Hunter's Alpha (gxg) ✓

51. Funeral

HUNTER

We were supposed to have a happy ending.

I have been pacing the hospital corridor for eighteen hours. Gianina is weeping quietly into Mikayla's shoulder, and Mikayla's arm is around her waist. Murmuring quiet words of comfort, Mikayla presses soft kisses against Gianina's curly hair.

I have accomplished everything I wanted.

Elijah is dead. Anise is dead. Both the sex trafficking rings in the gangs have been disassembled, and the girls are free.

Once I reached the shore, I stole a ship and locked Imai and the other Yakuza aboard it.

I hope they have a fun eight-month voyage to Saudi Arabia.

And I hope they are welcomed with all the grace of a hostile military.

The door to the hospital is thrown open. Lacy and Kiara burst through, running with all the energy of a sugar-induced high. Tommy follows close behind, giving me an apologetic look.

And maybe any other time I would have been furious.

But I need my kids now, as much as they need me.

"Momma!" shrieks Kiara, jumping into my outstretched arms. I don't have the heart to tell her to lower her voice. "Mom, I thought you were—"

Lacy is glowering at me.

"You. Left. Us," she says, trembling from head to toe.

"Lacy, you know why I had to."

"I thought you were dead!" she says fiercely, stamping her foot.

"Did you miss me?" They are enough to ease the coil of grief in my chest. They are enough to make me feel like the semblance of a whole person again.

"I'm glad you're alive," Lacy says stubbornly. But then she is crying, and I hold out an arm for her to climb into.

Both of them nestled into my chest, kissing the tops of both their heads, I finally look up three and a half hours later to see a doctor approaching me.

It has been almost twenty-two hours.

"How is she?" I say, too choked to say much else.

"We put her in a medically-induced coma," he says. "If she doesn't wake up in the next week, we will be forced to declare her in a vegetative state."

A vegetative state.

Someone who will never wake up.

"It's going to be okay, Mommy," Kiara whispers against my neck, curling her small hands over my shoulder.

"It's going to be okay," Mikayla repeats, and when Gianina looks up, her face is tearstained.

I don't miss the way Gianina is sitting on Mikayla's lap, or the way their fingers are interlaced together.

But it's not going to be okay.

It's never going to be okay if Jude doesn't wake up.

I sit at her bedside every day that week.

Holding her hand.