Defiance Falls War: Defiance Falls Book 3

by Dean, Ali

  Hazel

  I kept expecting, hoping, Cruz would pop into one of my classes or appear around the corner in the hallway. He didn’t. He didn’t show for soccer practice either, and I barely made it through my own. My body was numb, moving on autopilot, when I met the guys in the parking lot. It was a hot and humid afternoon but the blood in my veins was ice cold. Everything inside me felt frozen. Even my throat was like an icicle. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t swallow, could hardly breathe.

  Emmett opened his arms and stepped forward for a hug but I shook my head. Hell no. I wouldn’t take his warmth and comfort. Not right now. That would mean accepting that something terrible had happened to Cruz, and I refused to do that.

  “Fuck!” Bodhi shouted, threatening to shake me loose from my self-imposed coma. He kicked the tire of Spike’s Hummer. Bodhi’s fists clenched, and he turned to pace, looking for something else to unleash his anger on. Emmett continued standing on the sidewalk, waiting or hoping for that hug from someone, anyone. I glanced at Moody, wanting to beg for any intel he had about Cruz’s whereabouts. Moody wouldn’t make eye contact with me though, and that was my answer.

  None of us had heard a word.

  “Come on,” Spike called, “get in.” We moved like zombies at his order. Dad had dropped me off that morning and I’d spoken to him three times already on the phone since then. He was looking for Cruz while fielding calls from media and law enforcement.

  Of course Dad had wanted to stay anonymous for as long as possible, but he’d known that despite his hacking abilities, that would be impossible. The media needed a valid source to report the information, and even with the roadmap they’d been given, law enforcement had endless follow-up questions.

  It had been easy to strike a deal that left Dad without any criminal repercussions. They’d been willing to let Dad off the hook for only a tenth of the evidence he had against the Malones. With what he was giving them now, they should really be paying him, bending over backwards to keep him safe. Well, they did offer witness protection, but it was an empty offer and everyone knew it. Dad could do a better job going into hiding and making a new identity for himself than the government could. But he didn’t want that. He’d done all this to be free from the Malone chains, and that would just be another kind of prison.

  Besides, Dad’s role in all of this was too big at this point to make him a direct target of the Malones. Of course it was, I should have known that. Going after him now would be like shooting themselves in the foot. But Cruz? For all the media and law enforcement knew, Cruz Donovan was simply a tragic victim of the Malones’ enterprises. The Malones had no reason to hurt a kid who’d lost his mother to their greed, not at this point, not according to what the rest of the world knew. If he disappeared in the midst of all this, it wouldn’t be a nail in the Malones’ coffin like it would if something happened to Dad. No, it would just be another casualty in the already tragic Donovan-Braven tale.

  A sob tore through the Hummer and when I recognized it as my own, I threw a hand over my mouth.

  “Why him? Why did they do this?” The questions ripped from my throat, burning my insides. Cruz was gone. It was the only explanation. And with my questions, the silent denial we’d been holding onto was wrenched away.

  “We don’t know that,” Emmett said, as he finally pulled me into that hug he needed as much as I did. “Cruz is hurting. He almost lost his dad, and we still don’t know what happened when he saw him at the hospital. Who knows how he’s coping? I’d probably run away from the world too.”

  “Run away? He didn’t run away, Em,” I told him. Emmett didn’t respond, because he knew I was right. We might not know exactly how Cruz would respond to nearly losing his father by the same hand that killed his mother, but it wasn’t to run and hide. He’d fight. Hell, he’d been the one to make the call to bring the Malones down. An idea struck me with this thought and I sat up from Em’s embrace.

  “Saturday afternoon Mitch took Cruz to get his bike from Harvard’s campus,” I said, though we all knew this bit already. “Mitch said he saw him pull out, but they didn’t make plans to meet. Cruz said he wanted to be alone.”

  The guys were silent. We’d gone over this on Sunday. None of us had stayed at the Spot Saturday night and we’d assumed he’d crashed there. The twins stayed there Sunday night though, and there was no sign of him. “None of the Malones were arrested until last night, and only a handful. Do you think he’s going after the other Malones on his own?” Even as I asked the question, I knew I was grasping at straws. There was too much false hope in my voice and my hands shook.

