by Emilia Finn
Almost black.
Death.
Another explosion, but louder this time, brings heat tearing through my arm.
The world slows, and the chaos around me mutes as a single line of blood dribbles through Kane’s ski mask and into his eyes.
One day, I might be able to look back on this moment and know that the sting in my arm is a bullet. I might even be able to recognize that it was the same bullet that passed through his ski mask. Someday, I might be able to look back on this and know the exact mistakes that were made, each individual second that ticked by that led to this.
But right now, all I see are Kane’s eyes. The mask covers his lips, so I’ll never see that smirk again. It covers the deep wrinkle, that one single line that marks his forehead when I annoy him.
But the eyes are his, and while he drops to his knees, he watches me. His shoulders, always so broad and strong, now droop. Hands that have worshipped me now dangle lifelessly by his side. Broad thighs, thighs big enough for both of us, no longer hold him up. Kane drops to his knees, and when he falls forward, the noise and chaos around us un-mutes and I come eye-to-eye with Abel Hayes, a still smoking gun, and a horrible grin marring his ugly face.
The support beam I was tied to fractures under the weight of a heavy ceiling. Kane lies face first in a tiny river of flames that moves forward and licks at my still soaked jeans.
While Kane and I stared, the world went silent. The creaking of the large club was muted, and the roaring of the fire was silenced, but now that our connection is broken, it’s all back.
Steel twists, and fire races up my jeans.
I scream; at my jeans, at Alex’s rough hands, at Kane.
Especially at Kane.
“Jess!” Alex’s strong arm wraps around my stomach and swings me around. The stitches that were all but healed, stitches that Kane so very gently put into my body, tear open on Alex’s belt full of tools and keys. He lifts me off my wildly flailing feet; to take me out of the collapsing club, to take me to safety, to extinguish the flames that race up my legs and blister my skin. But I fight against him, to get back to Kane, to save him.
It’s my turn to save him.
My turn to help him.
That’s what we do, we take turns saving each other.
“It’s my turn!” Seizing in Alex’s arms, I flip and scream for my freedom, but he refuses to let me loose. “Kane! No. Alex. No!” I shoot off bullets with the gun still in my hand. Uncaring for anyone’s safety, wildly aiming for Abel but missing him by yards, I shoot off every round I have until the gun stops firing and seizes up. I throw it as hard as I can, and yet, it lands just fifteen feet away. “Let me down, Alex.” He drags me away from Kane. “Alex! Let me go!”
He drags me through a long hall clogged with black smoke. He refuses to let me go, even when I lose sight of Kane and my fighting intensifies. Oz sprints along the hall with his gun in hand and a shirt tied over his face, and when he reaches us, he helps Alex with my weight.
Two grown men struggle to drag me out. “Jess!” Alex’s voice is broken and scratchy from the smoke. His eyes water and his muscles bulge from adrenaline, but he doesn’t let me go. “Jess! He’s gone. We gotta get out.”
Sections of the ceiling fall in, and each fiery piece of metal that rains down on us burns our backs and arms.
Like the hallway that just won’t end, the smoke races for the exit just as fast as Alex and Oz drag me. Bursting into sunlight, remembering it’s the middle of the morning, and not the night that it feels, we explode into a parking lot filled with police cruisers, fire trucks with men racing around and preparing hoses, and four ambulances.
My brother, my real brother, sweeps me up from Alex’s grasp and runs clear across the street. Dropping to the ground and rolling over me, he slams blankets over my legs to smother the flames I forgot were eating my skin.
In an instant, Kari stops at my side and slaps a mask over my face, then Luc pulls out a pair of scissors and works through the thick denim sticking to my blistering skin.
I swing my gaze around like I expect Kane to run out and help me. I stop on Laine, who sits in the back of an ambulance with her face in her hands, and Angelo, who stands guard with that gun still in his grasp.
They should’ve disarmed him already, but the police belong to us and they were busy pulling me from a burning building.
