Fallen Angel (The List #3)

by N. K. Love

  FUCK! NO!

  I burst out of the car and fly over to Chloe, whose twisted, groaning body is lying motionless on the tarmac.

  As I drop to my knees, I look up at the car to see if it’s stopped. The brake lights flick on, giving me chance to catch the registration plate. Just as I think he’s going to stop, the red lights go out again and the car accelerates out of sight.

  “Clo, Clo. Can you hear me?”

  “Joe.” She’s trying to speak but there’s dark red blood gargling out of her mouth. “Help me. Please.”

  I grab my phone from my pocket and call ‘999’.

  “I’m here darlin’, it’s okay. I’m with you.”

  “I’m sor-ry. I lied.”

  The emergency services ask me which service I require and then the line goes quiet as they connect me.

  “Don’t say sorry. That doesn’t matter.”

  As the call connects, I tell them that a woman has been seriously injured in a hit and run accident. When I say the words, I can’t quite believe it myself. I am looking into Chloe’s eyes as I speak and the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach is already telling me that she’s going to die. She is going to die lying on this cold road, in the middle of the night, outside of her house.

  Her tears—the ones I put there—have been washed away with the blood now.

  In her panic stricken face, I see the sweet girl that I met a few months ago. Not the hollow girl she seems to have transformed into.

  I end the call and throw my phone on the ground. I shrug my jacket off and cover up her legs. If she looks down, I can’t have her seeing how her bones are protruding or the deformed angle that they’ve broken into.

  I think the fact that she’s not screaming in agony is more evidence as to how fatal her injuries are.

  “I’m scared… Joe.”

  I’m fucking scared shitless.

  “Sssh. There’s no need to be scared. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  They say never to move somebody who’s been in a collision, but I know in my heart that she’s taking her last breaths. Her body is already surrounded in a shallow pool of blood that’s spreading around my knees. I can’t have her die like this.

  I hook my arm carefully around her neck, soaking my white shirt with blood. It’s the most vivid red I’ve ever seen. I move forwards and lean closely over her so that my face is right next to hers.

  I try my best to cradle her, to comfort her. I put my free hand in hers and she latches onto it with a frail, trembling grip. The haunting look in her eyes penetrates straight through me as though to cement itself inside my head for eternity.

  Chloe blinks slowly, coughing up more thick blood. She has lost so much in just a few short minutes.

  She sobs, “Joe, I don’t… wanna die.”

  “Good, because you’re not going to. I won’t let that happen.”

  “What about my… baby?”

  “The baby is going to be fine. You’re both going to be fine. The ambulance is nearly here, I can hear it” I can’t. “Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of you.”

  I watch her expression ease slightly as she finds some comfort in my words and clings on to it.

  “But I can’t… feel my body.”

  Her words are slow and faint and strained.

  “You’re just in shock darlin’. It’s good. It’s good that you can’t feel any pain.”

  “Joe, I think… I do love… you.”

  “I know you do. I love you too Clo. I was just scared when I saw the scan. But I do love you.” I don’t mean it but I need her to believe it. I need to say whatever the fuck I can to try and ease some of the pain and misery I’ve unintentionally caused her. “Everything’s going to work out,” I whisper, “you’re going to be a beautiful mother. We’ll be happy together.” She never looks away, only to close her eyes slowly. When she reopens them this time I can see her slipping away from me. I hear her struggling to draw air into her lungs. “Listen to me Clo, I promise—I swear to you that I will find the person who did this and I will make them pay. I promise you both.”

  I need her to hear every one of those words. It’s the only true thing I’ve said and ultimately it’s the most important.

  Chloe nods her head slightly in acknowledgement and I hear an eerie rattle echoing from her throat. This time when she blinks, she doesn’t open her eyes again. I urge her to, but she doesn’t.

  Kissing her lips, I feel her last weak breath escape and she slips away silently from this cruel, fucked up world.

  The light grip she had on me has eased away at some point but I squeeze her limp hand nevertheless, hoping this isn’t it but knowing that it is…This is the end.

  The end of her innocent life and the start of my guilt ridden existence.

  “I promise.” I mutter into her ear with a fierce determination. “I will find them and make them pay for this.”

  I wipe away her blonde hair from where it’s sticking to her face. It’s more like pink now, matted with her blood.

  My shoes scrape across the bloodied tarmac as I adjust myself to bring her body onto my lap.

  Wrapping her in my arms, I rock her gently. I recite the registration plate over in my head obsessively. Closing my eyes, I make sure to embed that evil bastard’s face inside my head for life. I carve it into my mind, piece by motherfucking piece, where it’ll stay until he’s paid penance.

