by Meli Raine
“You don't get to die on your own. Where would the pleasure be in that?”
“HUH!” The last burst of air inside me comes roaring out.
That's it.
“You are just like him. Duff. Many have tried to bring him down. All have failed. All except me.” His palm flattens against my calf and roughly he shoves, the heel of his hand digging into my hamstring, my leg reflexively kicking out, foot sinking into the dead man's brain.
It's still warm.
“You are only alive because of him,” he goes on. Roughly grabbing the hem of my dress, he rips it up to the bottom of my ribcage, the cool air clashing with the warmth of my foot. Portions of my skull light up, hot and electric, then cold, like steel in a freezer. Nothing regulates, the world turning into darkness and pain.
It's ending soon, isn't it? I'm ending.
I'm ending without Sean. Duff. Whoever he really is.
I'll never know.
“I have to make this look good,” Romeo says as his fingers move between my legs, grabbing my upper thigh. A gasp catches in my nose, my left side too weak to fight. My brain makes a horrible shift, like it’s sliding down a sand dune. A unicorn horn sprouts on Romeo's broad forehead, wide as a Buick's grille, tall as a glacier's side. His face becomes a tangled vine as his hands move to my throat, the tightness a blessing.
“Thank you,” I try to say, but the words come out like gurgles, his hands so hot, so hot, so...
Sean.
Sean?
Goodbye.
Duff
Words fail me.
Actions don't.
The sight of Romeo with his hands around Lily's neck, her right hand flailing, left arm limp, turns the world red. That's all I see. My vision narrows and sharpens as instinct shuts off any part of my central nervous system that distracts from the singular focus of saving Lily.
Gun drawn, I work to align the shot, but the peephole is too tiny and the angle is wrong.
“Drew,” I snap. “Shoot out the wall behind him while I go to the door.” Exact instructions beyond that are impossible. Before I finish, I'm out in the hall, Silas at my side, gun drawn.
I don't hear Drew's bullet.
I only hear Romeo's reaction to it.
Shooting out the doorknob leaves the searing smell of lead and adrenaline burning the air, like ozone and fear as a scent. My shoulder slams against the door and then we're in the room, Romeo's gun drawn on Lily and he turns –
I shoot.
But I don't shoot to kill.
He's too valuable.
I blow out his knee, instead.
His bullet goes rogue, nailing me in the ribs, stopped short by bone. I feel it wedge in there, so hot that it doesn't know it's stopped, burning like an out-of-control sun.
“Lily,” I say, the word the only one I know. She's passed out, neck red from that bastard's hands. The dress she's wearing is in tatters, torn up past her hip, and she's covered in dried blood in a spatter pattern that makes no sense. Hair matted, it hangs over her face in clumps like a neglected stray mutt.
Indignant fury boils me in place.
Silas has his gun drawn on Romeo, Drew appearing at the door.
“I'll get help,” Drew says with a curt nod to Silas, who gives it back.
No one comes to ask what's going on. All of the guns have silencers, all of our actions are controlled. We're the perfect team to do this.
A little too perfect.
Until a woman's screams come pouring from down the hall.
“BUSY!” she screams. “OH GOD BUSY SOMEONE SHOT BUSY!”
So much for keeping this quiet.
I point my gun at Romeo, who is groaning, hands pressing on his gushing lower leg. “Go, Silas. I've got him.”
“That's Fuala,” he says. “Fuala McIntire. The owner. She found Busy in the closet.”
“GO! I got this,” I snap. “Do damage control. Drew'll be back.”
He listens. He leaves.
I turn to Lily, her dress ripped up her body, her face slack on the left side. Dried blood's all over her leg, but when I look down, I realize it's not hers.
A random dead guy is at her feet, his face shot to jelly.
She's breathing. Her pulse flutters. Drew's getting medical help, so all I can do now is secure the scene. Secure her.
“Wyatt.”
I go cold at hearing my brother's name come out of that slick bastard's mouth.
Romeo groans. “You want to know about Wyatt. Of course you do. That's why you're here. That's why you breathe.”
“I'm here to stop you and to save Lily.”
“That's your honorable reason. And then there's the real reason–Sean.”
“Sean,” Lily echoes, coming out of it. I turn to her, right arm with my gun on Romeo, left hand on her cheek. It's hot to the touch and yet as I move my hand down to her left arm, that's cold.
Struggling, she sits up, then slumps forward, against me.
“Not dead,” she murmurs.
“No, you're not.”
“Not me. You,” she she says with effort. “Thought you were.”
“You want Wyatt,” Romeo says with effort, sitting up, fumbling in his pocket.
Tightening my grip on the gun, I snap, “Hands up.” He doesn't bother. “Go ahead. Shoot me. You want me alive to talk. To talk about Wyatt.” He draws my brother's name out like a taunt, a tease, a curse.
“Fuck you.” My voice is choked, the bullet in my side making it hard to express force.
A thick cough makes his voice wheeze. I shot him in the knee, but he seems to be struggling to breathe. He's not my priority now.
Lily is.
“Think. Stroke.” Her words are sparse, scary.