  Cruz was a fighter, but… Emmett filled in the blanks. “Why would he ghost us? He’d answer his damn phone or let us know where he was.”

  “Not necessarily,” Bodhi said from my other side and I leaned toward him, desperate for any theory that didn’t mean the worst possible outcome. “Maybe he wants to do it on his own, doesn’t want Hazel caught up in it.”

  “Or maybe,” Spike said from the driver’s seat, “the dude is hurting bad and wants to be alone.”

  Moody contradicted Spike immediately, shutting down my growing hopes that Cruz was only being an idiot, not dead in a ditch somewhere. “Cruz is too smart for that. Too conscientious of all our feelings, especially Hazel’s, to go off on a solo bender or something.”

  “Guys!” I hated that my voice was shrill, but it had its effect. “None of us can predict how he’d react. We know him, but none of us knows how he must be feeling.” My tone went from shrieky to soft in two sentences. I was swaying between panic and determination to calm the hell down and focus. “He’d been trying to ignore what was happening to his dad, and then I asked him to spend time with him.” I didn’t know what I was saying, I just knew that I had to say it. We had to try to get in Cruz’s head. We couldn’t assume the worst before we even had an answer. We had to try to be in his shoes, even if it was painful. And if he came back, when he came back, we could help him better. “Cruz wasn’t in denial, like you said, Moody, he’s too smart, too compassionate.”

  Moody nodded from the passenger seat. “No, not denial. But he had compartmentalized his dad’s diagnosis in his head to something he would address later, deal with later, because he couldn’t handle it. It was too much pain, especially when he was grieving you, Hazel. He’s been stronger since you came back.”

  I heard Emmett suck in a sharp breath beside me and my spine went stiff. It was hard to hear that, even as it gave me a strange comfort.

  “Okay,” Spike cut in. “So he started spending more time with his dad the past few weeks, what does that mean about where he might have gone or what the hell he’s doing right now?”

  “It means,” Moody said, “that the compartment he’d kept his dad in was open, and he was dealing with it. He was starting to adjust, to grieve the parts of his dad he was losing, but then it all went up in smoke.” Moody cringed. “Sorry, bad word choice. Maybe a better analogy is this – he had this wound wrapped up tight but eventually it couldn’t heal that way. He unwrapped it, then just as it was starting to heal, the Malones poured gasoline on it.”

  Silence. I think we were all contemplating whether to smack Moody in the back of the head for reducing Cruz’s turmoil to such a gross analogy or if we were running with it and what it meant. I couldn’t regret unwrapping the wound though, so to speak, because it was only getting worse, festering like that. Yeah, okay, so it was a good analogy.

  Bodhi muttered beside me, just loud enough for all of us to hear, “So what does a guy do when gasoline’s poured on an open wound?”

  My chest squeezed. Maybe Emmett had been right. Maybe he had run. What else could he do? We were turning onto the road to the Spot when Moody’s phone ringing broke the silence and of course, my heart immediately leapt with hope. Hope that it was a lead on Cruz’s whereabouts. “It’s my mom,” Moody mumbled before answering. My hope died down.

  “Hey Mom,” he said.

  I heard her faintly, but not
the words she was saying. It felt like she was speaking for ages before Moody asked, “Which hospital?”

  I slid to the front of my seat and gripped his shoulder. His eyes met mine, but they gave me no answers.

  “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” He ended the call and told Spike to turn around. “Mass General.”

  “Cruz?” I choked out his name, relief and fear flooding me all at once.

  Moody’s mouth flattened into a hard line. “No. Neil Malone.” Air hissed out of me as my insides twisted, uncertain how to feel at this news.

  “Someone beat the crap out of him. His jaw’s wired shut and he had internal bleeding,” Moody added.

  “Did he say who?” Spike asked.

  “No. He hasn’t said anything except to ask for his lawyer. I assume he had to write that out since he can’t open his mouth.”