Tears burn my eyes, like acid on sensitive skin, and they dribble onto my oxygen mask as I bring my eyes back to watch the club doors.
He’ll come out soon.
He will.
I know he will.
He’s the big grizzly bear that needs to make a scene about how mad he is that I put myself in danger. He’s just in there taking care of Abel, but he’ll be out in a sec.
Fire crews run around the outside of the double story building. They unravel hoses and split into teams to work on opposite sides of the warehouse. They shout orders between themselves. They decide who’ll go inside and who will work the ladders.
Alex skids down by my side in just a tank and with burns on his arms. Kari presses the mask to my face, because each time she relaxes her hold, I bat it away.
My right arm burns, and when I drag my eyes away from the club entrance, I stop on the divot in my skin. A channel where flesh used to be, but now blood oozes as a different EMT works to push my skin back together.
With white gloves on his hands and the concentration a man possesses when he knows he’s working on his co-worker’s little sister, he wraps a bandage around my arm and calls for a stretcher.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday! Everybody out, now!” Shouts rocket into the crowded space as a fire chief stands at the front entrance with his radio pressed to his lips. Three loud horns boom from the biggest truck. “Command to all units, evacuate the building. Company officers begin roll call now!”
“Engine one checking in.”
“Engine two checking in.”
“Fuck.” Like the airhorns mean something to them, Alex and Luc pick me up while I simply concentrate on breathing air that’s not completely smoke. The firemen that ran in only a minute ago now turn on their heels and sprint toward the exit. I watch on in horrified hope as they drag a man by the arms the way Alex and Oz carried me.
My heart beats faster with relief.
Here he comes.
He needed to be saved.
He needed help.
Fire hoses are retracted the way the power cord snaps back into the body of a vacuum cleaner as three firemen and Kane race down the hall that never ends.
The smoke races them, but I see their fluorescent uniforms. I see the lights on their helmets and can hear the pounding of heavy boots on concrete.
“Get out!” The fire chief swings his arms as above them, the club eats away at itself. The roof collapses in and each new piece of steel that falls in leaves the rest of the structure groaning in protest.
Ten feet from the exit, the first fireman escapes and stops at his chief, only to turn back and watch the final two drag Kane forward.
I try to stand. I push the mask away, but my friends, my family, hold me down until the chief turns and shouts, “Everybody back!”
Luc, my strong, big brother that carried me a billion times in my life, turns on a curse and lifts me into his arms. He snags Kari’s hand with his right, and drags us to the ambulance that Laine sits in. He tosses me in so I land on my sister, then he tosses Kari on top of us so we’re a three-girl stack of legs while he and Angelo turn their backs to the inferno and guard the doors.
I scramble to my knees and tear the useless mask away from my face. Peeking past the guys’ shoulders, I watch the entire building collapse as the three men dive through the exit.
Hot air and black smoke whoosh out and blow my hair back. The guys close in to protect us from the blast, and the stench of burning hair and baking skin permeate the air as fireballs rush out from beneath the collapsed building, sending the fire crew diving for cover.
The
final two that were carrying Kane scramble to their feet and race to their big red trucks, leaving Kane lying on the ground in front of the crumbling building.
Someday, I’ll be able to look back on this moment and see that everyone does everything they can to protect me. I’ll see the two firemen racing away from the man on the ground as self-preservation, because even hidden behind my friends, even forty or so yards from the front door, the heat pulsing off the fireball that used to be a club burns my nostrils.
Someday, I’ll be able to see the fancy black loafers on the unconscious man’s feet, the jewelry that adorns his sausage fingers, and the greasy black hair that’s now half missing on one side of his head.
Like I’ve been sucked back into a vacuum of non-reality, it’s minutes or seconds or hours before Luc and Angelo step away from the open ambulance doors. Luc takes my hand and helps me stand on shaking legs, then Kari slides an arm around my pain-filled ribs and holds my weight up.
