Gavin, alive.
I’ve spent so long replaying it from every angle. My own culpability in Gavin’s death, the sadism of Rosie and her goons. There was so much blood. Gavin was so pale, so utterly drained of life. I had my arms around him. I saw him die.
And yet. Here he is. In a tux. His black bow tie undone, the ends of it drooping from a starched collar.
In the Boss’s house. In the Boss’s desk chair. Because the Boss is Gavin.
I take another step backward, my whole body shaking.
“Ladies,” he says. “We need a minute alone. How about waiting in the bedroom down the hall.”
They trip out the door, coltish and giggling, waving goodbye. Waiting in the bedroom down the hall. My heart kicks a sharp pain into my chest.
“You look surprised,” he says with a smirk. Then he gets to his feet and moves behind me, stopping to pat me on the head like I’m a pet. I jump out of reach and watch, still too shocked to react, as he closes and locks the door.
He moves toward me, and I back up. My eyes are drawn to something gleaming inside his tuxedo jacket. A revolver. His hand drifts slowly, casually toward the gun.
“Gavin?” I whisper, shaking my head, my mind still clutching at the absurd idea that there’s been some mistake. Because the truth is just too painful to process. Lies. All of it. A scam. From the night we met, and forever after.
His fingers tighten around the gun handle, and the hot liquid shame coursing through me turns instantly to ice. He pulls the gun from the holster, his finger threaded through the trigger hole.
“So it was all a scam.” My voice quavers, but I need to hear him say it. And I need to buy time.
He takes a step closer to me, his hand with the gun in it raised slightly away from his body.
“If you’d just behaved yourself, you would never have had to know,” he says. “But no. You’re like a boomerang. Toss you away, and you come right back. All you had to do was stay away and go back to your life as a little rich girl. Why was that so hard for you?”
His voice is pinched, off-kilter. Not the shy voice I remember, but a deeper, rougher one with a South Side accent.
I shake my head, my mouth open, no idea what to say. Pinpricks of pain are lodged in my chest from the daggers he’s throwing. Little rich girl. Toss you away.
“Please,” I manage, my voice thick. At this close range, he’s not going to miss. No matter how fast I am. “Gavin, put away the gun.”
My eyes move from the gun to his face. His jaw working, furiously clenching.
“You don’t actually think my name is Gavin, do you, sweet pea? Just like your name isn’t Anthem Flood.”
“No,” I whisper, taking a small step back toward the desk. “I guess I don’t.
“Why me?” I ask, stalling him, trying to figure out how to get the gun away from him.
“You don’t know how many times I’ve asked myself that this month.” He waves the gun around, breathing fast. “You’re all the same, really. Smug. Special snowflakes. Sensitive rare flowers. It’s disgusting, what they teach you at the private schools. Though it’s been helpful for the rest of us. You’ve got your heads so far up your own asses, you can’t even see when you’re being played.”
“So there were others.” I watch the barrel of the gun circle and swerve in the air as he talks. I’ve got to keep him talking. If I don’t keep him talking, he’ll start shooting.
“Come on. You really don’t get it? Even now?” His voice goes way up at the end, and he looks incredulous. “It was a perfect scam. I perfected it myself. Took me two years. And it worked on twelve girls before you. We never had any problems until you came along, lucky thirteen.”
Twelve. I feel bile rising in my throat. I’m backing away, shaking my head.
“And then you couldn’t just go home to your ballet slippers and your ponies. And now that it’s been in the papers, people are starting to copy you.”
“They are?” This is news to me.
“I’ve lost twenty-six of my guys since you started pulling this vigilante shit. People are calling the cops on us left and right, getting all sanctimonious about cleaning up the city.”
A part of me, underneath the shame and humiliation and fear for my life, is a little bit proud.
