Terror washed over her and for a moment, a single heartbreaking moment, she mourned everything she was losing.
She was just . . . gone.
Four hours later
Lexington, Kentucky
Angel stood still, silent. Her back rested against the white wall of the hospital waiting room, her gaze focused on the identical wall across from her. She looked as devastated as he felt, Natches reflected, watching her. Her face stark white, her eyes like storm clouds rolling over the mountains. And she just stood there. In the hours since the chopper Doogan had ordered had deposited them on the hospital roof, just minutes after Life Flight had turned Chaya over to the surgeons and they’d been shown to the waiting room, Angel hadn’t moved.
“Mom’s going to be fine,” Bliss said, not for the first time from where she sat next to him, her head on his chest as he held her against him. “I know she is, Dad.”
But he didn’t know it. For once, he couldn’t look into the future and know for a fact that when the sun rose in the morning, she’d be there with him, if nothing else, somewhere in the world.
Breathing. Living.
There was this cold, aching hole in his heart where his wife had resided since the day he’d pulled her from certain death all those years ago. Even after she’d disappeared on him for five cold, lonely years, he’d felt her there, holding him back from the brink of the dark, murderous fury he knew would have eventually ensnared him.
And now, he couldn’t feel her there.
He couldn’t have imagined ever feeling this alone in his life. Even as a boy suffering beneath his father’s abuses, he hadn’t felt so adrift in the world.
He tightened his arms around Bliss, wondering how the hell he could go on if he lost his heart. If death stole her from him, how could he bear it? How could he go on for his daughter and still function?
He didn’t think he could. Not even for the child he knew would depend on him.
“Dad? You need coffee or anything?” Declan asked from the seat next to him.
Declan. He’d been a half-wild kid born of an American serviceman and Afghani mother killed a few years after his birth. Orphaned, he’d been watching half-starved goats when he’d seen a helicopter land in a small Taliban encampment where a pretty blonde had been carried, kicking and screaming, into a stone building. He’d immediately used the radio a soldier at one of the bases had given him and sent out an SOS. Natches had been only a few miles away, and he’d been curious.
“Dad?” Declan’s voice firmed when Natches didn’t answer him.
He shook his head. He didn’t want coffee. He wanted Chaya to hang on, to live. If nothing else, for him.
“You made me live when I lost Beth, and for a while I think I hated you for that. . . .” Her words drifted through his mind, the memory of her brown eyes filled with so much love and with so much loss as they lay together in his bed, wrapped around each other, warming each other.
“I loved you. I love you forever, Chay.” He stared into her eyes, giving her the only thing he had, himself.
A hint of confusion touched her expression. “You whispered that in my dreams.”
“I whispered that into the darkness.” He sighed as he held her to his heart. “No matter where it found me. I sent it to you a thousand times a day. God, Chaya, every breath I took was a thought of you. . . .”
“Mom’s going to be okay,” Bliss repeated. “You’ll see, Dad.”
Her voice was hoarse from her screams that morning. She’d fought Dawg like a wild thing, screaming for her mother, for him. And Natches hadn’t been able to comfort her, just as he hadn’t been able to keep Chaya with him.
“Come on, Sister Mary Bliss.” Declan rose to his feet, his voice gentle as he teased her. “Let’s go get a donut and a soda.”
Declan had a weakness for donuts and sodas. Keeping that boy’s teeth from rotting out had been a full-time job when he first came to them, Natches remembered. Chaya had fussed at the boy, took him to the dentist, and when they’d put braces on him she’d sympathized and fussed some more.
She had made him her son. She had mothered him, loved him, and when he asked her why, she’d told him it was because he was her son. Did she need any other reason?
And that night, she’d cried for the daughter she’d lost.
“I’ll be back, Dad,” Bliss promised, pushing from his hold and getting to her feet.
“Bliss.” He caught her hand when she would have walked away and left him.
“Yeah, Daddy?” Her eyes, so like his, but her strong, independent spirit was so like her mother’s.