Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 340

Chapter 340

The ambulance had not fully stopped when Lucia’s feet hit the ground.

The paramedics were shouting things at each other in the compressed language of people who needed information to move fast, and the hospital doors were already opening with staff coming out to meet them, and Lucas was on the stretcher between all of it with the oxygen mask on his face and his eyes closed and his jacket darkened in the places it had absorbed what the road had given him.

Lucia had his hand.

She ran beside the stretcher and kept his hand in both of hers and talked to him, not loud enough for anyone else to properly hear, just close enough to his ear that if he could hear anything it would be her voice.

Alexander ran on the other side.

The stretcher moved fast through the corridor and Lucia kept up with it, kept his hand, kept talking, until the emergency room doors came and the nurse stepped in front of her.

“Ma’am.”

Lucia tried to go around her.

Another nurse appeared on the other side.

Ma’am, you can’t go further.”

“That is my son.” Lucia said. Her voice had a quality in it that she had not heard from herself before. “He is sixteen years old and he is scared and he needs to know I’m there. Please.”

“We’ll take care of him.”

“He needs to hear me.”

The stretcher was through the doors.

The doors closed.

The light above them turned red.

Lucia looked at the closed doors.

She looked at the red light above them.

Her legs stopped doing what legs were supposed to do.

Alexander caught her before she reached the floor. Both arms, from behind, and he held her upright and she could feel that his grip was too tight but she understood why because he was holding himself upright the same way, by holding her.

“He’s fighting,” Alexander said, against her hair. “That’s what Lucas does. He fights.”

She pressed both hands over her face.

She thought about the road.

The blood on the road.

She thought about his hand cold in Monica’s hands.

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She thought about his face when he came downstairs to tell them not to let her win. His voice breaking once and then recovering.

“There was so much blood,” she said.

Alexander closed his eyes behind her.

He thought about a sixteen–year–old boy who had walked into a kitchen and looked at him and said Dad didn’t do this, with a certainty that adults twice his age had failed to maintain. He thought about that same boy sitting beside him on a porch at night with a glass of water he had not asked for, saying I believe you.

His voice came out steadier than it had any right to.

“He’s our son,” he said. “He’s coming back to us.”

The sound of running feet.

Ria came through the entrance first with Lena immediately behind. Monica was third, and the moment she saw Lucia she crossed the remaining distance and put her arms around her mother the way she had not held anyone since she was much younger, with everything she had.

“Mum,” she said. Just that.

Lucia held her.

She did not say it was alright. She held her daughter and stroked her hair and Monica cried against her in the specific way of someone who had been holding something since the moment she saw him on the road and was only now letting it out.

Ria went to Alexander.

She put her arms around him and he hugged her back, and Ria who managed everything, who had been the steady one since she was old enough to understand that someone needed to be, pressed her face against her father’s shoulder and did not say anything.

Lena stood slightly apart.

She was not crying yet. She had the look of someone who had decided to use the grief for something other than tears and had not yet found what that something was.

Monica started again.

“If I hadn’t gone after Ruth alone,” she said. “If I had waited. If I had gone to Lucas first and we had done it together then he wouldn’t have-”

“Monica.” Ria said.

Monica looked at her.

“The person who sent that vehicle knew where Lucas would be,” Ria said. “This was arranged before you sent that message. Someone was already watching and waiting for him to step outside.” She held Monica’s eyes. “You didn’t put Lucas in danger. They did. Do you understand that?”

Monica pressed her mouth together.

Alexander crouched in front of her.

He waited until she looked at him.

“Your brother left that house to protect you,” he said. “That’s what he chose to do. You didn’t choose it for him and you

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couldn’t have stopped him if you’d tried.” He held her face with both hands, carefully. “None of this belongs to you.”

Monica’s chin was shaking.

She nodded.

Alexander stood.

He was already on his phone.

He called the head of security and when the call connected his voice was the voice he used in negotiations where the outcome was not something he was willing to leave to chance.