  I blinked a few times at this. If he was beaten half to death, why would he be requesting a lawyer? My stomach churned and I shivered. Bodhi seemed incapable of uttering anything except curse words today so it came as no surprise when he bit out, “Shit. Fucking Cruz.”

  My mind jumped to weeks earlier, when I’d watched Cruz attack Kai on the dock at the Lake. But that had been different, hadn’t it? No, that had come from a place inside Cruz that he’d tried to bury, anger that was justified but was unleashed on the wrong person, at the wrong time.

  My voice shook but I forced myself to ask Bodhi, and the rest of the car, “What do you think happened?”

  No one answered right away. Finally, Bodhi spoke, but it wasn’t a response to my question, not really. “I think we got our answer about what happens when gasoline’s dumped on an open wound.”

  Chapter Three

  Hazel

  I wasn’t thinking rationally, that was for sure, because I found myself confused at first when they wouldn’t let us in to see Neil Malone. After nearly two days waiting for any lead on Cruz’s whereabouts, everything happened in fast forward once we got that call. Moody’s mom didn’t actually work at the ER near Harvard’s campus, but the gossip about Neil Malone had spread to the Defiance Falls Hospital by the time she arrived for her shift. Moody called Dad, and I listened as they discussed searching all surrounding emergency rooms for an unidentified patient. I understood why they were doing this, but it didn’t really hit me until we got to the waiting room where Neil was and found half of his hockey team sitting there. They watched us with an odd mixture of expressions on their faces – anger, conceit, fear, worry, and the one that scared me the most, regret.

  My eyes swept the room for Blake or Easton, but I didn’t see any familiar faces. No one would make eye contact with me, but they didn’t manage to have any problem standing up to face off against my cousins, Spike, and Moody. When they did, I had to grip the back of a chair as my knees buckled.

  They had some scrapes on their faces that I’d been able to chalk up to… well, anything else. But then I noticed the red knuckles and I knew. I knew exactly what Cruz had done.

  “Where is he?” Spike asked.

  A couple of the guys glanced at each other before one of them answered, “Who? Three of our guys are in the hospital.”

  My grip on the chair tightened.

  Spike showed no reaction though and I was glad he’d taken on the role of spokesperson in Cruz’s absence. He’d always been the most menacing of the group.

  Instead of asking for clarification on which three guys were in the hospital, Spike took one long stride until he was face to face with the guy who answered. “That’s not what I asked. Don’t play games. Where is Cruz?”

  The guy tried to hold Spike’s glare but he couldn’t pull it off. His eyes darted away. “How would we know? He doesn’t even go to Harvard yet.”

  If I hadn’t known it already, I would’ve detected it in that response, in the way his eyes flashed down in guilt. This group right here in the waiting room, they’d done something to Cruz. I sensed Bodhi shifting beside me but before the others could make a move to get answers, two police officers were stepping into the circle.

  “All right, everyone back up,” one of the officers said as he inserted himself into the small gap between Spike and the hockey player. My phone buzzed and as I reached into my back pocket to pull it out I noticed Spike retreating. We didn’t need the police asking questions about who we were or why we were here. I backed up toward the automatic doors and admired how quickly the twins and Moody made themselves scarce. Within a minute we were all outside the ER, and I held up my phone up in triumph.

  “Cambridge Hospital,” I told them. “Dad thinks he found him.” I tried not to wonder why it was a text instead of a phone call, but in the short drive to another nearby hospital, my mind spun out of control. Dad didn’t want me asking questions, didn’t want to explain what he had discovered. There were ten guys in that waiting room. Had it been ten on one? Why would they be there risking being associated with Neil Malone after everything came out?

  “Wait. I thought Neil was supposed to get arrested in this first round with Seamus?” I asked the car.

  “He was,” Moody answered. “That’s probably why he asked for a lawyer. And why the cops are there.”

  My chest burned with unanswered questions, reminding me of the way I felt weeks ago, before I knew about any of this. The truth was brutal, and it sure as hell didn’t give me the peace I wanted.