  Cradling her lifeless body, I whisper words that I don’t remember until the ambulance comes screeching to a halt beside us, snapping me back into reality. As I zone back in, the piercing sound of the siren fades but the blue lights illuminate the road, intermittently lighting up Chloe’s face. She somehow looks peaceful, which makes this all the more gut wrenching.

  They take her from my arms but I remain sitting on the ground, covered in Chloe’s blood. Whilst the commotion unravels around me, I absorb the chaos and breathe in the rancid tragedy. I willingly let the guilt take over me, where I already know it’ll manifest and alter the path that I’ll tread for the rest of my selfish, pathetic days.

  When they officially declared her as deceased, I officially declared the same fate to the motherfucker that killed them both. He didn’t stop. He didn’t stop to help her and I won’t stop either, not until the person responsible is held accountable.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Monday 4th May 2015

  6:01pm

  Beth

  The emotion in his words rips through me as though I was physically there. As though I was sitting beside him watching them both, caught up in the eerie, life changing moment that has scarred Jax so deeply ever since.

  I feel every emotion that’s pouring out of his soul and my entire body has gradually tensed up. Tears freefall silently onto my lap. I squeeze his hand tighter with one hand and pluck a tissue from the box on the side with the other. I dab at my face until the tissue is damp.

  She died in such a horrific way and he held her body in his arms.

  Whilst reliving that nightmare he has answered questions I didn’t even know existed.

  It explains why he made me promise to always say goodbye.

  It explains his behaviour towards women; keeping it short and sweet, making sure he’s closed off to stop anybody from getting attached—until me.

  It explains his attitude towards himself, his misplaced belief that he is underserving of love or a future of happiness—until me.

  “You know that you’re not to blame, don’t you Jax?”

  “Aren’t I?”

  He chokes on the words, seemingly still dragging himself back to the present day.

  “Of course not. It was a tragic tragic accident. She was in the wrong place at the wrong t—”

  “I put her there. She stormed into that road without looking because of the way I’d mistreated her. I was too worried about my reputation. I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I shouldn’t have hesitated. I should have kept her with me and drove her to a rehab clinic that night. I
should have told her that I will support her not carelessly kicked her out the fucking car, to her death.”

  “But you didn’t, Jax. You can’t blame yourself for all the things you should’ve done but didn’t. You went through hell and back that night.”

  “No I didn’t Beth. I didn’t come back—until I met you.” He lets those words settle between us and then continues. “She bled to death whilst holding my hand and there’s nothing I could do to bring her back. I didn’t go through anything compared to what I deserved.”

  “She can’t have been that innocent. She was pregnant with somebody else’s baby, trying to have you believe it was yours and taking dangerous drugs.”

  “Don’t, Beth. She was young and impressionable. I was selfish and heartless.”

  “Jax, I’m only stating some of the facts that you’ve just laid out.” Even though I feel like a bitch for talking like that. “So you knew that you couldn’t have children back then too? Is that how you knew the baby wasn’t yours?”

  He nods. “I don’t know who the father was.”

  “Was he caught, the driver?”

  “I gave the police a decent description of him and the car, which turned out to be stolen. After a few days, they found him on CCTV just before the accident. They tracked a lead back to a suspect’s address nearly an hour’s drive away. But he wasn’t there. A woman, apparently his girlfriend, hadn’t heard from him in a while. She gave the police a load of different addresses across the city, which served to waste their time on a wild goose chase. They had evidence that he’d entered the country on a fake passport and that he’d since fled the country again. By that time, the post-mortem report confirmed that Chloe was three months pregnant with Class A drugs in her system. The police pretty much washed their hands of the case after that and said they’d exhausted all lines of enquiry.”

  “So Chloe’s death led you to leave your old life behind and start afresh?”

  “They gave up Beth but I didn’t… At first, I didn’t cope well. Over the weeks that the police were investigating the accident, I shut down, locked myself away. I wouldn’t talk to anybody. My parents insisted that I see a counsellor. In the end, I said they could send somebody to the house but they insisted I went to the meetings, I suppose to get me out the house. So eventually I did, just to get them off my back. I met a guy there who had a really troubled past, he was a decent lad who’d been dealt a shit hand in life. I went for a drink with him after a session one night and ended up back at his drunk out of our faces. He offered me a line of coke and I took it. I’d never touched Class A before then...”

  I find myself shaking my head in disbelief without even realising. I just can’t imagine Jax doing something like that.

  “That became my miserable, isolated pattern. I locked myself away during the day, went to a session to score, went home, got coked up to the eyeballs and then hit the repeat button... My brother clocked on to what was happening and tried to help me. He took the extra strain at work and checked in on me daily.”

  “And did you get clean straight away?”

