Mockingbird (A Stepbrother Romance)

by Graham, Abigail

  "I have the combination. I need the rotating encryption key." He never looks at her. He glares at me instead.

  What comes next, I was not expecting.

  Carols starts crying. She gasps for air and starts sobbing, falls on Diana's shoulder and starts sobbing like a little girl, complete with screams. Her anguished gasps and moans of sorrow slice through me like a knife. Diana glares at me, but only for a moment.

  "Look," I growl at my father, "Look at what you did."

  He looks at Carol, and Diana, and looks at me.

  "So fucking what."

  "You miserable piece of shit," I snarl.

  "You go down, I go down," he says. "You think you can do anything to me without going up the river yourself, you stupid little fool? I always knew you were mad for cunt but I didn't think you'd get so stuck on one you'd fuck us both over. You realize I'm going to have to do this the hard way now."

  "What hard way?"

  "You should have searched me."

  The gun comes out so fast, his hand blurs. I barely have time to move.

  He aims right at Diana.

  "Don't move. You so much as twitch and I'll blow the little tart's brains all over her bitchy mother. And shut the fuck up, Carol."

  To my surprise, Diana's mom goes quiet.

  "Nobody. Move. Understood?"

  I nod.

  "Don't fuck with me. My life matters much more to me than any of yours. Especially you, traitor. I taught you everything."

  "You ruined me. I'm a piece of shit because of you."

  "Whatever. Now, let's all do exactly as I say. You two," he shakes the gun at the girls, "By the front door. Slowly. If you try to make a run for it I'll fucking shoot you."

  Diana nods. Carol stands up, and her eyes never leave him as they walk to the front door and stand there. I think about lunging, but he just knows. He looks right at me.

  If looks could kill, he'd be a greasy smear on the floor.

  "You're not my father. You're just some guy that fucked my mother."

  "To think I thought you had some potential. I started buying higher quality rubbers after you, by the way," he says, almost casually. "Get up and go over there with them. No sudden moves. Try anything and I'll empty the fucking gun into that little bitch's back. Understood?"

  I nod, and rise to my feet. I keep my hands away from my body, and my eyes on the gun. He's smart not to point it my way. It wouldn't stop me. If I go at him now, he'll shoot Diana. Just the thought makes it feel like my bones are grinding together.

  He has his finger on the damned trigger. I walk over and shield the women with my body, for all the good it would do. The gun dips as he leans on the table to get up, and I think about it. If I took him by surprise, hit him at the right angle…

  He's taught me all my moves. He sees me thinking it and he knows exactly what I would do. What the fuck am I supposed to do about that?

  "Good," he rasps, clutching his side.

  Might be a broken rib. It could slow him down, make him weak on that side, if I-

  Damn it, he sees me looking.

  "This is what's going to happen. Diana is going to open the door and you two will walk through it. If you run or raise any kind of alarm, I'll shoot her in the back, right above her pelvis. Long, unpleasant way to die. Understood?"

  I nod, and look at Carol. I don't know what to make of her. She's gone still, like she's just accepting it.

  "Do it."

  Diana steps to the side and looks at me the whole time she slowly opens the door. I take Carol by the arm and lead her out, my heart pounding as I wait for Diana to follow. She steps out, and then my father lurches behind her. He's pulling his right leg a little. Not bad, just a little. Not enough for me to make a move. He's watching, always one eye on me.

  "Close together. No running, no sounds. We're going to walk over to the loading dock and inside the building. Carol, are you ready to open the vault for me?"

  She doesn't hesitate. "Yes. Take whatever it is and leave us alone."

  "I'm taking the Lost Vermeer."

  "I don't care. Just don't hurt Diana."

  Diana flinches at that.

  "Let's move," I whisper to them. I take each of their arms in my hands and walk between them.

  "I'm going to get us out of this," I whisper. "I promise."

  "I know," Diana whispers back.

  "Quiet," my father growls.

