Ask Me If I Care (SWAT Generation 2.0 4)

An alarm went off on her phone, breaking the spell.

She sighed and turned it off with a flick of her finger.

“I have to go,” she muttered. “That was my daily ‘take your multivitamin before you go to bed’ alarm.”

“Stay.”

She smiled tiredly. “As much as I wish I could, I can’t. I have to put hair product in my hair before it totally dries. I have to be at work early to deal with bus drop-offs, and tomorrow’s wear camo day at school. I have to stop by the store and go buy a shirt or something.”

I got up and walked into my room, going to my closet and reaching onto the top shelf for a vest that I wore when I was in bootcamp.

Grinning, I pulled it down and walked back into the living room and tossed it at her.

“It’s smaller than I wear now, so it might not swamp you,” I told her as she unfolded it.

She ran her finger over the embroidered pocket that sported ‘Romine’ on it. My last name.

And she smiled.

“I love it, thank you.”

And as I watched her drive away after walking her to her car, I had this irrational urge to call her back. To tell her not to leave. To make her stay.

But I didn’t make her stay.

I didn’t call her back.

And that night, when I got the phone call from my dad like I did, I wished that I had.Chapter 15Just tell her when and where, and Ares will be there twenty minutes late.

-Hayes’ secret thoughts

Hayes

“Hello?” I answered the phone, even though I’d rather do anything but.

“They have a confirmed match to the killings you’ve been looking into. The Highway to Haughton Killer,” my father, Vlad, said.

It took me a few long minutes to understand what he was talking about, and for my brain to come back online from the dead sleep that I’d finally fallen into after hours of thinking about Ares. But when it did, my heart started to fucking pound.

I blinked, then sat up in my bed. “Where? When?”

Trigger, sensing my anxiety, placed his nose against my hand.

Just a touch, but it was enough.

“About an hour ago, now. They found her on the highway at mile marker seventy-one,” my father said. “Same as all the others. Only, this one looked a little more beaten than the rest.”

That made me sick.

“Young girl still?” I asked.

I could practically see my father nodding, even though I wasn’t there.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re notifying her next of kin now.”

I frowned. “They knew who she was already?”

“A missing person’s report blasted social media last night. The girl’s brother came home from a deployment and surprised her at school. It went viral. Then she went missing only hours after he came home. Never came home from the library. The brother went to social media and her picture was everywhere,” Dad explained. “We’re not one-hundred-percent sure as of right now, but it’s close. They’re going to take the brother down to the morgue to confirm.”

I felt sick to my stomach.

The girl that’d gone missing was one of Ares’ students.

“That girl was a mother,” I said softly. “She had a three-month-old. She went to Ares’ school.”

My father gasped. “She was?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “She was.”

There was another gasp, then my father sounded like he’d stood up so fast that his rolling chair hit the wall behind him.

“Honey!”

I pulled the phone away from my ear, surprised and a bit startled to hear my father shout so loudly into the receiver.

“Honey,” Dad said more quietly this time. “Google this first girl. See if she was a teenage mother.”

My heart started to pound as my father’s brain started to work on a different wavelength than mine, but I had a feeling that the wavelength was the correct course.

“Dad…”

My stomach started to fill with acid as it boiled.

“Shh,” he ordered.

I shushed, but I was already up and moving, too.

Going to my computer, I started searching for another name. This one in the middle of the lot, so to speak, to be murdered.

The first article to pop up was a photo of the girl on the highway. Or, at least, a sheet covering a body that was said to be her.

But as I went through the pages, I found a particular link that led to a hospital birth announcement/article in the online paper for Gun Barrel, Texas.

Katrin Dobbs, 17, welcomes 7-pound 1-ounce baby boy. Adoptive parents, Davy and Remina Horne adopt beautiful boy and thank teenage mother for giving them such a perfect gift.

“They were all single mothers,” I breathed. “That’s the connection, isn’t it?”

My dad hummed as he listened to my step-mother speak in the background.

I moved on to the next girl. And the next. And the next.

And found one thing in common with them all. They were all, indeed, single mothers.