“Elias, the police are—”
I hung up, burying the throttle.
We screamed into the hospital parking lot just as the first gray hint of dawn began to bleed into the horizon. I dumped the kickstand and sprinted through the automatic sliding doors, leaving a trail of blood drops on the pristine white tiles.
Chaos had entirely consumed the lobby. Nurses were shouting. Security guards were running toward the stairwells with their radios blaring.
Becca stood near the security desk, her face totally bloodless.
“Camera feed,” I snapped at the head guard, pushing my way behind the desk. “Show me the loading dock.”
The guard didn't argue. He clicked his mouse, bringing up a grainy black-and-white feed from five minutes ago.
On the screen, a woman in blue surgical scrubs, her face obscured by a medical mask, was pushing Maya’s wheelchair down a desolate service corridor. Maya looked utterly terrified but completely silent, clutching her stuffed bear to her chest.
At the very last camera angle, right before the concrete loading bay, the woman turned her head slightly toward the lens. The mask slipped down.
I froze. My breath caught in my throat.
Becca let out a horrified gasp beside me.
Because the woman pushing the wheelchair wasn't a stranger. It was Jenna.
She was alive.
For one impossible, agonizing second, nobody in the security room breathed.
Then the camera feed switched to the exterior dock.
Jenna shoved the wheelchair aggressively toward the open back doors of a running white cargo van.
But as I watched closely, my stomach plummeted. She wasn't acting like a mother rescuing her child. She was violently jerking her head, looking over her shoulder with absolute panic.
Just before she lifted Maya into the van, Jenna slipped her hand into her pocket and shoved something small and dark into Maya’s hospital gown.
“What is she doing?” Becca whispered.
My pulse hammered against my temples as the sickening answer formed in my mind. The receipts in the box. The massive deposits in Jenna’s name. Corbin had said she took the money.
Was Jenna selling her own daughter?
Then, I saw the final detail on the monitor.
A towering man stepped out from the deep shadows behind the van. He grabbed Jenna roughly by the shoulder and shoved her hard into the back of the vehicle.
Even on the grainy feed, I could see the dark, winding snake tattoo crawling up the side of his neck.
The van doors were violently slammed shut from the outside by a second man, and the vehicle sped off into the darkness.
I backed away from the glowing screen, every single nerve in my body burning with adrenaline and rage.
Jenna hadn't shown up to rescue Maya. She was part of the delivery.
“Get me that license plate,” I barked.
The guard hastily typed on the keyboard, enlarging the final frozen frame. The plate was heavily muddy, but the first four letters were visible.
Miller checked the notebook we had stolen from the house. He looked up, his eyes hard and grim.
“It matches the last entry,” Miller said. “They’re heading toward the old iron freight yard on the edge of the county line.”
I turned toward the glass doors as the morning light broke over the city.
Maya was still alive. But she was in the hands of monsters, and her own mother was sitting right beside them.
I grabbed my bleeding arm, tying a rag tight over the wound, my jaw set like carved stone.
“Mount up,” I told my brothers.
And this time, we were riding for war.
I didn’t wait for the hospital security guards to finish writing down the van’s license plate. I shoved my way back through the glass double doors, the cold morning air hitting my face like a physical blow.