84 Traps and tears

**Date = 1 August**
**Place = San Francisco (UCSF Medical Center)**

**POV - Aria**

I’m starting to realize that the human body has strange coping mechanisms to ensure survival.
Like right now … sitting here in the ER, on a hospital cot in my blood-spattered sundress — I have the overwhelming urge to tell a joke. Why? The hell if I know. Probably some primal, stupid instinct to pretend I’m fine while the universe sets itself on fire.
But even if the want is there, my brain’s not exactly open for business, let alone humor.
It’s just a giant, dark echo chamber looping the same fragmented footage on repeat — crash, scream, pain — as if it’ll make sense the next time around.
Spoiler — it doesn’t.
So, instead, I watch Marco pace up and down in front of the door — like he’s rehearsing a guilt he can’t name. His right hand clutches his injured, definitely broken, arm, where a nurse trapped it to his chest with a makeshift sling. He refuses treatment and painkillers until one of his brothers comes to release him.
Apparently, Marco and Miguel have another brother. An older one. Who was secretly looking after Lee … Sky … Sky-Lee. It was he who received the earful at the side of the road earlier. Because he let Sky escape.
And it was he, Mathias, I hear, who immediately chased after the car with a few … the Jeep I saw tearing away.
Marco is a valuable source of information. When he wants to be.
Marco’s phone starts ringing in his pocket, vibrating like an accusation. He struggles one-handed to fish it out, so I crook a finger at him. “Allow me.” I slip it free and answer before he can stop me.
“Brother,” a voice hits the line — low, urgent, and threaded with static. Before I can say a word, the voice barrels on — “It was a fucking trap. Joe is shot.”
I nearly drop the phone. And even though I don’t know who Joe is, my heart lurches into my throat. Marco’s face sharpens, and he grabs the phone fast, holding it to his ear.
“Mathias … repeat,” he snaps. His voice goes cold — too calm. He listens. Silence stretches.
“Miguel can tell him.” His face drains. “I like to breathe.”
The room is frozen. You don’t need to understand the words to feel them. The air shifts, heavy and suffocating. The silence grows louder. Somewhere, a nurse laughs — and it sounds obscene.
“Will do. Be careful.” Marco ends the call with a low curse and just stands there, the phone dangling from his fingers. The kind of silence that follows isn’t peace — it’s a warning.
Mel props herself up on one elbow on the bed, her dirty clothes expanding over her belly. “Okay, spill,” she demands. Her voice cracks the air like a whip.
River’s curled against Haley like a kitten, quiet and alert at the same time, as if she’s still waiting for the car to come back around the corner.
I watch her small body tremble under the too-big blanket. She hasn’t cried much. That worries me more than if she had.
Marco looks like a man who’d rather chew glass, or take the fifth.
“The group who chased the car was led into a trap,” he says finally. “One of ours got shot.” His eyes flicker over each of us — Haley, Mel, me — then stop at the smallest figure in the room. “But for now … we don’t tell Jackson. He’s a little unstable. Miguel will handle it when the time’s right.”
Unstable? Yeah, right … and I’m a little tired, and the world’s a little on fire … no one is exactly stable right now.
But how is one supposed to act after what happened?
All I can remember are bits and pieces … the sound of the crash … the screams … the smell of tar … the flash of yellow … all our stuff scattered around … and the bodies.
I stare at the wall, the white is too bright, too clean — too much. I blink.
The air smells like antiseptic and melted tires.
Everything pains. The adrenaline fizzled, and suddenly my body remembered — the crunch of metal, the flash of yellow, the screams that cut off mid-air, the way I slammed into the road. The taste of tar in my mouth. The stuff strewn across the road like the world decided to chew and then spit us out.
My hands sting. My legs ache. My shoulder pulses with a deep, radiating bruise.
Everything screams at once. Every nerve throws a tantrum.
But it’s not the pain that unsettles me.
It’s the quiet.
There’s a strange, heavy silence in this ER room, like the kind right after an explosion. The kind where your ears are ringing, but nothing else moves. Where no one dares to speak because the words might collapse you.
