DADDY AT THE ALTAR

by Claire St. Rose

  I was pretty damn sure that Ruby would feel nothing at all.

  It made sense that he said he would take her back. Anything that would play along with this game she had going on until we could find a way to secure the situation. Because right now we were drawing the short straw, and we were wildly outnumbered.

  There wasn’t a lot of time to think. Ruby was just about ready to lose her mind, guessing by the look on her face and the way Daniel was swallowing hard. And I knew that in the next couple of seconds everything was going to come to point…whatever that may be. It was the silence before the storm, and the atmosphere was so heavy it was almost electric.

  Sure thing, Ruby started lifting that gun toward me. And it was loaded this time. The idea that it hadn’t been before was calming in retrospect, but I hadn’t known it then and I’d just about tasted my heart.

  The next thing I knew Daniel had that gun up and shots were firing. My mind went on autopilot. Everything was crystal clear, and I was hyper-aware. It was as if I was on call at the ER, and there was a life or death situation coming through my doors. Except that, this time, the life or death situation was Daniel and I.

  The car window shattered, and I didn’t even think as I threw my body toward the opening. I was jumping into the range of fire, but I was a hundred percent sure Daniel wouldn’t hit me, and a hundred percent sure that Ruby would.

  I launched myself out of the window as far as I could and sliced that razor blade across her wrist, cutting in deep. The tendons there were what permitted her to hold onto the gun, and if I even only damaged them she would drop it.

  Blood colored my own hand a cherry red, and the gun fell to the floor. Ruby screamed. Daniel swore. The gunshots made my ears ring. And then it was all over.

  I hung out of the car door halfway, blood on my hand. Ruby clutched her cut hand against her chest and moaned with an awful sound that would haunt me for a very long time. Daniel stood next to her, staring at me, chest rising and falling. He was breathing too fast. He needed to slow it down or he was going to hyperventilate. Until two seconds ago, I had completely been the victim at the business end of Ruby’s gun.

  Now it seemed that I was the only one who wasn’t in shock.

  Ruby sank to her knees, whimpering like a kitten. Daniel rushed to me, his gun still in his hands, and yanked the door open. He pulled me out and pulled me against him.

  “Oh, my god, oh, my god, oh, my god,” he kept muttering. Then he took me by the shoulders and pushed me away far enough to inspect my hand. “You’re bleeding.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s my blood.”

  He gently unfurled my hand and it stung. Sure enough, there was a cut in my palm and another crossing my front and middle finger. The blade must have caught me before I’d cut Ruby.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I think it’s more her blood than mine.”

  Ruby moaned, and Daniel spun around, kicking her gun away and pointing his own at her. It gave me time to look down at the men on the floor. I’d been too scared to see the damage, but I realized now that Daniel had only incapacitated them, not killed them. They were all writhing on the floor with gunshots in different places in their legs. They were all so hopped up on drugs I doubted they were going to be able to do much more than squirm on the floor.

  With Daniel pointing at Ruby’s head, she started crying. His face was void of expression, his reaction toward her was cold. She was bleeding badly. I’d cut her in a bad way and the blood was starting to make patches on her jacket and her jeans. I couldn’t just leave her like that. I knelt by her. My actions got a sharp intake of breath from Daniel, but I ignored him and took a bandage out of the medical bag that was within reach. I put gauze on the wound and then bandaged it up to stop the bleeding.

  “You’ll need stitches, but that’s going to hold back the blood for now,” I said to her.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  “Because not everyone is as coldhearted as you are, and I hurt you. The least I can do is make sure that you’re okay.”

  She swallowed hard, and I wondered for a moment if she was going to start wailing, but she just sat there, silently crying with tears running down her cheeks.

  I roughly bandaged my own hand and swore under my breath when it stung. When I was done, Daniel held out his hand to me and I took it with his good hand. He pulled me up so that I stood next to him, leaning against my car.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “All of this.” He shook his head. “Every single bit of this. You’re too good for it. I don’t want you tangled up in this mess.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. It sounded an awful lot like a breakup to me, but he didn’t say anything along those lines. Instead he just pulled me tight against his body with the arm that didn’t hold the gun and kissed me on the head.

  “I’m so glad you’re safe.”

  “Oh my god, Sarah,” I said, only thinking of her now that we were both safe. “Where is she?”

  “Taylor was getting her inside,” Daniel said.

  “Taylor? What?”

  He shook his head and sighed. He still had the gun trained on Ruby, but it didn’t look like she was going to get away.

  “He was here. He’d come all by himself to be a hero, and naturally, he’d gotten knocked out.” He glared at Ruby when he said it. She looked down at the ground, avoiding eye contact. Surely she knew how important his brother was to him.

  “They’re still in there,” he said. “I need you to call the police, and as soon as they’re here, we can go after them. I don’t want to leave you here with them, and I’m not sending you in there alone, either.”

  It was nice of him. I didn’t want to do either. I just wanted to stay out here, in the sun, with Daniel who had the gun and where it was safe.

  “I failed her,” I said. The past was threatening to overrun the present.

  “Who, Sarah?” Daniel asked.

  I nodded and tears pricked at my eyes.

  “I failed her the same way I failed Chrissy.”

  “Who?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out with a shudder. “She was my friend. We studied together before I decided to become a doctor. We got into the wrong crowd and did wrong things. There were always boys and booze and drugs.”