  It's not a long walk. Damn it, why couldn't someone have hung around? The security guy was supposed to be close by. If I could get his attention…

  Dad will shoot Diana. No, I can't risk that. It's dark out, now, but the path is bright, lit by high pressure sodium lamps. He has one eye on me but Dad has his head on a swivel, looking everywhere. I walk slowly, forcing Diana and her mother to do the same. I don't know what he'll do if he thinks we're going to try to bolt. Finally, we reach the loading dock.

  "Stop. Do exactly as I say."

  I freeze, and the girls stop on either side of me.

  "Carol. Go up and open the gate."

  She nods, walks up the ramp, and opens the gate.

  "You two. Inside. Stay still, Carol, or I'll paint the wall with Diana's brains."

  Carol freezes. I lead Diana inside. She's shaking like a leaf. She must be terrified. Once I'm in Carol follows, and then my father.

  "Open the vault."

  There it is. I've never actually seen it.

  "I need Diana's help," Carol says.

  "I know. Get over there and do it. Either of you make a move and I'll kill the boy."

  For emphasis, he puts the gun to the back of my head.

  Fuck.

  "He'll do it," I say, softly.

  He pushes the gun harder into the back of my neck. "Shut. Up."

  Carol nods to Diana and they walk to the vault door. There's a keypad on both sides, too far apart for a single person to reach both.

  "The passcode is your birthday. After it's in we need to enter the encryption key. I'll tell you what to do."

  Diana gives her a trembling nod, and they type in the code. Carol calls out the letters and numbers for the encryption key. Diana's hand is shaking like a leaf. I can see Carol tensing up as she puts in the last letters, calls them out to Diana. Finally the vault opens with a dull thudding clang and the door moves, just a little. Carol grabs it and pulls with her weight, walking back as it swings open. The inside is smaller than I expected.

  "Where is it?" my father demands.

  "There," Carol nods at the table in the middle.

  There's a crate in the center. It's… little. I seriously thought it would be bigger than that.

  "This is how it's going to work. You two, get in the vault. Apollo is going to set the painting on the floor and get in there with you."

  Carol's eyes go wide.

  "Wait, no! You can't!"

  He snaps the gun away from my head to aim at her. "Yes, you can."

  "No, please! If they don't know the painting is missing, no one will check in the vault for days, we'll suffocate-"

  "That would be terrible," he says, and shoots her.

  The bang next to my head is more than a gunshot, it's a physical force. I stumble sideways. Diana lets out an almost inhuman cry of fear and aguish. Carol falls against the wall and slides to the floor, leaving a smear of blood down the concrete as she goes.

  "Mom!" Diana wails, "Mom!"

  "You son of a bitch," I roar, turning. I swing both hands. I"m too close. He got too close to me. His arm is out straight and I catch his elbow. It goes off again, and Diana dives to the floor. We go down in a heap, grappling. I claw at his hand, trying to get the gun away. Something drives into my side, and agony spreads through my body like liquid fire.

  I jerk back and swing at him. We turn and twist. I smash my fist down on his hand, and his fingers fly open. The gun skids away. We roll. My side is hot, sticky. I touch my shirt and my hand comes away red. He's got a punch blade in his hand, a little knife with a t-handle so the po
int sticks out between his fingers.

  He stabbed me.

  We roll. He tries to get on top of me. I catch his wrist, keep him from driving the point into my temple.

  He grabs something on the table and I narrowly avoid the edge of a sword taking off half my face. He's got a sword.

  Of course. We're in a museum.

  He knows all my moves. He's always been able to beat me at everything. I look past him, over his shoulder, see Diana holding her mother, desperately clutching the wound in her side.

  There's one move I never used on him.

  I knee him in the groin.

  He howls in agony. It's enough. I shove him off me, roll, and as I put my hands down to get up, my fingers close around supple, well-worn leather.

  We would end up doing this in a place with swords lying everywhere.

  I yank the museum piece free of the scabbard. It's not the type I'm used to sparring with or training for, but the commonly held believe that European swords are clumsier or heavier than Japanese weapons is a myth. This is actually lighter than my practice blade, with a wicked, nearly four foot blade that tapers to a wicked point. The blade ripples a little when it catches the light, from the smith's hammering. It's the real deal.

