Ghosts ✔

011 • Kozik

Kozik's heart broke as he found Juice sobbing on the ground, his arms wrapped around his knees, leaning with his back against the bar. The phone was lying on the floor next to him. A jolt of pain went through his chest. What had happened? Had somebody found Dana's body? With an enormous lump in his throat he crouched down in front of the man and laid a hand on his knee. "What happened?" he asked in an intrusive tone, afraid he wouldn't be able to cut through Juice's grief otherwise. 

Juice pulled away his leg, so Kozik's hand glided off. He suppressed a sigh. His brother clearly wanted to be alone, but Kozik knew it wouldn't do him any good. His thoughts would keep spinning until he was lost in them, like he had seen so many times the past weeks. 

"Was it Maddox?"

Juice turned his head away from him and breathed loudly. Was he angry at him? Or did he no longer want to show his tears? The first weeks after Dana's disappearance he had been a wreck, a mess that hadn't been able to do anything. In the end he had tore himself away from his grief and he had showed his face around the club again. However, the past days his face had grown dark, the lines had became deeper. Bitterness filled his heart, he had even broke a girl's arm without remorse. Kozik had been afraid that he was growing cold, that he was extinguishing. 

Now it looked like the boy was ashamed of his tears. As if his mask was broken and showed him in all his brokenness. Kozik didn't know what version of Juice was worse. Both terrified him.

One because there would be a day on which he could no longer bear the pain, making him look for a definitive way out. 

The other because there would remain nothing of the old Juice.

Still Kozik didn't let himself scare away. He sat down next to the boy, his head leaning against the wood supporting the bar. He clenched the fingers of his right hand and relaxed them again, over and over again, afraid he would shake up the boy and scream for an answer otherwise. The frustration kept gnawing on him, desperately he raked a hand through his blonde hair. "Juice," he tried again. "What happened? Who called you? Is she... is she..."

"She's pregnant."

Kozik's eyes widened. That was the last thing he'd expected to hear. "Ooh..."

It didn't happen often, but he had no idea what to say. 

Juice turned his head to the side. With red, puffy eyes he looked at him. "He made her call me. To tell me she was pregnant. It's... It's..." His voice was shaking. 

"It's his?" Kozik complemented his sentence hesitantly. 

"It's mine."

Oh fuck. Kozik rubbed his forehead. Of course he was happy Dana wasn't carrying a child from that asshole, but this would break Juice again. It was no longer his fiance alone who was in the hands of that psycho, but also his unborn child. 

And within a few months his born child.

Sighing deeply, he ran his hands across his head. Juice stared at him, lost, as if he expected a solution for this drama from him. But there was nothing Kozik could do about it.

The situation was so shitty he barely felt relieved that Dana was still alive. This would change everything for her. Soon it wouldn't be her own life that was at stake, but that of her child. Juice's child. She would do everything in her power to get away from Maddox and the possible consequences made him shiver. 

Was Maddox insane enough to hurt a little baby? 

A baby belonging to the woman he thought he loved and the man she loved? 

There was no doubt. Maddox would despise the kid. Kozik couldn't imagine that he wouldn't beat it to dead, the moment it was born. And the panic and fear radiating from Juice's face, told him his friend knew that all too well.