“You think you're having a stroke?”
She grunts.
Shit. How long has this been going on?
“Lily? How long have you been like this?”
“No time.”
“No time for what?”
Romeo moves, his hand reaching up to his mouth. Reluctantly, I leave Lily.
“Kill me, Duff,” he asks. Interestingly, he's not begging.
Not yet.
“Why?” Pressing my palm against my side, I don’t feel blood through my jacket. That’s a good sign.
“Why not?”
“You're worth more alive.”
“I'm worth nothing more than pain alive, Duff. You know that. The people who give me orders don't want me talking.”
“The people who give you orders can burn in hell for all I care, Romeo.” Our eyes meet. We do not look away. His dark irises, eyes dilated until they're almost black moons, draw me in.
“I underestimated you.” He looks at Lily. “I definitely underestimated her.”
“I don't give a shit what you think.”
“You were supposed to be the one who killed her.”
I jolt. “What?”
Ragged breaths, more driven by pain than system failure, rip through Romeo's body. It takes effort to speak, I see, but he can't help himself. In training in the army, we learned how vital a man's dying moments could be in situations like this. The quest for meaning is engrained in us. We all need to matter.
Dying without meaning is a biological horror.
“You. I was setting you up. Kill her, lure you here, make it look like kinky murder suicide.”
“WHY?” I thunder.
“Why? You still ask why?” A choked laugh, gravelly and nightmarish, pours out of him. “You are so naïve, Duff. There is no why. Just kill me now. Do me that favor.”
“I owe you nothing.”
“You don't? Because I brought Wyatt to you. I think you have a debt you need to pay.”
Death is nothing more than a power exchange.
Murdering someone makes people think they’re the dominant. That they have all the power and take their victim’s power, too. They don’t understand it’s the other way around. The victim has all the power. And when you murder someone in cold bl
ood, without cause, without mercy, you drain all your own power into the dimming soul of the person you kill.
But I’m not about to drain my own power for his sake.
“You're rambling.”
“You care about Wyatt. Your grandmother did, too. That's why Alice started the investigation that led her to Monica Bosworth, to El Brujo and the drug trafficking, to Nolan Corning and his stupid payoffs to people who could pave the way for Stateless.”
“What?”
“See? You do care.”
“What do you mean, 'pave the way for Stateless'? You're making shit up now, Romeo. Senator Corning was all about getting cheap drugs and sex slaves into the U.S. from Central and South America.”
“You still think that? After everything you've learned? Where do you think the stateless would come from, Duff? That there's an endless supply of people in the United States eager to hand off their babies to a shadow government? Stateless started by bringing children here from other countries.”
“Like you. From Romania.”
“Like me. Like many others. But that's not even the real reason Corning wanted free flow across borders.”
“Then why?”
“If you’ve built the perfect army, what's even better is not to need it.”
“There you go again. Rambling.”
“No. I'm telling truths you can't decode. To an untrained man, it's the same thing.”
Footsteps boom down the hallway like stormtroopers coming in waves.
“Shoot me!” he shouts.
I lower my gun.
The way his tongue shifts in his jaw is my clue. Now I know what he was putting in his mouth.
Damn it.
Fiery eyes meet mine as he grinds his teeth together, slow and deliberate. Too late for me to stop him, I look back, unflinching. If he wants to die while forcing me to watch, I won't look away. That's his last shred of power.
Making me turn away.
I grab Lily’s face and press it against my chest, arms a shield. No one should watch this, least of all her. I will watch because I'm robbing Romeo of his revenge. He lured me here using Lily. Now he's choosing to take his own life.
That doesn't mean he gets everything he wants.
As he bites and swallows the cyanide capsule he chipmunk-cheeked moments ago, his face turns an ungodly red, mouth twisting with disgust. Those dark eyes, like coals inside snow, begin to falter. Chin up, his throat spasms.
I want to ask him where Wyatt is. Beg him. Plead with him to tell me. What did he mean, he brought Wyatt to me? Is that just another lie? Some spun story designed to get me to slip?
Instead, I maintain eye contact and say evenly, “I know where Wyatt is, Romeo. You failed to execute your mission. You failed. I won.”
And then I change my mind. I deprive him of an audience.
Closing my eyes takes longer than I want, though.
Then again, it’s nothing worse than I saw in combat.
And definitely not as bad as what I woke up to find when I was eleven.
Chapter 10
Lily
Blink.
* * *
Ice is sliding up my nose into my brain, twisting like a copper wire in a liquid nitrogen bath. My skin is cold. I am ice. I am the smooth, hard surface of a pond in winter. I am a cold snowball that my brother throws at me in the mountains. I am an icicle hanging from the roof, lumpy and pointed, a stalactite of wandering water trapped by the freeze. I am a ski track from a cross-country trail, packed solid and slick.
* * *
Blink.
* * *
Alcohol slides on the air, slithering up into my mouth, making the back of my throat turn dry. Warm fingers slither up my arm, turning into snakes at the soft spot inside my elbow, burrowing like rabbits in a winter den. The shush of deer running through underbrush makes my hair hurt.