“Lock down the entire estate,” he said. “Every camera inside. Every camera outside. I want street footage and traffic footage from every camera within a quarter–mile radius of the front gate. Find every witness. Check every vehicle registration against the footage.” He paused. “Find that driver. Find the vehicle. Find whoever gave the instruction.”

He listened for a moment.

“I don’t care how long it takes,” he said. “I don’t care what it costs. Whoever touched my son will be found.”

He ended the call.

The waiting area was quiet.

Lucia was looking at the emergency room doors.

She turned slowly toward Alexander.

“Put someone on Ruth,” she said.

The room heard it.

Alexander looked at her.

“You think she’s involved,” he said.

“I don’t have proof,” she said. “I know I don’t have proof. But I have watched this family get dismantled since the day she walked through our door. Every lie built carefully. Every piece of evidence constructed precisely. Every argument designed to damage us at the exact points that would hurt us most.” She looked at the closed doors. “And now my son is in there.”

Her voice was not loud. It was very low and very controlled and it carried everything that was behind it.

“She’s watched,” Alexander said. It was not a question. It was a decision.

Ria exchanged a look with Lena. Then with Monica. The look of people who had already known something and were watching someone they loved arrive at it from a different direction.

They said nothing.

Lucia pulled all three girls toward her.

One arm around Monica and one reaching for Ria, and Lena came into the space that was left, and the four of them held onto each other in the institutional waiting area with its plastic chairs and its sanitized smell and its red light above the closed door.

Alexander put his arms around all of them.

They stood.

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They prayed in the way people prayed without words when words were not available but the need was.

68 voucher

Lucia found the chapel by following the small sign at the end of the second corridor.

It was a small room. Six rows of wooden pews. A crucifix on the white wall at the front. Two candles on a small table beneath it. The light was low and still in the way of places specifically designed to hold quiet.

She went in.

She knelt.

She held her own hands in her lap and looked at the crucifix and could not speak for a long moment, not because she had nothing to say but because the amount she had to say was too large for any of it to come out first.

Then it came.

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t take him.”

The candles moved slightly.

“Take me instead.” Her hands were shaking against each other. “Take anything else. Take whatever you need. Just let him

live.”

She pressed her forehead against the back of the pew in front of her.

“You already took Marco,” she said. Her voice broke completely on his name and she let it. “My children already lost their father. They have already lived through more than children should live through. Please. She could not keep herself steady and she stopped trying to. “Don’t take their brother. Don’t make me bury my child. I cannot do it. I know people say they can survive these things but I cannot. Please don’t make me.”

She wept.

The wooden pew was worn smooth in the place where her hands were pressed.

She thought about how many people had knelt in this place with their hands exactly here.

How many had asked for the same thing.

She did not know how long she had been there when the warmth arrived beside her.

Monica had come in.

She had heard enough from the doorway.

She knelt beside Lucia and put her arms around her mother’s shoulders and Lucia held her and they stayed in the candlelight and cried together in the specific way of people who were afraid of the same thing and were not going to be afraid of it alone.

“He’s coming back,” Monica said.

Her voice was not certain. It was a choice. The choice to believe something in the absence of certainty because the alternative was worse.

“He has to, Lucia said.

She held Monica tighter.

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“Our family isn’t complete without him.”

The chapel was quiet.

The candles burned.

The crucifix stood against the white wall unchanged and without answer, the way things that held everything stood: present, and silent, and carrying whatever was brought to them.

The door opened.

A woman in scrubs appeared in the doorway, slightly out of breath, scanning the pews until she found Lucia.

“Mrs. Kane.”

Lucia was on her feet before the second word was fully out.

“The doctor would like to speak with your family,” the woman said.

Lucia’s breath did not move.

Monica took her hand.

Alexander appeared in the doorway behind the nurse, and behind him Ria and Lena, and they all looked at the nurse’s face for the thing they needed to read there.

Her expression gave them nothing

AD