20. Chapter 18

Chapter 18

Davina

I woke up to a full-body chill. It wasn't the kind that signified a person was cold. No, this was the type of chill that signaled there was a predator nearby, a fire, or some other catastrophe headed your way.

When my eyes drifted open, it was to see a nurse staring at my daughter with far too much interest. It seemed as though she was memorizing or cataloging her features as the woman slipped closer. Just as she reached for Coral's IV, she hesitated and turned to see me watching her.

I didn't even get to ask what she was doing before she startled and began to backpedal out of the room. It took me aback so much that I immediately reached for the nurse call button on the side of my daughter's crib.

"Can we help you?"

"There was just a nurse in here behaving oddly. Please, send someone in here. Not the nurse who was just here, though. I think she may have been trying to do something to my daughter."

Before I could get another word out an alarm blared over the hospital's announcement system. "Code Pink has been issued. Code Pink."

A nurse ran into the room and shut the door behind her immediately. I noticed a security officer stationed himself outside the door before she made her way over to me. "Someone from security will be here in a moment to take your statement. Can you describe the woman who was just in your room?"

"She had long brown hair, but it looked weird, like maybe it wasn't sitting right on her head. She was about average height for a woman and…" I was frustrated with myself because I couldn't remember much else. "I just woke up and saw her standing there looking at my daughter before she grabbed her IV line. When she noticed I was awake, she ran out of the room."

"Do you remember what she was wearing?"

"Basic blue scrubs. She had a mask on, but it wasn't pulled up on her face, it was just dangling around her neck."

"Okay, that's good." The woman pulled out her cell phone and started talking to someone on the other end of the line. She gave them the description I'd just shot off and then offered a tiny smile to me. "I know you're scared right now, but we have everyone in the hospital looking out for this woman. She was not a nurse, at least not the one assigned to your daughter – as that's me and I was standing at the nurse's station when you hit the call button. We have a code pink up throughout the hospital right now, it's basically like an inhouse Amber Alert system. Even though your daughter wasn't taken, we are having security watch all the exits and the security cameras are all recording. Everyone will have to show ID and explain who they are here to see to access any floors beyond the first floor where emergency is."

"Okay. I still don't understand how some woman pretending to be a nurse could be in here. Why would anyone want to hurt my daughter?"

"I can explain that." I turned to see Tripp coming through the doorway with the security guard following behind him.

"Sir, you can't go in without showing your ID."

"It's okay, he's her father," I called out. The security guard didn't seem happy to be dismissed but still walked back out to stand guard in the hallway once more.

"What happened?"

The nurse and I filled Tripp in on what I woke up to and what the hospital was doing to try to locate the woman. Tripp wasted no time in getting his phone out and shooting off several messages via text. It wasn't until he was done that he asked the nurse to excuse us for a minute, so that we could have a conversation in private.

Tripp explained what he had learned from June's cousin and Scout, who had apparently had the woman under investigation on orders of her President. "So, you knew that she might come here?"

"I didn't think she could gain access to the floor anymore because the nurses caught her once before and chased her off when she attempted to follow us up here. We thought… I thought that we had it handled. Then Scout told me just a bit ago that they didn't have eyes on June and Anna told me that no one in her family had seen or spoken to her cousin for a couple days. Plus, June's father is suddenly on his death bed in this very hospital, and Mack thinks that isn't the coincidence it seems to be." Tripp scraped his hands through his hair and then yanked at his beard in frustration.

"I should have told you all this, but you have so much to worry about already with Coral. I didn't want to burden you with a problem that I brought into the mix."

My anger deflated immediately as I moved closer so that I could wrap my arms around Tripp.

We snuggled into one another for a few minutes before I turned my head up to look into his eyes. "Thank you for trying to give me peace, but I need to know when my daughter might be in danger. If that weird feeling hadn't woken me up, there's no telling what she might have done to my baby girl while I slept there unaware."