A bird in the tree beeps… but birds don’t beep. Maybe they do here, wherever I am.
* * *
Blink.
* * *
Sunlight streams in, heating the only part of me that isn’t ice, my left hand. My eyelids open a crack. I look. The sun is a man, a man I know. He holds my hand in both of his. His head is down, looking at the floor. His hair is thick, longer than last time I saw him. His shoulders slump. How can he be the sun? The warmth is all in his hands, but the rest of him is so remote, too far away to be the star that keeps the solar system going.
I need to pull him closer. I need him to break through all of the ice that I’ve become. I'm trapped beneath the surface, looking up through the opaque ice, screaming for an opening that never appears, the water rushing in in in until I can't scream, can't move, can't do anything but–
* * *
Blink.
* * *
“She’s not on a vent,” my mother says, her voice calm and resigned. “This isn’t like last time, Tom.”
I swallow. She's right. My tongue is free to violate all the rules, whatever rules a tongue might want to transgress.
“I know it isn’t, Bee. This time it’s almost worse.” Dad's voice chokes with emotion. They're talking about me. I want to open my eyes and look at his heart.
Am I about to break my daddy again?
“Worse? What do you mean? The doctors say she’ll be fine,” Mom rushes to say, her words a freight train crashing through gates that other people design to protect themselves.
“Bee.” The way he says her name makes my left calf burn. “Bee, honey, that’s not what the doctors say.”
“This isn’t like before, Tom,” she insists. “She didn’t get shot. And so far, the only injuries she has seem to be—” her words stop, as if someone slammed on an emergency brake.
I feel him before anyone calls out his name.
“Hi, Duff,” my dad says.
“Hey.”
Duff. That’s right. That’s his name. That’s the name of the sun.
I open my eyes just a crack and look. He’s always been so stoic. With a face that hard to read, you can’t tell what’s going on beneath the surface. Thick hair curls slightly around his ears, one piece falling across his forehead, the ends brushing the top of his eyebrow. He looks casual, rakish.
The scar along his eye stands out less.
But something’s wrong. He’s somber, withdrawn. But he’s here.
Come warm me, I think but cannot say.
* * *
Blink.
* * *
“Lily.”
It’s nighttime, and his voice sounds like the wind. Like the waves of the ocean crashing on rocks at high tide. Like the sound of a thousand butterflies all flapping their wings at the same time, going towards something joyful.
Except his voice is anything but joyful.
This time he’s on my right, and my corresponding hand is so deliciously warm. He’s stroking my wrist with fingers that would tickle if they didn’t feel so good.
“Lily,” he says again. I like hearing my name come out of that mouth. I like owning the place inside him where my name lives.
But I don't like it when he says, “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t get there faster. This is all my fault.”
Ripples of heat billow through me, making my skin lift and drop, go up, then deep. I am a thousand Tibetan prayer flags flapping on a mountain. I am a hundred kites in the sky on a breezy day at the beach. He’s sending a wave through me, not just with his touch, but with the emotion in his words.
I feel his truth. I feel his authenticity. It moves through my blood like medicine, more powerful than any chemical in the IV drip that goes down into the back of the hand that he holds, cradling it in his own. Bending down, he kisses the center of my palm.
I take a deep breath.
I open my eyes, and when he looks up, I see that I am wrong.
He is not my sun.
I am his.
* * *
Blink.
Duff
I’ve had bullets rip through my flesh.
> I’ve been beaten with a piece of firewood, my skull bashed in by men who killed my mother and father, men who kidnapped my brother.
I’ve had shrapnel rip through my face and been so dehydrated, I saw goddesses I didn’t know existed.
I’ve killed, I’ve maimed, I’ve driven through fire, I’ve parachuted into active gunfire.
No pain I’ve ever felt before measures up to this.
She’s in bed, so peaceful, the machines communicating for her. There’s no ventilator. This is all about Lily’s mind and heart finding their way back to some semblance of wholeness. The machines can tell us what's wrong. But they cannot aid her.
Machines are useless now. It's Lily's very human body that needs to do the work to bring her back.
Me, too.
I cannot be a robot. A robot is a machine.
I need to be a very real, very raw human.
That's harder.
When we brought her in, she was in the middle of a massive stroke. The doctors said her body wasn’t too beaten, other than what appeared to be a smack or punch to the face.
Romeo, to his credit, hadn’t touched her in any way that would violate her beautiful body or psyche, either.
The thought of it makes my hands clench, and goddammit, it makes me grateful. Grateful to the motherfucker who put her in this position in the first place.
We have to take our wins where we can get them.
Her face is so beautiful, slack and without emotion. It’s just there. Of course, it’s even better when she’s my Lily. But we’ll get to that point.
Soon.
Bee is right. This isn’t like the first time. But she’s also wrong. This isn’t worse. This isn’t worse because there’s still hope.
Lily and I had a false start, a relationship built on lies and fear, distrust and paranoia. But that was never the foundation. The foundation is here. It’s now. It’s what I’m doing. Coming every day, holding her hand, being present, working to feel the same connection that I felt in that goddamn sex club where I intuitively found her.