”You obviously have a death wish.” Gavin shrugs. “Why else would you come to a Syndicate recruit party? I was going to leave you be, even after Rosie. But now you know all my secrets. What’s a guy to do?” His eyes are cold, a half-smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. A dimple forms below his cut-glass cheekbone.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. In the distance, I hear police sirens approaching. Maybe whoever taped the note to my mirror—whoever believes in me, believes that the Syndicate can be stopped—called in a tip. Gavin can’t hear the sirens yet. All of the dominoes fallen now. I look around the room. Each TV screen broadcasts a live feed from security cameras all over the city. Behind Gavin on one of the screens, a group of Syndicate guys surround a couple dressed for a night on the town. They grab the woman’s purse and frisk the guy until they find his wallet. These are his employees, I realize. The people who pay for this giant house.
“If it makes you feel better, special snowflake”—he cocks the gun—“you were really good in bed.”
Hatred bubbling up inside me, I concentrate on the gun. Both his hands encircle it now as he takes aim, one brown eye closed, the eye with the blue smudge in the iris trained on me.
Like a cornered animal, I tense up and get ready to move. My only hope is to come at him, to leap into the air and hope he’s too startled to shoot before I land on him. I take a breath, my legs tensed and ready to spring. But then the window behind Gavin shatters and a whole wall of TV screens goes black.
In the remaining light, I make out a figure ducking inside the window dressed all in black, save the white piping down the sides of his workout pants.
Nonononono.
Gavin whirls around just as Ford barrels into him. They struggle and fall onto Gavin’s enormous desk, Ford on top, Gavin under him.
Frozen in horror, I watch Gavin’s left arm flail behind him as they struggle. And then a shot rings out, muffled by flesh and clothes.
Ford slumps on top of Gavin, both of them sprawled across the giant desk. The figures on the surveillance screens are the only things that move. Ford’s body is absolutely still.
CHAPTER 40
The ringing silence after the gunshot is like so many of my nightmares. I run toward them, but my body can’t move fast enough. It feels like I’m wading through mud.
Gavin pushes Ford off him onto the floor and stands up, still holding his gun. “Everybody wants to be a hero.”
“No,” I’m saying over and over. It’s like a repeat of when Gavin was shot. A mirror image. Only it’s all backward now, because Gavin is alive. And he is the killer. I kneel down next to Ford. He’s still conscious, but barely. His hands cover his midsection.
I move his hands aside and peel his sweatshirt up, flinching as he cries out in pain. The pool of blood just below his chest, spreading outward from the hole in his clean white T-shirt. The blood spot the size of a baseball, quickly spreading.
In a second it’s a softball. A moment later, a volleyball.
The police sirens I heard before are much louder now. I glance at Gavin and can see that he hears them, too, then focus on Ford, pulling him to me, rocking him back and forth. It’s just like before. Only this time, it’s not an act. The blood is very real, and very warm. That’s the difference, I realize. Gavin’s blood was cold. This is hot and sticky, and I can smell the rusty tang of it as it seeps out of him. Ford is so pale, his eyes so black. He’s whispering something. I lean in to hear. “Fight.”
I turn around. Gavin is aiming the gun at my head, saying something I’m not listening to. The sirens get closer, and the sound mingles with the beating of my blood. I marvel at how blind I was not to notice the sadism in Gavin’s eyes. A stranger, I think t
o myself.
And then, like the yellow haze that sits on top of Bedlam on an air-quality alert day, a surreal absence of fear settles over me, and it’s as if I’ve already left my body. I stand up and get ready to kick the gun from his hands, when the sound of the sirens grows from loud to deafening.
Gavin lowers his gun a little, wincing at the noise. “YOU ARE SURROUNDED,” a voice booms from a bullhorn in the front of the house. “COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.”
There’s the screech of brakes, doors slamming. Riot police shouting over bullhorns, and, from downstairs, the sound of dozens of windows opening all at once, with partiers jumping out them. The wail of sirens fills the blood-scented air of Gavin’s office. And then the sound of boots on the stairs. Climbing.
Gavin pushes past me, his eyes completely blank, as if I’m not even here anymore. I’m sure he has a perfect place to hide and hopes to slip out before the cops make it to the third floor.
I watch him run down the hall for a moment before I kneel down again with Ford, listening to him wheeze like a broken accordion.