When we’re allowed to move closer, she takes most of my weight and helps me toward the unconscious man that’s not unconscious at all.
He’s dead.
Just like Kane, a bullet hole rests in the center of his forehead.
Abel Hayes is dead, and Kane didn’t come back out of that horrible club.
35
Jess
Nothing Will Ever Be The Same
I don’t bother lowering the volume on my radio when someone knocks on my bedroom door. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t want to pretend I’m okay. I don’t want to be shamed for loving – and consequently mourning – a criminal.
I just want to be left alone.
I love my family, and they love me, but they don’t understand.
So I’m done telling them I’m okay.
Kane Bishop was a good man. He did bad things to bad people, but he was never bad to good people. He’s not governed by the law I study, but the law he lays down – laid down – for himself was solid.
Bad people do bad things to good people all the time.
That wasn’t Kane.
He was a good person in a bad person’s body. In a bad person’s world. But he was as good as they come.
“Jessie?”
“Alex.” I clear the croak in my voice. I haven’t talked yet today. Literally. They’ve tried, but nothing they say can bring me back to them.
Everyone is going about their lives, though not quite as many jokes are being told. Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t loud, but as far as my family are concerned, their sisters are safe and the criminals took each other out.
Jules just loves it when they take each other out.
His lips turn up into a small smile. Pretend everything’s normal. Pretend the criminal never existed. She’ll get over it eventually. “Can I come in, honey?”
Tears burn the backs of my eyes. Nodding, I turn my head away and wipe my nose on my sleeve. “Yeah, X. What’s up?”
The bed dips in where he sits down by my knee. Our family are touchers. Huggers. We show our love physically – with loving hugs, or angry fists. But with my ribs stitched up all over again, my arm patched and bandaged, and my legs wrapped in moist bandages to help with the blistering from my jeans, he’s lost as to where to touch me.
“You okay, Jess? What are you doing in here all alone?”
I move back to sit against the wall, slide a hand under my pillow, and finger the frayed corners of Kane’s manila file. My touchstone. Proof he existed.
Proof I loved.
I still sleep with him under my pillow, because the magic still exists. For ten hours a day, I spend my time with him in my dreams.
I used to sleep five or six hours a night at the most. Too busy with work, too busy with studying, too busy running around with Kane. But now I have nowhere to be. No case to study. No office to go to.
I’m off work indefinitely. Jules wants me to stay off to recover. To study for my exam. To not come back until I’m truly ready.
So I stare at textbooks for a couple minutes here and there, and I stare at Kane’s file the rest of the time. Then when I can’t breathe through the agony anymore, when I can’t live another moment without him right here spooning me, I lie down and visit him in my dreams.
I don’t want to wake up anymore.
I don’t want to be without him.
I’m supposed to want to live for my family. For my twin sister who’s in her own version of mourning, and for Luc, who’s freaking the hell out even more than that time he and Alex had a giant gun-toting fight.
The text chat between my best friends continues to blow up, but Laine and I are noticeably absent. Kari and Britt aren’t trying to be insensitive, they’re just trying to coax us out of the shells we’ve burrowed into.
You’d think, as twins, we’d burrow together. We’d seek solace together.
But we don’t. We stay away, because we can’t handle the other’s grief, and I don’t have the energy to even learn hers.
I don’t know the full details of why she’s sad. And my empty heart can’t find the energy to care.
I’m supposed to be strong for them all.
But I’m not.
I don’t care about them. I don’t care about anything except the empty space in my chest where a man used to live. Now there’s nothing, and every minute of every hour that I’m awake is a struggle to stay sane. To breathe.
Grieving is a person’s ability to live, even without their heart inside their body.
I don’t want this anymore.
I don’t want the pain.
But more than that, I don’t want the emptiness.
“Jessie?” Alex leans closer and lifts my chin. His voice is still scratchy and raw from smoke inhalation. He has tender shoulders and blisters. But he’s fine. Oz is fine. Luc and Ang are fine.