I clutch the thin, scratchy blanket across my lap and stare at the smudges of blood on my dress, wondering if it’s mine or Kiara’s or Lee’s —
No. Sky.
I’m still wrapping my head around it. Sky is Lee. Lee is Sky. And not dead.
A part of me wants to cry. Another part is frozen. The rest just aches.
For a moment, nobody moves.
Just minutes ago, we were laughing. Trying on dresses. Complaining about corsets. Taking stupid mirror selfies while Mel tried to convince the seamstress that a slit up to the thigh was *‘tastefully dramatic’*. And now we’re sitting here, waiting on the casualties of whatever war we apparently wandered into.
The shift feels unreal — so sharp it makes my stomach ache — like the world tilted while no one was looking.
Mel runs a shaky hand through her hair, her engagement ring catching the sterile light.
“This morning we were laughing,” she whispers as if picking my thoughts. “Now we’re in a hospital listening to men talk about traps and shootings while two friends are fighting for their lives. What the actual hell happened?”
Haley exhales, slow and controlled, though her eyes are glassy. “Life happened,” she says. “It doesn’t knock first. It just walks in and wrecks the place.”
“Today was not life … today some asshole who likes playing God happened,” Mel snaps.
“He must really, really hate you guys,” River peeves. She’s not wrong. This isn’t the casual kind of hate — it’s rot-deep. The kind that curdles into obsession.
No normal person plans stuff like this. I mean, who wakes up and thinks, ‘*you know what I’ll do today — I’ll blow up someone’s life and create mass chaos’?*
I can’t shake the feeling that what happened today wasn’t by chance — it was planned. The choices. The attacks. The trap. The way they know stuff.

Whoever did it … knew exactly where to aim.

I rub my temple. “Maybe we have … like a mole,” I mutter. “Someone leaked where we’d be, when we’d be there.”
Mel stares at me. “A mole? In our group?”
“Or near it,” I say, my stomach turning. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
River’s voice cuts through the silence, calm and perfectly serious. “Or maybe it isn’t a mole,” she says, frowning. “Could be that shark instead. Moles are basically blind hamsters that live underground. What’s a mole gonna do? Cover us in dirt?”
Haley pinches the bridge of her nose. “Not that kind of mole, sweetie. This one spills secrets.”
River blinks. “Then why call it that? Just say snitch.”
“Honestly, at this point,” Mel mutters from her bed, voice dry, “a vengeful shark sounds about right.”
I nearly laugh. Nearly. Because what else can you do when your day goes from wedding dress fittings and sunlight to car crashes and death talk?
Haley huffs a quiet laugh — the kind that sounds more like a cough — before the heaviness settles back in, sharp as the disinfectant in the air.
Marco, who’s been pacing like he’s trying to grind a hole in the floor, stops dead. “None of our guys would ever snitch,” he says, low and certain. “I’m dead sure about that.”
Mel narrows her eyes. “Then maybe they followed us?”
Marco shakes his head sharply. “We would’ve noticed. We always notice.”
“What about trackers?” she asks, her voice softer than intended. “Could they have tagged one of the cars?”
He snorts. “We check for those all the time. Every morning. Every route. Every stop.” He hesitates. “If someone got tracked …” He looks around the room — slowly, pointedly — his eyes landing on each of us in turn. “Then it was someone who didn’t check. Someone not trained. Someone not attentive to that kind of thing.”
The room goes still. I wonder what a tracking device even looks like.
“Meaning?” Mel presses.
Marco’s gaze flicks toward where River is huddled with Haley.
I swallow.
River’s face crumples into a frown. “What?” she asks defensively. “Why are you looking at me like that? I don’t even drive.”
“No one’s blaming you, sweetheart,” Haley says quickly. “Marco’s just thinking out loud.”
River squints suspiciously. “Thinking looks a lot like glaring.”
That almost gets a smile out of him, but not quite. “I’m not glaring, kid. I’m assessing.”
