Our Saving Grace

Answers - Kota

Luke: I found Sang. She came to my house. She is safe. 

Luke: She says that she doesn't want to see anyone, so give us some space. Sean, her wrist looks broken to me and I convinced her to let you see her. But only you. 

Ever since that text came through the group message has been flooded with pleas for information from the rest of us, but another text from Luke never came through. It was Gabriel that reminded us that Uncle's house was completely wired and all we had to do was click on the right icon to get a live video feed of Luke's place. I knew that I wasn't the only one that had been using this app lately to monitor Luke's emotional state. 

Currently I was driving out to Uncle's house. Not a single one of us listened to Luke's stay away message. I had been directing my text-to-speech program in my Subaru Crosstrek to auto read all of the messages as they came through, but the moment that Gabriel mentioned the camera's I took the first opportunity to pull over and click on the pancakes app. It took me a second to flip through the cameras of Luke's bedroom and the living room before I finally found them in the kitchen. It looked like Luke was wrapping Sang's wrist with an ice pack. 

Ten fingers. Two green eyes that were free of tears. One cat? Actually her dramatic makeup looked fairly undisturbed despite the events of the night. Thankfully she had lost the wig and her blonde hair was failing around her face in gentle waves. Except for her swollen wrist, Sang looked perfectly fine. Maybe Nathan had exaggerated how upset she had been. It was my experience that girls tended to cry when they were upset. Mia was defiantly a crier. But I wasn't able to deduce anything about her emotional state from Sang's features on the screen. 

When Luke sat next to Sang and they remained motionless for forty-seven seconds, I decided that this would be a good time to make the rest of the trip to Uncle's house. I set the phone in the dash-broad holder and then pulled back onto the road. I was analyzing the differences in Sang's attitude towards Sean versus North when I pulled up to North's trailer, seeing that Silas' and Victor's cars were already parked haphazardly out front. I garbed my phone and dashed inside as Sang described as she had previously broken her wrist. I literately missed a step of the front steps, causing me to fall forward. My phone went flying into North's front door as I flung my hands out in front of me to brace my fall. I barely even felt the sing in my palms, still focused on Sang's defiantly clear, hard voice.   

My hands were repeatedly slammed against the ground while my wrists were hand-cuffed. 

Jesus, I was not expecting that. I let out a breath and turned to sit properly on the steps. This was the part of the job I hated the most and even after years of hearing about it, seeing it, and even recusing people from it, my stomach always sank at the mention of any sort of abuse. My own years of pain at my father's hands always seemed closer when we worked abuse cases. I started to count to regain my equilibrium. 

Three. Nine. Twenty-seven. Eighty-one. Two-hundred-forty-three. Seven-hundred-twenty nine.... 

I picked threes because they were a simple rational number. Thees could always calm me down. By the time I got to 4,782,969 I knew that I was in control again. My brothers were not going to react well to the news that Sang was hurt in that way. Not only were we all already on high alert because of what happened with Nathan, but this was a hot button for us. We had all been there when North finally pulled Luke out of that prison. 

I got up, gathered up my phone that thankfully was still working even though it now had a spiderweb of cracks in the upper right corner, and walked into North's trailer. Inside, Victor, Gabriel, and Silas were all crowed on the couch while Nathan sat alone at the square kitchen table. They should know better than to punish Nathan for what had happened. We all knew that Nathan was punishing himself more than we ever could. Hurting an innocent person was just as bad as it got for Nathan.