Chapter 10 - Rose In Room 9Her name was not Rose Hart.
Not anymore.
Agent Cross found her under the name Rosalie Marsh.
Dr. Evelyn Marsh’s adopted daughter.
The room went quiet when Cross said it.
Adrian swore softly.
I stared at the federal agent like language had stopped working.
“Dr. Marsh?”
Cross nodded. “She’s been protecting her for fifteen years.”
My body went cold.
The doctor who cleaned my wounds knew my sister.
The doctor who warned me about Adrian knew my father.
Everyone knew pieces of my life except me.
I wanted to scream.
Instead, I asked, “Where is she?”
Agent Cross hesitated.
Adrian answered.
“Mercer will go for her next.”
That was how I found myself racing toward Dr. Marsh’s house with cracked ribs, a broken heart, and a man I no longer trusted behind the wheel.
We arrived too late.
The front door stood open.
The exam room was overturned.
A lamp lay shattered in the hallway.
Dr. Marsh was alive, sitting on the kitchen floor with blood on her forehead and a pistol in her lap.
Mara knelt beside her.
“Where’s Rose?” I asked.
Dr. Marsh looked up at me.
Her eyes filled.
“I’m sorry.”
Those two words were starting to make me sick.
Adrian crouched near the broken doorframe. “How many?”
“Three,” Dr. Marsh said. “Mercer wasn’t with them. They knew exactly where to look.”
“Where would they take her?”
Dr. Marsh closed her eyes.
“The Riverside Motel.”
Room 9.
Of course.
Everything rotten in Bellmore returned to the same place.
The motel looked abandoned when we arrived near dusk.
That meant it was not.
Adrian refused to let me go in at first.
I told him he could either help me rescue my sister or explain to me later why I had to do it alone.
He chose correctly.
Silas cut the power from the rear utility box. Mara, who had ignored everyone and followed us in her own truck, came armed with Dr. Marsh’s old shotgun and the calm fury of a woman who had waited fifteen years for a second chance.
Agent Cross coordinated outside with state police.
No local badges.
No Bellmore uniforms.
Not this time.
We entered through the back of Room 8.
The wall between rooms had old water damage. Silas opened it with a crowbar. Dust filled the air.
Through the gap, I heard crying.
A woman’s voice.
“Please. I don’t know anything.”
My heart stopped.
Rose.
Adrian went first.
Then Silas.
Then me.
Room 9 smelled like mold, cigarettes, and gasoline.
Rose Marsh sat tied to a chair near the bed. She was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, with my father’s eyes and my mouth. Her hair was dark and tangled. A bruise marked her cheek.
For one second, we stared at each other like mirrors do when they first learn to hurt.
Then a man stepped from the bathroom with a gun.
Deputy Briggs.
He looked awful.
Desperate men usually did.
“I’ll shoot her,” he said.
Adrian stopped moving.
So did Silas.
Mara raised her shotgun.
Briggs pressed the gun to Rose’s head.
I felt Adrian’s hand near my arm.
“Lena,” he warned quietly.
But I was done being warned.
I stepped forward.
Briggs’s eyes widened. “Stop.”
“No.”
“I said stop.”
“You said a lot of things in the diner too.”
His hand shook.
Good.
I took another step.
“You’re not Mercer,” I said. “You’re not even Jesse. You’re a man holding a gun because without it nobody listens to you.”
His face flushed.
“Shut up.”
“You don’t want to shoot her. If you did, you would have done it already.”
Rose stared at me with terrified eyes.
I kept mine on Briggs.
“Mercer is gone, Nolan. He’s running. Judge Price is running. Jesse is talking. Caleb is alive. The ledger is with the feds. You’re holding the only thing left that makes you useful, and the second Mercer doesn’t need you, he’ll bury you beside every other idiot who believed him.”
Briggs swallowed.
Outside, sirens wailed.
Not close enough.
Briggs looked toward the window.
That was all Adrian needed.
He moved like lightning.
The gun fired into the ceiling.
Mara pulled me back.
Silas took Briggs down before he could fire again.
Rose screamed.
Adrian kicked the gun under the bed, then turned to me.
I was already at Rose’s side.
My hands shook so badly I could barely untie her.
“I’m Lena,” I said.
Her breath hitched.
“I know.”
I froze.
She cried harder.
“Evelyn told me not to find you. She said it wasn’t safe.”
My throat closed.
“You knew about me?”
Rose nodded.
“All my life.”
That should have hurt.
It did hurt.
May you like
But when the ropes came loose, Rose fell forward into my arms like she had been waiting years to do it.
And I held my sister for the first time in a motel room where our father’s secrets had nearly destroyed us both.
