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.”
“I bet he did,” I said.
I walked out of the room. The seven brothers stopped talking as I approached. Victor looked at me with cold, dead eyes.
“Tragedy,” Victor said flatly. “But we will take care of her. Hunter, you have done your duty. You can go back to your base. We have the best doctors money can buy.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
“She’s my daughter!” Victor snapped, his voice rising. “And you are just a husband who is never there. You weren’t there to protect her. I’m handling this.”
I stepped close to him. I was three inches taller than him and carried fifty pounds more muscle than his security guards.
“That’s the problem, Victor,” I whispered so only he could hear. “You’re handling it too well. You don’t look sad. You look inconvenienced.”
Victor’s eye twitched. I looked at the brothers. Seven strong, capable men, yet not a single scratch on any of them. But I noticed something else. Mason. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the floor. His hands were shaking. He was holding a coffee cup, and the liquid inside was rippling.
“A robbery,” I said loud enough for all of them to hear. “That’s the story. Some junkie broke in and hit her. How many times?”
I looked at the medical chart I had swiped from the end of the bed.
“Thirty-one times,” I read aloud. “Thirty-one strikes with a blunt object. Probably a hammer.” I looked at Grant, then Ian, then Dominic. “A robber hits once to knock you down. Twice to keep you down. Thirty-one times…” I shook my head. “Thirty-one times is personal. Thirty-one times is hate.”
“Watch your mouth,” Dominic warned, stepping forward again.
“I’m going to find who did this,” I said, looking directly at Victor. “And when I do, I’m not going to call the police. I’m going to do what I was trained to do.”
I turned my back on them and walked toward the exit. I needed air, but more than that, I needed to get back to the house. The detective said it was a robbery, but my gut—the same instinct that kept me alive in the mountains of Afghanistan—told me the enemy wasn’t some stranger in the dark.
The enemy was standing in the waiting room. And they had made one fatal mistake.
They didn’t kill her. And they didn’t kill me.
—————-
The drive back to the house felt like a funeral procession of one. The streetlights flickered past my windshield like strobes, counting down the seconds until I had to face the reality of what happened in my own dining room.