  My father goes after his gun.

  "En garde, motherfucker!" I bellow, and I almost have him.

  His defensive swipe, barely deserving to be called a parry, is weak. He strikes my blade aside and rolls to his feet, tosses the punch blade and lunges at me.

  This isn't a game. We've never practiced with even blunted metal swords, much less live steel. This is it. This is the real deal. I have to keep him off the sword. I have to beat him. That might mean I have to kill him. Diana's mom is going to bleed out.

  He's been training me for this the whole time and never even knew it.

  Blades clash, flat on flat, as I try to hack an opening into his defense. If I tire I lose my advantage, but I feel worse every second, like every beat is draining blood from my head. I'm bleeding bad from my side, where that blade sawed into my flesh, just above my bottom rib. My father presses his advantage, striking at the side he knows is weakest. He's not holding back, he's not teaching me, he's trying to kill me. Every swing almost makes it. He goes high when I think he's going to go low, he feints, he defies my attempts to read his muscle movements and looks to predict where he will strike. All at once the advantage is gone.

  Then I hear Diana wailing, as she clutches her mother. Carol is ashen, her face slack.

  I throw myself at my father as I never have before, molten fury exploding in my chest, surging down my limbs as renewed energy. Swing strike, parry. He's moving back. He hurt his leg on the table, it's making some of his strokes and parries slow, off of the forms. I let him swing at me and my parry turns into a riposte, melding defense with attack.

  It was a feint. The point of his sword goes into my thigh and through and out the other side. My arms fall slack to my sides in shock. It fucking hurts. He draws it out and I fall to my knees, then onto my side, clutching the wound. Holy shit.

  I'm going to die. He raises the sword over his head, about to crudely bury it in my skull, like he would if he was chopping wood.

  Bang.

  In a movie, a red dot would appear on his chest and he'd look down in confusion. In real life, there's a puckered dark red flower on his chest and the sword goes flying out of his hands as blood paints the wall behind him in a splat, audibly distinct from the gunshot and even his groan.

  Diana pulls the trigger again and again and again and empties the gun almost before it hits the ground. When my father hits the wall, he's already dead. His chest looks like a piece of meat that someone took a tenderizing mallet to. He doesn't say anything. He just falls down all in an awkward boneless heap and Diana drops the gun and starts shrieking.

  I'm looking at my leg. I'm bleeding.

  A lot.

  That doesn't seem important, though.

  I'm sleepy. Really sleepy.

  Diana is screaming at me.

  She won't let me go to sleep.

  Chapter 14: Diana

  The time is just gone.

  It comes to me in flashes, like I'm reliving it while I live it. I can feel the kick of the gun in my hand, the checkered grips digging into my skin as I pull the trigger over and over and over until the top locks back and it's empty. I can see Apollo's father slumped against the wall. He doesn't look peaceful or have a frozen sneer or a faraway look. He looks confused, if anything. His face is just slack. I can feel the same hand pressed to my mother's side, holding in her blood with a handkerchief I found somewhere. She looks so pale, like all the color is leaking out of her through her wound.

  Apollo is lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood. I'm screaming at him to move, to get up, until my throat is raw. Bob Anderson runs into the room.

  Then I'm in an ambulance between two gurneys. There's plastic tubes and wires everywhere. I hear my mother's ribs crack as the EMT gives her CPR. Apollo isn't moving.

  It's like five minutes has passed, but hours have gone missing. I'm sitting on a bench outside an operating room. It's built into the wall, in front of a window, facing the door. It's not like a TV operating room door, the swingy kind with the round porthole windows. It's unusually wide but it's just a door. Charity has her arms around my shoulders, and I can't stop crying into her. At least not for the first few hours. Then I just sit there, shell-shocked, staring at nothing.

  Please. Please. Please.

  It takes fourteen hours before the doctor comes out. He's not covered in blood but he does have a doctor's mask hanging around his neck like a weird bleached necktie. His hands are very clean.

  "Diana?"

