Adrien's POV
The buzzing phone. The unknown caller. In the deafening silence, it was a thread in the dark, the only one he had, and his hand, which had never wavered holding a rifle on a unstable rooftop, trembled as he picked up the shattered device. Focus. Find the thread. Pull. It's all you have. The cracked glass felt like a portent, a warning of broken things. He hit 'call back' and raised it to his ear, his own breathing suddenly a roaring, ragged thing in the quiet.
"Evergreen Falls General Hospital, Emergency Department."
Two words. Hospital. Emergency. The world didn't spin or go black. It did the opposite. It sharpened, hardened, telescoped down into a single, laser-focused point of light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. Alive. They call for the living. They don't call you down to identify the dead. Not like this. It was a brutal, clinical comfort, the only kind he knew how to process. A status report: Civilian, one, location unknown, condition critical but present.
"My daughter. Harper Moore. This is her phone." His voice was flat, a field radio transmission. He gave the facts. Name. Relation. He withheld the panic, the rage, the thousand questions. Data first.
"Mr. Moore. Yes. We've been trying to reach the family. You need to come to the hospital. Immediately." The woman's voice was professional, but the urgency underneath was a live wire.
"What is her condition? Is she conscious?" He demanded, the soldier needing parameters, a sitrep. What am I walking into?
"Sir," the voice said, firm and final, leaving no room for debate. "You need to come now." The line went dead with a definitive click.
Now. Go. Move. The words were a detonation in his head. His body was a weapon system engaging, protocols overriding emotion. He was out the door, leaving it gaping open to the cold. Nothing inside mattered now except the clue that had led him here. The house was a crime scene, and he was contaminating it, but the victim wasn't here. The victim was the mission.
The truck door slammed with a sound like a gunshot. The engine roared, a mechanical snarl that echoed the one building in his chest. He reversed so fast the tires screamed, spitting gravel against the siding of his own home. He didn't look back in the rearview mirror. He saw a battlefield he needed to retreat from, a position that had been compromised. He needed higher ground. He needed intel. The hospital was the next objective.
Downtown was a clogged artery, a celebration of survival he no longer felt part of. The Veterans Day parade a spectacle of gratitude he'd always found vaguely embarrassing now felt like a sick joke. Floats covered in fluttering crepe paper, a high school band murdering a patriotic march, people lining the sidewalks with steaming cups and cheerful, oblivious faces. He was trapped in a sea of idling cars, a logjam of normalcy. His knuckles were bone-white on the steering wheel, his jaw clenched so tight a muscle ticked in his cheek. They're celebrating coming home. They're cheering for men who made it back. While my home is… what? What is it now? A shell? A trap?
His eyes, on automatic scan, swept the crowd. Not for pleasure, but for threat assessment, for clues. Teenage boys in letterman jackets laughed on a curb, shoving each other. His gaze locked onto them. A hot, primitive rage, acid-bright and terrifying, surged up from that locked box in his soul. Was it you? Do you know something? Did you see her? Did you hurt her? His foot itched to slam the gas, to plow through the barrier and grab one, to shake the truth out of them. He mastered it, forced it down, turned the key in the mental lock. Intel first. Emotion later. Emotion gets you dead. Emotion gets the mission compromised.
With a snarl that tore from a place deeper than his throat, he yanked the steering wheel hard right. The truck mounted the curb with a jolting thump, bouncing over it and into a litter-strewn service alley. Trash cans clattered and spun in his wake. A dumpster loomed; he swerved around it with inches to spare. Faster. Clear the obstacle. Take the unconventional route. The alley dumped him onto a side street, clear of the parade. He stomped on the accelerator, the truck leaping forward.
The hospital rose before him, a brick and glass fortress of pain and whispered news. It stood on a hill, overlooking the town like a watchtower. He didn't look for parking. He didn't follow the rules. He abandoned the truck directly in front of the Emergency Department's sliding doors, a blatant violation. Let them tow it. Let them arrest him. Nothing mattered but the distance between him and that building.
He hit the automatic doors at a run, and they whisked open too slowly, as if trying to delay the inevitable. The bright, artificial light of the lobby was a shock after the gray day. The smell hit him next antiseptic, ammonia, overlying something sweet and sickly, like decay masked with candy. It was the smell of broken bodies, a smell he knew intimately, but it had no place here, not in his hometown, not connected to Harper.
A woman behind the circular desk looked up, her mouth already forming a polite, institutional question. He talked over her, his voice cutting through the low hum of the waiting room.
"Harper Moore. My daughter. Where is she?"
