The nurse looked at me with pity. That was the second warning. When the nurses look at you with pity, it means there is no good news.
“She is in the ICU, sir. Room 404. But you should know… the family is already there.”
The family.
My stomach twisted. Tessa’s family wasn’t like mine. I grew up with nothing, scrapping for every meal. Tessa grew up in a fortress. Her father, Victor Wolf, was a man who owned half the real estate in the county and the souls of the politicians who ran it. And then there were her brothers. Seven of them. Dominic, Evan, Felix, Grant, Ian, Kyle, and Mason.
The Wolf Pack, Victor called them. They were loud, arrogant men who treated the world like it was something they could buy or break. They had never liked me. To them, I was just a grunt, a government dog who wasn’t good enough for their princess.
I turned the corner toward the ICU waiting area, and there they were. It looked like a blockade. Victor was sitting on a bench, checking his watch like he was late for a board meeting. The seven brothers stood in a semicircle around the door to her room.
When they saw me, the atmosphere shifted. It wasn’t grief I saw in their eyes. It was annoyance.
“Finally,” Victor said, standing up. He smoothed his expensive Italian suit. “The soldier returns.”
“Where is she?” I growled, stepping forward.
Dominic, the oldest brother, stepped in my path. He was a big guy, a gym rat with vanity muscles and soft hands. He put a hand on my chest.
“Easy, Rambo. She’s not in a state to see anyone right now.”
I looked at his hand on my chest. Then I looked at his eyes.
“Touch me again, Dominic, and you’ll be in the bed next to her.”
He hesitated, the bully’s instinct recognizing a predator, then stepped back. I pushed past them and opened the door.
The sound of the ventilator was the only thing in the room. Whoosh. Click. Whoosh.
I walked to the side of the bed, and my knees almost gave out. If the name on the chart didn’t say Tessa, I wouldn’t have known it was her. Her face was swollen to twice its size. Her jaw was wired shut. One eye was completely sealed, a bulbous mass of purple and black. Her beautiful blonde hair had been shaved on the left side to make room for stitches that ran across her scalp like a railroad track.
I reached out to touch her hand, but it was in a cast. I touched her shoulder instead—the only place that didn’t look broken.
“Tessa,” I whispered. “I’m here. I’m home.”
She didn’t move. The machine just kept breathing for her.
The door opened behind me. It was Detective Miller. He looked uncomfortable, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
“Mr. Hunter,” Miller said. “I’m sorry.”
“Who did this?” I asked, not turning around. My eyes were fixed on Tessa’s broken face.
“We believe it was a home invasion,” Miller said. “Robbery gone wrong. It happens. They probably panicked when she came downstairs, beat her, took some jewelry, and ran.”
I turned around slowly. I looked at the detective. Then I looked past him, through the glass window of the room, at Victor and his seven sons. They were talking to each other, laughing. Mason, the youngest, was showing something on his phone to Kyle.
“A robbery,” I repeated.
“Yes, sir. We found signs of forced entry at the back door.”
I looked back at Tessa. I gently lifted her arm, the one that wasn’t in a cast. I looked at her fingernails. They were clean.
“Detective,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “My wife is a fighter. She takes kickboxing classes three times a week. If a stranger broke into our home and attacked her, she would have clawed his eyes out. There would be skin under her nails. There would be defensive wounds on her forearms.” I pointed to her smooth arms. “She didn’t fight back. Which means she knew the person. She let them get close. Or she was held down.”
The detective’s eyes flickered toward the window, toward Victor. It was a micro-expression, a tiny split-second of fear. I caught it.
“We are investigating all leads,” Miller said, sweating now. “But the father, Mr. Victor… he has been very helpful. He hired a private security team to watch the house now.”