  "Yeah," I croak.

  "Your mother is going to make it."

  I nod. My chin trembles and Charity's grip tightens.

  "The bullet went through her side, but it broke one of her ribs and collapsed her left lung. She's going to be out for a few days. It will be a long recovery, but she should be back to a hundred percent eventually."

  I nod again.

  "We'll page you when she's been moved to her room, okay? There's no need to sit out here for hours. It's going to be a while before we move her. She's stable. She's safe."

  He stands there for a minute like he's trying to figure out something to add, something comforting to say. You'd think after enough practice it would come naturally. It probably doesn't.

  Time to go.

  The last time I saw Apollo he was unconscious. His surgery was simpler, he was moved to the intensive care ward faster. A puncture wound to his right side and a stab wound through his leg. It was a miracle that the blade didn't hit any major arteries, or he'd have bled out before the ambulance arrived no matter what I did. I can still feel myself freezing as he laid there and I thought Mom was dying in my arms. When people say they freeze up it's like the mean they go still. I felt frozen, like all the blood drained out of me, too, and ice replaced it and I just couldn't move.

  It takes work to steel myself to see him again. The last I was up here was lying in the hospital bed with all the machines beeping around him and blood in plastic bags leaking back into his body to replace what he'd lost. He looked so small. When we met one of the first things I noticed was how he towered over me. I stop in the corridor and take a deep breath, and slowly remove Charity's hand from my arm. No words are exchanged. She leans on the wall and looks down at the floor, her expression dark.

  I walk into the room, over to the bed, and my blood freezes again. Then I start screaming.

  A nurse comes running in and grabs me and before the first word is out of her mouth I grab her back and shake her.

  "Where is he?"

  She looks at the bed, at me, at the bed.

  "I…"

  She shakes loose and runs out of the room. I follow right on her heels as she runs behind the nurse's station to the computer.

  "He… we didn't move him, I…"

  Al
l the color is draining from her face. I run back into the room. I touch the bed, feeling the impression where his body lay before I went down to wait for Mom to come out. The sheets are still warm. The IV lines are dangling unhooked from the pole. The muted TV is tuned to Maury. He was just here. Back out into the hallway, running so fast I skid on the slick tiles. She runs to me, her face a mask of shock.

  "What-"

  "It doesn't matter, he's still here somewhere. Find him."

  "What? How-"

  "Look," I scream, and run away from her. Over my shoulder I see her mouth snap closed and she runs off. Down the hall, she grabs a security guard, yelling at him.

  I run. I run through wards, I run through doors that read EMPLOYEES ONLY, I run past security guards that turn on their heels to follow me. I smash through the doors into a stairwell and run down two at a time, so fast that later I'll wonder how I didn't break my neck. Think, Diana. Find him.

  On the first floor I stop, look around.

  Doctors. Doctors everywhere and…

  …one of them is limping, leaning on the wall. Favoring his right leg.

  I run up. Grab his arm.

  Apollo turns.

  "What the fuck are you doing?" I hiss. "Get back in bed. Now."

  "I can't, Diana."

  I start to say something but it dies in my throat, just rattles away to nothing.

  He grabs my arms. His hands are cold. Oh my God, he's still bleeding. Apollo you idiot, what are you doing?

  "Listen to me," he rasps, his voice breathy and weak. "I have to go."

  "What? Why?"

  "If I stay they'll start asking questions. Then they'll arrest me. I can't let that happen."

  I wriggle loose from his grip and he leans on the wall. He's so pale. When I get him back in the bed and safe I'm going to kill him.

  "So this is about you?"

  "No, it's about you. Your safety," he gasps. "Had to think it was real. Weren't supposed to find me. Needed you to think… I was dead…"

  He winces when he sees the look on my face as my expression crumples, my lips tremble, and hot tears cut lines down my cheeks. "You're just going to leave me? After all this? You bastard."

  "No," he shakes his head. "Never. Danger. You, your mom. Have to think I'm dead. Wait a while. Have things to fix. Things to put right. Have to. Trust me. I'll be back."