  “If those guys got to Cruz – you know, the guys in the waiting room – why are they there? Wouldn’t you think they’d want to lie low?”

  I tried to distract myself with all the other questions so that the fear of finding Cruz didn’t suffocate me. Was it really him at this hospital? And if it was, it couldn’t mean anything good, besides that he was still alive. Maybe. Probably.

  “Those guys?” Bodhi asked, dismissing them at the same time. “They’re not the brightest bulbs. Sure, they managed to get into Harvard but they’ve been hit in the head one too many times.”

  “It’s not that,” Moody said. “Those guys probably still think their asses are covered by Neil and Keegan no matter what shit they pull.”

  “But they know the cops are there for a reason. They know the Malones are about to lose all their power.”

  “It’ll take a while for people to accept that.”

  “Like I said,” Bodhi added, “not the brightest bulbs. They think being at the Malones’ beck and call will get them free tickets in life, but those days are over.”

  When we pulled up to the other hospital I practically knocked Emmett out of his seat trying to get out of the Hummer. Rushing inside, it wasn’t until I was at the reception desk that I realized I didn’t know what I was supposed to say in order to see Cruz. Moody stepped in right as I was about to word vomit on the lady for asking how she could help me.

  “We’re looking for our friend. He’s eighteen years old and we haven’t heard from him in two days. We heard a rumor he might have been jumped and decided to check all the ERs around.”

  The woman’s eyes darted between us before moving behind where the others were standing. “All right, give me a minute.” She disappeared and came back with another woman, who asked us for photographs of Cruz, and then about his closest living relative. We then had to explain about his father being in the hospital, and finally the woman left to get in touch with Mitch when we provided his contact information.

  We remained standing around the reception desk even after the receptionist pointedly suggested we take a seat in the waiting room. Eventually the receptionist got a call with the verdict: we couldn’t go in to see him until Mitch arrived. We still hadn’t even received confirmation that it was Cruz in there. I was certain it was him though, it had to be.

  “Does he know we’re here? Can he give permission for us to see him? He’s eighteen.”

  “I’m sorry. You’ll need to have a seat until his grandfather arrives.”

  I glanced at the guys, not wanting to back down but not sure barging through the door and looking for Cruz wo
uld get me anywhere either.

  “Come on,” Emmett said, taking my elbow and steering me to the row of chairs. My blood ran cold again, like it had after practice earlier. Was that only an hour or so ago? It could have been years. This time, he was within our reach. It didn’t feel like it though.

  “Why hasn’t he told anyone his name?” I asked, and it came out as a whisper. We were the only ones in the waiting room on a Monday evening, but my voice wasn’t working.

  “Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe they had to do surgery and knocked him out. Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.” Emmett stroked my hair as he offered explanations that didn’t make me feel any better.

  Maybe he was dead. No, he couldn’t be. They didn’t keep dead people in hospitals. Maybe they did if they couldn’t identify the person?

  “He’s okay, Haze,” Bodhi reassured me. Coming from him, it didn’t seem patronizing either.

  “How do you know, Bodhi?”

  “I just know it. He’s Cruz Donovan.”

  Moody glanced up from his phone. “The three hockey guys they were referring to at the ER are Keegan, Neil, and Easton. They were checked in within hours of each other early Sunday morning or late Saturday night. I’m thinking our boy did a number on them before the rest of the team got to him.”

  “Not helping, Moody,” Emmett scolded.

  “I’m just reiterating what Bodhi said. Cruz is a badass. He took out three college varsity players. Hopefully smart enough to take them on one by one.”

  “Smart? That was anything but smart,” Spike said with a sneer. “What was he thinking? This isn’t how we handle shit. We had a plan with those idiots.”

  “I thought you guys loved fighting,” I argued, because I didn’t know what else to do in this horrible, sterile, overly bright space.

  “Well, yeah,” Spike conceded. “But that’s when it’s for fun. Maybe not fun exactly, but, it’s hard to explain. It’s meant to be fair, number-wise, in those situations. This? This was not the way to handle it.”