“Go after him,” he manages, each syllable an effort. “He’s getting away.”
The riot police are thumping up the stairs. It’s not long before this whole house fills with feargas or something worse. And Ford has a record of petty theft. They’ll think he’s Syndicate. He could die before they’re done arresting everyone, and they probably wouldn’t care.
I shake my head. “Forget him.”
Ford’s eyes widen, then go kind of blank. He’s losing so much blood.
“This is going to hurt,” I say, wrapping his arms around my shoulders and pulling him onto my back. He groans, but he holds on as tightly as he can. “Stay with me, Ford,” I yell. “You are not allowed to pass out.”
“Or you’ll kill me,” he slurs, his labored breath hot on my ear.
“Good one. Keep the zingers coming, okay?”
I wrap my hand in one of Gavin’s luxury curtains and punch out as much broken glass as I can from the window frame, then duck out the window with Ford on my back, moving carefully so as not to cut or scrape him. Below us there’s a ledge—I think the kitchen roof. Holding on to Ford, I do the only thing I can think of to get us out. I squeeze his limp arms around my back and jump. Ford howls with pain when we hit the roof and falls from my grasp. I hoist him onto my back again and shimmy down the drainpipe.
Ford’s blood has already seeped through his sweatshirt, through my coat. I feel it on my back. Each movement produces a muffled groan.
“We can do this,” I say to Ford as we touch down on the blue-green lawn, hoisting him higher onto my shoulders just as the hiss of feargas canisters reaches my ears, loud and sinister even from outside the house. “Just a little longer, okay?” He barely makes a sound even though the jump must have hurt a lot. He’s losing consciousness, I realize, my head pounding with raw panic.
I run past the pool and into a thicket of trees, past police cars that are making their way onto the lawn. Luckily, nobody stops us.
There’s a gap in the security fence, and I’m just able to squeeze through it with Ford on my shoulders. We run through the yard of another mansion until we reach the street. I turn right, quickening my pace as best I can with Ford’s 180-pound body in my arms. I listen desperately, straining my supercharged hearing, the only sound I want to hear Ford’s heartbeat in my ears.
CHAPTER 41
Ford’s body seems to double in weight as I hurtle through the streets, my throat swelling with a raw ache, my legs pumping faster, faster, even as my arms feel like they can barely hold on to him another second. Every few minutes, I have to stop and change the position I carry him in, moving him from a sort of piggyback to throwing him over one shoulder like a sack of bricks. The entire back of my coat is now saturated with his blood. When I pause to listen for his breathing, it is that of a drowning man, gurgling with what must be blood.
I stop to move Ford’s body so it drapes over both my shoulders, and he groans, his liquid breaths coming slower and slower. “Ford!” I scream. “Stay awake! I’m getting you help.”
But his eyes are closed. He’s probably unconscious. I look around me, turning in a circle, looking for the nearest hospital. The decent hospitals, the ones not overrun by bacteria and death, are all in the direction of what I see now is a line of police cars cordoning off the North Side. The glass trapezoid of Bedlam University Hospital glitters just up the hill, but holding Ford, how will I ever get past all those police cars? The next closest hospital, about fifteen minutes away, is Saint Savior, a hospital my mother once called a glorified morgue.
Blood seeping from my shoulders down my coat sleeves, I make a snap decision and change course.
“Now we just sew up the wound,” Jax says through gritted teeth, a piece of black thread hanging out of her mouth. “And we wait.”
I nod miserably. “Okay.”
I’ve stood by and held Ford’s hand as Jax cut his blood-soaked shirt off him, searching his closed lids for movement. I’ve handed her sponges and suction tubes and scalpels when she asks for them. The bullet, gold-tipped, the back of it shredded and now sitting on the table next to me in a clear glass bowl smeared with blood, was lodged in his left lung. Blood had been pooling inside it, nearly drowning him.
Two inches higher, and it would have been his heart. Two inches higher, and he would have died instantly. I shiver in my leotard and tights, the scrubs Jax has loaned me providing no additional warmth.
