked Emma to come up with a plan because he knew they were going to use him, and he would be powerless to stop it.”
I shake my head. “I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up a bit. Emma told me what they wanted to do to me and pretended to prepare me for the procedure, but she was really telling me what I needed to do. When the orderly came in to get me, she accompanied us to the clinic, but she made him leave when lockdown protocols were initiated.”
“Reports said people heard sirens going off before the explosion,” Oz states.
“Emma did something. I don’t know how, but she set it off. It wasn’t a fire alarm, though I guess most people would think it was because of the explosion. It was the alarm for an unauthorized intruder.”