She blinked, taken aback by his intensity, by the dust and cold still clinging to him. She typed on her keyboard. Her face changed as she read the screen. The professional mask softened around the eyes, her brows knitting with a practiced sympathy. Pity. That's the look. The 'I'm so sorry for your loss' look, before any words are spoken. His heart dropped into his stomach.
"ICU," she said, her voice gentler now. "Third floor, sir. You can take the elevators just around the"
He was already past her, a force moving down the hallway. The elevators were to his left closed boxes, traps where time stretched and panic could bloom. To his right was the stairwell door, a solid metal rectangle. He hit the bar with the heel of his hand and plunged into the concrete shaft.
The stairwell was cold, echoey. His boots pounded a frantic, rising rhythm on the metal steps, a drumbeat of dread. One flight. Two. Three. Each landing was a marker, a countdown to a reality he wasn't ready for. ICU. Intensive Care Unit. The terms were professional, sterile, designed to distance. They did nothing to describe the hurricane of fear tearing through his chest, stripping away the soldier and leaving only the raw, terrified father.
He burst through the door onto the third floor. The quiet here was profound, heavy, broken only by the distant, persistent beep… beep… beep of machinery. It was the sound of life hanging by a thread. A nurse at a central station, surrounded by glowing monitors, took one look at his face the wild eyes, the set jaw, the aura of controlled violence and didn't ask a thing. She simply pointed a finger, silently, down a hall to the left.
Room 312. The number was on a placard. He pushed the door open. The world shrunk, collapsed, until it contained only the bed in the center of the small, dim room.
There she was.
All the breath left his body in a silent rush. His Harper. His vibrant, argumentative, eye-rolling, science-loving, too-smart-for-her-own-good girl. Reduced to this. A small, pale form under a maze of tubes and wires, dwarfed by the mechanical landscape of the bed. An ugly plastic tube was taped to her mouth, connected to a machine that breathed for her with a rhythmic, monstrous hiss-thump… hiss-thump. It was the loudest sound in the universe, marking time in a world where her time had almost stopped.
A man in a white coat turned from the window, where he'd been staring out at the festive town as if looking at another planet. He had a kind, tired face, but his eyes were careful, guarded. "Mr. Moore. I'm Dr. Evans." He approached, not with a hand extended, but with his hands clasped in front of him, a defensive posture. "She was brought in early this morning. She took a very bad fall. Fainted, we believe, at home. Tumbled down a full flight of stairs."
Adrien heard the words, the smooth, practiced explanation, but his brain had already disconnected from language and was processing the raw visual data. Harper's face. A map of violence was written there in stark, brutal colors. A deep purple bruise, blooming like a rotten flower around her left eye, the lid swollen completely shut. An angry, stitched cut on her swollen lip. Abrasions on her cheekbone and forehead. His mind, trained in field medicine, trained to assess wounds in seconds and determine weapon type, angle of attack, and severity, rejected the story with the cold certainty of a computer rejecting faulty data. Pattern of contusions inconsistent with a linear, tumbling fall down stairs. Impact points are focal, acute, suggesting multiple, angled strikes from a hard, rounded object knuckles. Abrasions on forearms consistent with defensive positioning. This is not a fall. This is an assault.
"Those are fist marks," he stated. His voice was flat, detached, devoid of the volcanic rage that was now bubbling beneath the frozen surface of his control. It was a field report. Enemy contact confirmed. Hostile engagement.
Dr. Evans's gaze flickered away, from Adrien's piercing stare to the steady blip of the heart monitor, to the chart in his hands. Anywhere but the truth on the girl's face or in the father's eyes. He adjusted his glasses, a nervous, repetitive tic. "Blunt force trauma from stairs… it can often appear quite severe. The angles, the banister… The police have been informed and are satisfied. It's a tragic, tragic accident."
The police have been informed and are satisfied. The phrase landed not as reassurance, but as a bureaucratic stamp, a door being closed. Case filed. Narrative set. Move along.
Adrien moved past him, a ship cutting through still water. He went to the bedside. He didn't touch the tubes, the wires, the things holding her to this world. He gently, so gently it felt like he was handling a ghost, took Harper's limp hand in his. It was cool, the skin waxy. He leaned close, his lips near her un-swollen ear, his voice dropping to a whisper meant only for her, a secret in the room of machines.
"I'm here, baby," he breathed, the words a vow that solidified in the very core of his soul. "Daddy's here. I see it. I see what they did to you." He swallowed hard, the lump in his throat like a stone. "Now I'm going to find them. I promise."
The doctor offered a comforting, official lie. The system had already written its report, closed its file. But as Adrien stared at the undeniable evidence written on his daughter's broken face, a new mission, dark, absolute, and personal, ignited within him with the cold blue flame of a pilot light. Find the truth. And burn down every single lie that tried to cover it.