“Same thing,” River mutters, then glances at me. “See? This is why I said it was the shark. Sharks don’t need trackers. They just smell blood.”
Haley subtly rolls her eyes with a faint smile.

But River just shrugs, blinking fast like she’s trying not to cry. “It’s true. Maybe they smelled ours.”
For a moment, no one says anything. The steady beep of a monitor hums through the air. The hospital light above us flickers once — a slow, stuttering pulse like it’s tired of seeing people fall apart.
I glance at Marco again. His jaw is tight, his good hand clenched in a fist. “We’ll figure it out,” he says. “Whoever it is — whoever set this up — they’ll wish they hadn’t.”
River looks at him, her face pale and grim. “‘Cause they made Jackson angry.”
He doesn’t answer.
That’s answer enough.
Haley reaches for River’s hand. “Not just angry,” she says softly, “That man is furiously enraged.”
River stares at the door, her voice quiet. “Yep.”
The silence that follows is thick and uneasy.
Somewhere down the corridor, a door slams. A shout echoes faintly. Then the rumble of hurried footsteps.
The kind that never brings good news.
And then Damion’s there. Followed by Logan. But my eyes go straight to the last one through the door.
Sport. My Sport.
His face is thunder and flame all at once. He looks fine, but not okay. Not even close. His chest rises and falls like he’s been running for miles. Then his eyes find me, and before I can think, he’s across the room and wrapping his arms around me.
Pain sparks along my back and shoulder, but I don’t care. I lean into him. I want to fall apart, tell him all the inconsequential, unimportant stuff I remember. Stuff that really doesn’t matter right now … but I suddenly have an urge to talk about. Like the perfect pair of earrings that got lost, the shoes that got trampled, and how the sexy lace underwear fluttered through the sky, looking like a blue Jay with a broken wing. Just stupid stuff like that.
But instead, I just sit here, breathing him in, feeling him shake.
Damion glares at his mom as if making sure she’s still breathing, then stretches his strong arms out and snatches Mel against him like he’s afraid she’ll vanish.
“Are you fucking trying to kill me before the baby is born, woman?” His voice cracks halfway through, part laugh, part panic, pulling Mel into his body as close as he can.
“My fucking heart can’t take this shit anymore,” Damion goes on, his face filled with emotion.
His tone is rough, but his hands shake against her back.
“If you don’t stop swearing,” Mel rebukes, smacking his chest with a trembling hand, “I’m going to rip that heart out myself and use it as a paperweight.”
He laughs — ragged, wet, a man coming down from adrenaline and terror — as he buries his face in her hair.
“I swear this baby’s first word is gonna be *‘fuck’,*” she mutters into his shoulder.
River snickers from under the blanket, that shy, exhausted laugh that sounds like it’s fighting its way out.
“I don’t care what his first word is,” Damion says gruffly, pulling back just enough to look at Mel. “As long as he gets born safe, screams *‘Daddy’* right after, and kicks whoever made you cry.”
The room smells like antiseptic and metal — blood that’s been scrubbed but not forgotten. The overhead light flickers, casting everyone in uneasy flashes.
“I fu— frickin’ love you, angel,” he blurts, catching himself mid-word. “And that little shithead in your belly.” His voice breaks again, and he presses a kiss to her temple. It’s messy and raw and so full of love it hurts to look at.
“Are you hurt?” Enrique’s voice cuts through the moment, deep and gravelly, slacking his arms just enough for me to breathe again, but the weight of his concern lingers in the air.
Hearing the worry lingering in those words warms me from the inside out. His emotional assertion is quiet and stubborn, carved out of pain — not nearly at the level where I would like it to be, but he’s slowly getting there. And the fact that he’s trying so damn hard to be better makes me love him just so much more.
“Nothing serious,” I manage. His eyes still scan over me anyway, slow and deliberate, like he’s memorizing every inch.
“What happened?” Damion asks, voice low.
I swallow hard — because how do you even start to describe the kind of madness we went through?