"Thank fuck for your feeling, whatever it was, waking you. Maybe it was Coral's angel."

"Maybe it was Kim, looking out for your daughter and making sure she didn't suffer the same fate."

Tripp choked back a sob at that. "Fuck, Vina." The words were whispered into my hair as he pulled me closer. "That's just what she'd do, too." He paused a minute and then cocked his head to the side. "Wait, why did you say that?"

"Say what?"

"The bit about Kim saving Coral from the same fate."

"I don't know. It was part of what woke me up. That feeling like, ‘It's happening again.'"

Tripp pulled me into his arms and held me tightly as he explained the part he had left out earlier, that the new theory everyone had was that June was responsible for the fire that killed his wife.

"We'll get justice for her."

"We're not one hundred percent certain it was June," he admitted.

"After seeing that woman, and the way she looked at our daughter, I have no doubt about it. She was going to take our baby from us. Anyone who could do that to a child could easily do that to a woman she thought stole her life out from under her."

"Fuck," Tripp hissed again. "Kim called me the day she died and told me she had a weird feeling. She was worried about me; afraid I'd been harmed or something. All along, Kim was probably feeling what was coming for her that day. I should have gone home to her when she told me she felt like something was off. If I had, maybe I could have saved her."

"Tripp," I whispered and then leaned in and gently pulled his face down toward me. My hands rested on his bearded cheeks as I did so and I stroked over them gently, to ease the tension built in his shoulders. "You couldn't have known. I don't think anyone would ever expect for a person to behave the way your ex-girlfriend has. It's something straight out of Hollywood, not the reality most of us face."

"That's no excuse. My wife called me because she felt off and needed me to be there for her, to offer comfort and I stayed at work while she was murdered by someone that did it because of me."

"And none of that is your fault. Not even the part where you didn't go home. It wasn't something you normally would have done, right?" He shook his head slightly. "Kim never asked you to come home, did she?"

"No."

"Okay then. You didn't let her down because you couldn't have known. That is what makes hindsight a bitch. Please, stop torturing yourself about what might have been because it isn't possible to go back and change anything. You need to pull your focus back to the present. Your children are your number one priority."

"The club just went on lockdown today."

"Well, that's good. Star and Kip will be at the clubhouse, so you won't have to worry about them."

"I will be here with you and Coral. If, for some reason, I can't be here with you, one of my trusted brothers will be in this room and another outside that door until that bitch is caught."

There was a quick knock on the door then and the nurse opened up without waiting for us to tell her she could. "Sorry for the intrusion, but I wanted to give you an update. It seems that a nurse named Anna was the one whose badge was scanned into one of the med drawers. She isn't a nurse on this wing."

"It wasn't her," Tripp stated.

"I'm sorry, how do you know that?"

"I was talking to her about the same time that the fake nurse must have been in this room. Anna is the cousin of the woman whose photo has been passed around the floor. Her cousin June might have gained access to Anna's badge. Go find her. She works on the second floor, but her uncle is also a patient in the critical care unit on the fourth floor, so she might be there visiting. Find out if she's missing her badge."

"I will go let security know what you had to say. Could you tell me the exact time, and where in the hospital, you saw Anna? It might be helpful in tracing her steps forward and back to see where she might have come into contact with this other woman, or where her badge went missing."

"Sure, it was about twenty minutes before I showed up here and down in the hallway just off the cafeteria."

No sooner did the nurse leave the room than Tripp was on the phone. He called Scout and told her to work her magic and snag the hospital's security footage before anyone else could fuck with it. I had to admire my man. Shit. He wasn't really my man. Maybe in another reality. Tripp was just being nice to me because of the problems with our daughter and now June. He had vowed to take care of me, but I wasn't delusional enough to think it meant he wanted to be with me too. He had his reasons for not wanting more than one night, despite whatever crush he claimed to have on me before. Those reasons hadn't gone away.