“Come on,” I whisper as Jax threads the needle. Ford’s breathing isn’t wet and labored anymore. Thanks to the blood dripping into his arm—what kind of blood, or where it came from, I don’t dare ask Jax—the monitor attached to his heart emits a steady, regular beep instead of the rapid-fire staccato it was tracking when Jax first put it on him. But his olive skin is still so sallow, and his lung might be damaged for life, the bones around it shattered. Damaged for life. “Wake up.”
“He’s tough,” Jax says absently, all her focus on Ford’s wound and where best to stitch. “If anyone can handle this, it’s Ford.”
Just before Jax pushes the needle through his skin, his eyelids flutter open. His brown eyes make contact with mine, and I can see he’s still there, still himself. His hand squeezes mine weakly, just for a second, and all the tears I’ve been holding begin to fall.
“I’m so sorry,” I blubber. “You should have let me drown that day. All I do is ruin things and get people hurt—”
I stop, realizing he’s trying to speak. His voice is barely a whisper. I lean in, careful not to let my hair dangle across his face. “No sorries,” he rasps. “S’okay, Green. . . . My whole life, I’ve been waiting . . .”
But just as quickly as he woke up, he falls unconscious again.
“Totally normal,” Jax says. “He’ll be in and out for a while.”
I study Jax as she stitches Ford’s chest, the needle moving back and forth under his taut, smooth skin. Her tattoo flashes on her arm every other stitch. The little red heart around the word Noa.
“Who is Noa?” I ask at last, after Jax ties a knot in the thread and has put a white gauze bandage on top.
Jax purses her lips, not answering for a long time. Finally she looks up at me and takes a breath. “She was my daughter.”
Then she corrects herself. “She is my daughter. No longer living among us, though.”
“I’m sorry,” I murmur, my eyes filling up with tears again when I imagine everything Jax has been through. “What happened to her?”
“Congenital defect in the left ventricle of her heart. She was six years old.” Jax draws a shaky breath, her blue eyes magnified behind her thick glasses, steady on mine. “She was dying. All the medical interventions had failed. We had the best specialists. I called in every favor I could through the university lab. And when eight different surgeons told us it was a matter of days before she died, I tried to correct it myself—” She shakes her head and her silver curls bounce. “And . . . I f
ailed. She died on the table. My husband pressed charges. I lost my lab, my license, my family, everything. All at once. And now . . . well, now I’m here.” Jax winces, then forces a pained smile.
I study Jax, absorbing this horrible story. A few tears snake again down my cheeks. “How do you do it? How do you go on each day, living with the death of someone you love?”
Jax looks at me and sighs. A sad smile plays at the corners of her lips. “It’s things like saving you that give me a little peace. The anomaly isn’t being unable to save people—that happens all the time, to all of us, every day. There are people everywhere suffering, people we can’t help. It’s the few people you do help that get you through.”
I look at the filthy floor, my throat aching as Jax starts fussing with Ford’s breathing tubes.
For the next hour, we both sit silently watching over him, waiting. Ford does not wake up. The only sounds in the lab are his shallow breathing, the heart monitor, and Mildred banging her food dish against the bars of her cage.
My whole life, I’ve been waiting . . .
I let my fingers travel through his soft black hair.
Wake up, Ford. You’re the one, of the two of us, I want to tell him. The one with no blood on your hands. The one who still has a chance at being happy. A few salty tears slide into my mouth.
I stare down at him, willing him to wake up and tell me: What is it you’ve been waiting for?
CHAPTER 42
“That’s all I know,” I say for the twentieth time, making sure to look directly into the eyes of the two police officers seated across from me at a bare metal table bolted to the floor. Liars look away, and I need them to think I have nothing to hide. “I’ve told you everything.”
At least everything I can. Which isn’t much.
The police interrogation room is freezing. I shift my weight on the hard metal chair, trying to find a way to get comfortable. But at four in the morning, after everything I’ve been through tonight, comfort is unlikely to find me ever again.
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