I close my eyes and it’s there again — the blur of motion, the scream of metal, the flash of yellow slicing through sunlight like a knife. Tires screeching, rubber burning. People yelling. The world turning inside out.
Kiara’s scream still rings in my skull, sharp and raw like it’s stuck there. And Lee — Sky — whatever name she’s wearing — flying forward, arms stretched like broken wings. Everything happened so fast that the air itself felt like it had cracked.
If it weren’t for fast reflexes and dumb luck, we’d be counting bodies instead of bruises.
“Lee dove on Mel,” Marco explains, voice gruff but a little shaky, fidgeting with the sling holding his arm. “The momentum dragged Aria back … Lee saved their asses but caught the edge of the bumper.”
“Marco broke his damn arm catching us,” Mel interrupts.

Marco rubs at the bridge of his nose like the memory itself gives him a headache. “Aria pushed Ava out of the way while she was falling — Briana got Lili clear, and Brick yanked Haley.”
He pauses. The air seems to thicken. “But Kiara … Kiara got the full brunt of it.”
The words hang there. No one breathes. Even River’s fidgeting stops.
Marco murmurs, almost absently. “It was bad, but it could have been so much worse. Thank God.”
“Lucky,” Logan mutters, though his voice doesn’t sound like he believes it.
“Yeah,” I say, a hollow laugh slipping out. “Lucky’s not the word I’d use, but sure. Let’s go with that. I’m sure Kiara and Lee think they were really lucky.” The words hit harder than I meant them to. They fall flat, sharp, ugly. For a heartbeat, no one breathes.
Logan’s face changes instantly — his mouth opens, then closes again like he wants to explain. His jaw tightens, guilt bleeding through the cracks.
“Logan …” I start softly, voice frayed at the edges.
But it’s too late. The damage is done.
Mel’s lips part in shock, her eyes flicking between us like she’s not sure if I need a slap or a hug. Haley just stares at me, wide-eyed, like she’s watching me come undone in real time.
Even Enrique’s hand tenses at my side — he doesn’t say anything, but I feel the muscle in his arm twitch, his silence louder than any lecture.
And in that sudden, suffocating quiet, I realize they all think I’ve cracked.
Maybe I have. Should I say something?
But then Axel walks in with a stark face, and the attention shifts.
“Do you know if my sister is alright?” River pipes up, her voice small but clear.
“Sister?” Damion frowns. Oh, right. I guess they don’t know yet.
“Long story short,” Mel says briskly. “Lee came back from the better place, and he’s actually a she — Sky.”
“Holy shit!” Damion and Logan shout in perfect sync, like an R-rated choir. Axel just stands there, stone-faced, while Enrique looks down at the floor — guilty. Of course, they knew.
“Lee’s a girl?” Logan blurts, eyes wide.
“Now that makes so much sense,” he mutters, half to himself. “Damn, I thought my brother might be gay.”
“Me too,” Damion adds, dead serious. Then he glances over at Enrique. “Wait — you knew?”
Enrique shrugs solemnly. “For about a month now.” He points at Axel. “He knew longer.”
Axel looks like he regrets walking into the room.
Mel throws her hands up. “Update, people. Focus.” Her tone is sharp enough to slice through the fog of shock in the room. Her words act like a tether, pulling everyone upright, forcing attention.
Axel straightens immediately, the air shifting as his voice hardens. “Kiara’s critical. They rushed her into surgery. Lianne Weber — hasn’t woken up yet. Head trauma.”
“Who the hell is Lianne Weber?” Mel asks, brow furrowed, a grumpy crease cutting across her forehead.
“The little *‘nanny’* who got hit …” Axel says, making air quotes like that somehow softens the blow.
“You mean —” Mel starts, but gets quickly interrupted.
“No … Lee died on the boat,” Axel chips in, annoyed, like the explanation should have been obvious.
I bite the inside of my cheek. Great. Lies on top of aliases. It’s like a Russian nesting doll of secrets.
“And Jackson?” Mel mutters, voice low, tense, eyes flicking toward the door like she can see the storm already brewing.