Everyone’s fine.
But not Kane.
And not me.
“What’d you do today, honey?”
I shrug. “Napped.”
“Did you get out? The sun’s out today. The breeze is cool; it feels good on your face.”
I shrug. “Did you want something?” I force a fake yawn. “I’m tired. I think I’m going to have an early night.”
“An early night?” He glances at the alarm clock tucked on my cluttered side table – cluttered and absolutely nothing like Kane’s apartment. “It’s four o’clock.”
I drop my chin until it rests on my chest. On the cotton shirt Kane sent me home in a lifetime ago. “I didn’t sleep well last night. Catching up on sleep.”
“We were thinking of having pizza tonight. The Rollers invited us over to hang out; it’s fight night. Britt wanted me to ask you to come.”
“Why didn’t Britt ask herself?”
“She did, honey. She asked you in text, but you didn’t answer.”
Oh. That makes sense.
I shake my head. “I don’t wanna go to fight night. You guys go. Have fun.”
“But–”
Sliding forward on my bed, I drop my feet to the floor for what feels like the first time in days, letting Kane’s shirt drop so the hem tickles my thighs. He was so big, so strong and unbreakable.
Until Abel broke him.
“Jess?” Alex sits forward. “You’re gonna come?”
“No.” I grab yoga pants and pull them up my tender legs. “I’m going for a drive.”
“He was a cop, Jess.”
I stop with one leg in my pants, and the other suspended in mid-air. For the first time since the day inside Infernos, I meet someone’s eyes. “What?”
“Special Agent Kane Bishop. He was pushed up the ranks the year before last, after he and his partner busted up a seventeen-million-dollar operation that was similar to Hayes’. Drugs, girls, bad shit.”
I slowly pull my pants up and turn to Alex with brand-new tears sliding along my face. “He’s a cop?”
He nods.
“He’s not a bad person? He’s not a criminal?”
“No, honey. He
was one of us. And he saved my life in that club.”
I use my shoulder and Kane’s shirt to wipe away a torrent of fresh grief. “I knew he was good.” I knew it.
“He was undercover at Infernos, and has been for nearly eighteen months. He was undercover, and so was his brother. They’ve been deep under for so long, nothing on their records is true except their names.”
“His birthday isn’t two days after mine?” For some reason, I grieve that, too. Like it’s important we share a birthday month. Even a birthday week. “His brother?” I frown and remember his file. Parents; both deceased. Siblings; one. Education; high school dropout. Starting quarterback on the varsity team. High school wrestling team. State champion. National champion. “His file said one sibling. No parents.”
He shrugs. “One father; alive. He’s still a decorated officer in the army. Mother; deceased. One brother. Jay Bishop. Two years younger. He and Jay have worked the last two undercover ops together.” He shrugs. “I dunno. No one really talks about UC ops, so it’s just guesswork. But I think I’ve got it straight.”
“Jay’s his brother.” I pull the drawstring on my pants and drag in deep breaths until my lungs ache. “Like, actual biological brother?”
“Yes. Do you know Jay? Did you meet him?”
“No.” I turn to tidy my messy drawers. “Jay was your ghost; the one you guys said you couldn’t identify. Kane told me Jay’s the ghost, but that you don’t have to worry about him. He won’t hurt us.” He won’t hurt me. “Kane said brother a few times, but I guess I thought he meant like how I say you’re my brother. Not by blood…”
“But by love.” He stands from my bed with a gentle smile. “You’re so accustomed to having so many made up brothers, it never occurred to you that he was being literal. They were biological brothers. Army brats. Decorated officers.”
I don’t know why anger roars in my blood instead of relief. I should be happy he’s innocent. I should be happy my instincts were on point. I knew he was good. I could feel it in my heart. It should make me happy that I was right, but it doesn’t, because none of it means a damn thing now.