  “No. After I found out the police weren’t bothered anymore, I fell further into a black hole of hate. Hate for myself. Hate for orchestrating Chloe’s death. Albeit an accident, it was my fault Beth, nothing can change that… I hated the drugs I was abusing my body with. But I’d drive myself stir-fucking-crazy with all that hatred that the only answer I found was to use again to make it all go away. I was caught in the vicious circle of the weak, pathetic man I’d quickly become.”

  “You were grieving Jax. You were trying to find a way to cope.”

  “I don’t think I was grieving. I was wallowing in self-pity Beth—big difference. I wasn’t doing anything constructive. After a while, I promised Jonathan that if he found out Samara’s—that was the driver’s name—if he found his address, where the girlfriends lived—I’d get clean.”

  “And did he do it?”

  “Yeah. It was tricky but he got it and took me there himself. It was on a derelict housing estate in a rundown town. The woman answered the door to Jonathan but as soon as she laid eyes on me she slammed it in our faces and told us to go away or else she’d call the police. Jonathan said that I looked intimidating—I was a wreck. He told me to wait in the car. Jonathan tried to reason with her through the letterbox but she simply said that she hadn’t seen Samara since the middle of January. She couldn’t help us or if she could, she wasn’t going to.”

  “So is that why you moved away, to get clean?”

  “Sort of. I knew I was teetering on the edge. If I’d stayed in London, I would’ve ended up on a worse rampage of self-destruction—drugs or no drugs. I couldn’t watch my family, watching me from the outside, knowing it was hurting them. I had to leave. I moved away so I could concentrate on getting my shit together. It was only going to be temporary, at first. I stopped using. It wasn’t too difficult once I’d made the decision. Jonathan knew I would the second I gave him my word. But instead I started going to bars to drink and pick up girls. I’d convinced myself that Samara must’ve been drunk, which is why he didn’t stop and why he was going so fucking fast in the first place. Plus his girlfriend admitted that he was an alcoholic. That led to me obsessing over drunk drivers. When I was in the bars, I’d watch how many drinks people were having. I’d follow them out to the car park and stop them from getting in their cars. Sometimes I’d just take their keys off them to throw in a field or something. But then sometimes it’d escalate and I’d end up hitting them, doing whatever I needed to. I was fixated on stopping them from getting behind the wheel. I saw it as my job to stop them… Beth, are you okay?”

  “Yes, yes. Hold on, I just need to get some water.”

  I walk swiftly to the kitchen with a dry mouth and a churning stomach. I don’t even remember being in that room just then. It’s like I’m totally absorbed in his recollections with him. I thought he’d told me the worst of it but there’s an unnerving feeling in the air, telling me there’s more to come.

  I just needed a breather away from the intensity, and to stop myself from freaking out. With shaky hands, I fill two glasses with water from the fridge.

  Walking back into the sitting area, I hand Jax a glass and take a swig of my own, placing the glass on the small table beside the sofa, next to the cold mug of coffee.

  I return to the same position and consciously make sure I stay just as close to Jax as I was before. We’re not touching but I don’t want him to think that I’m backing off in case he becomes reluctant to open up.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Please, carry on.”

  Jax sighs but dives back in.

  “One night, at a bar not far here, I had just knocked somebody out around the back of the place. He was totally wasted and adamant he was gonna drive away. I sparked him out, dumped him in his backseat to sleep it off and left the keys nearby for when he sobered up. Then I felt somebody watching me. When I looked around, there was a silhouette of a woman leaning up the corner of the building, staring at me. She just stood there, casually taking it all in, completely unfazed. She followed me back into the bar and came to sit at my table. We got to talking, which inevitably led to us drinking and ending up in a nearby hotel room. She somehow seemed to ask the right questions and related to being on a downward spiral. By that point I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere anyway. I told her, very briefly, about Chloe and she gave me an out. She hinted about some underworld operation that she knew of where I could help other people who’ve been wronged—like a way of balancing things out.”

  “Was it Carmel?”

  “Yes. She introduced me to the man who ran things, but only as an acquaintance at first. He lived just outside London. Carmel was in the middle of buying a place in the West Midlands, so we arranged a few more meetings where she’d take me to see the boss. After that, he and I had just seemed to click. He opened up to me more about the Unit and after seeing how I could handle myself against his best boys in his g
ym, he invited me in.”

  Jax stands up, seemingly agitated, like he wants to distance himself from me for some reason. He walks over to the fireplace and leans against the wall, averting his eyes.

  “So you said yes?” He nods and shrugs like it was a no-brainer decision. “But if they’re helping others, why would you need to fight? I don’t understand. Is it illegal?”

  “Yes, it’s illegal. The boss—he was a good man. He had his reasons… He started the Unit in order to bring his own kind of justice. He’d been hurt tremendously in his past and so dedicated his life to trying to stop others from feeling the kind of injustice that he went through.”