“He’s like a fucking tiger with his balls clamped. One wrong word away from wrecking the building, maybe the world.”
“And now we know why he’s so pissed,” Damion prats, tone smug. “That dimwit’s been in love this whole fucking time.”
River’s eyes grow wider, almost too big for her face, like someone just told her Santa runs a hit squad.
“He’s shitfaced,” Logan grumbles, running a hand down his face. “And one sneeze away from punching a wall.”
“Or a fucking doctor,” Damion sneers, eyes glinting.
Mel’s voice slices through the noise like a blade wrapped in honey — “The next one who swears is getting a punch in the face from me.”
They all freeze. Then, in unison, the grown men look at River for moral support.
She shrugs. “You deserve it.” Then crosses her arms. “You’re such a bunch of peonies. Afraid of your own brother.”
“Hey,” Logan snaps, the humor bleeding away. His jaw tightens, voice sharp. “You don’t know what the devil’s capable of when he loses control.”
Even the air seems to draw back, waiting. I shudder, not sure I actually want to know.
He looks toward the door, voice quieter now. “Frankly, I’ve never seen him this bad.”
The room stills.
Outside, someone yells. A doctor, maybe. The sound echoes down the corridor — too urgent, too loud.
And just like that, the fragile bubble of safety pops. River jags up, the blanket dropping from her shoulders. I’m worried. She’s been static for too long — too still for someone who usually can’t sit still for more than two minutes without plotting something.
River turns her head to Mel suddenly, eyes all serious, face pale. “Are you sure my sister is gonna be okay?”
Mel’s smile softens, though there’s something fragile about it, a thin thread holding it together. “I’m sure,” she says gently. “And do you know how I know?”
“How?” River blinks up, waiting.
Mel exhales through her nose, smiling through it. “Because your sister seems to be just as crazy as she’s brave. And, I’m saying this from experience …” she lowers her voice conspiratorially, “crazy bad-asses like that don’t die easily. Look at Jackson — man’s practically immortal.”
That earns her a small giggle. It’s watery, but it’s something.
“My sister *is* pretty crazy, isn’t she?” River’s voice is small, uncertain — like she’s testing whether it’s okay to laugh again.
Mel now snorts. “Girl, she dressed up as a boy and played hockey in the big leagues. AND anyone playing house with Jackson must be totally bonkers.”
River’s face lights up for a beat before clouding again. “She had to be a boy,” she insists gravely, “or else the shark would bite off Dad’s other leg.”
Mel chuckles. “She told you that, huh?”
River nods, serious as a judge. “That’s why she played hockey. To pay the shark.”
There’s a beat of silence, and I bite my lip to keep from laughing too hard. The kid’s face is too earnest, too heartbreakingly sincere.
“And she’s the bestest and bravest and prettiest person in the whole world,” River adds, her voice wobbling dangerously. “Even as a boy.”
My throat tightens. She’s right. I want to say that. Lee is all that — and more. She’s fire wrapped in skin, and she’s survived things no one should. But the words stick somewhere behind my ribs.
Mel leans closer, lowering her voice — “Want to know a secret?”
River’s eyes go big. A tiny spark of excitement starts to flicker in there.
“Your sister got my favorite brother.”
“Hey, I’m your favorite,” Enrique pouts.
Mel laughs softly, shaking her head. “Today it’s the quiet one with the death wish and the jawline of doom.”
Logan rolls his eyes and bumps Enrique with his shoulder. “She means Jackson.”
Mel nods. “Mhm. He’s the bravest of them all,” she whispers, brushing a strand of blonde hair off her face. “And he’d tear the world apart before he let anything happen to … eh Lianne Weber.”
River exhales, small shoulders relaxing a little. “Her devil card.”
Mel freezes for a second, then smiles faintly. “Yeah,” she says softly. “They’re both a little cursed, huh?”
“I blame the upbringing,” the kid nods solemnly. “But it’s the good kind of cursed.”
She wiggles her head and nestles into Haley’s shoulder, pulling the blanket tight.