  He raised his eyebrows at the last word, but I didn’t care what he was thinking. It had been pressing against my insides, threatening to break free and taint everything in my present life for so long that I’d been suffocating. I’d been suffocating for years. It had to come out at some point, and this was a good a time as ever.

  “One night we’d taken something—I didn’t even know what it was—and she reacted to it. There were so many of us, and we were all too out of it to help her. She was dying right in front of me,” I let out a sob, “and I didn’t even do anything to help her.”

  I started crying, sobs wracking through me something awful, making me hiccup and my body shake in the worst way. It was as if I was there all over again.

  “I never even went to her funeral. I felt too bad. I was such a coward.”

  “It’s okay…” Daniel started, but I shook my head.

  “It’s not okay. It can never be okay. My best friend died because I was too pathetic to do something about the way our lives were going at that point, and no matter how many lives I save, she’s never coming back.”

  It was like something inside me cracked open, and it all bubbled out. I sobbed into Daniel’s chest, crying about what I’d lost, about what I’d failed to save, about how I’d never been able to make amends.

  “It’s not your fault,” Daniel said. “You made mistakes, but you didn’t kill her.’

  The words were hard to hear, but something inside me relaxed. Only a small bit, but it was there. All these years I’d blamed myself for her death.

  “And what’s happening with Sarah isn’t your fault either,” he said.

  “It’s mi
ne,” Ruby said, and when I turned my head, cheeks stained with tears, she was on the floor looking up at me. She had her injuredarm in her lap and her eyes were wide and wet with new tears. “All you’ve done, as far as I can tell, is be a good person. Throughout all of this I could find nothing about you that was wrong, and that made me hate you so much more because I could never be like that. I could never be as good as you are.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “Why are you saying all of this?” I asked. She was the bitch ex, the woman who had killed so many people and kidnapped my friend and pointed a gun at my head.

  She shrugged, not answering.

  Police sirens sounded in the distance. I frowned at Daniel.

  “Did you call them?” I asked. He shook his head. The door to the morgue opened and Taylor appeared first. Behind him, Sarah came out, too. Taylor had a welt on his head so big I could see it all the way from where I was standing, and when they walked to us, Sarah was limping.

  But they were alive. And they were holding hands.

  “Sarah,” I cried and ran to her. I grabbed her and hugged her so hard her spine cracked. She complained when I let go, and I realized she might be hurt more than just the limp.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, making sure she was okay. “I’m just so fucking glad you’re alive.”

  She straightened out again looking pale, but she grinned. “You’re not getting rid of me that easy,” she said.

  And thank God for that.

  The police started pulling in one by one. Officers got out, and the moment they had their guns trained, Daniel hung his own gun off his finger and put up his hands. The police made quick work of rounding up all the guns and knives, and then they started cuffing the men on the ground.

  Paramedics arrived on the scene and transported them in drips and drabs to the closest hospital with police escort. It took forever to give them our statements.

  My hand was checked and bandaged again in a better way than I’d been able to do with one hand. The cuts weren’t deep enough for stitches. Thank God. My hands would be ready enough get back to my shift at the hospital tomorrow. There were always lives that needed to be saved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Daniel

  There were police everywhere, and for a change, I was happy to see them. I didn’t have anything on my name that would lead them to arrest me for other outstanding shit, and this time they were here to help me.

  When they took all those knives away from the men on the floor, I could breathe easy for the first time. I’d been standing in the middle of the lot with the car at my back, pointing my gun at whoever moved. My nerves were fried—even for a big bounty hunter like me—and I was tired. I’d slept enough, but I was tired of this life, this drama.

  My soul was tired.

  When they’d taken Ruby away, she’d started crying again. She was going to be charged with multiple murders, possession, and a whole lot of other things that weren’t going to be shrugged off by some judge just because she had a pretty face. Even in my world, there was bad and there was worse.

  Somewhere between our break-up and now, Ruby had crossed that line big time. I watched two officers flank her as the paramedic checked her wrist and then told her she needed stitches. The bandage had saved her from needing more blood, and I glanced at Emily.

  Even when Ruby had threatened her life and the people she loved, she’d still showed her kindness and had taken care of her. That was worthy and honorable in its own right. It made her seem that much more perfect. Was I ever going to find something about her that I didn’t like?

  How did someone like her choose to be with someone like me? I didn’t know the answers to those questions, but that was fine by me. I wanted her at my side. You didn’t let go of a woman like that.

  “I’m going to have to ask you two to come down to the station with us,” a police officer said after the rest of them had been carted off. Another officer was saying the same to Taylor and Sarah, who stood a couple of feet from us. No doubt they were hearing the same thing. They’d been keeping apart from us, somehow knowing that we needed the distance, but Taylor had stayed close enough that we were still close.

  I glanced at him the same time he looked at me, and we locked eyes. He nodded first, and I returned the gesture. Whatever still needed to be sorted out between us, we were together in this and we were brothers until the very end.

  We all got in Emily’s car, and I followed a police car to the station. The idea of going in made me nervous. I had nothing they could use against me, not unless they started digging, but I still felt nervous going to a place where so many cops milled around.

  We parked in the visitor’s lot because we weren’t criminals, after all, and got out of the car. Sarah and Emily linked arms and walked first, heads close together so that it looked like they were hugging even when they were walking. Taylor and I followed behind them. It was the first chance we had to speak since last night.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, starting with the important things. The right things.

  “For what?”

  “For telling you that you weren’t strong enough to do this.” I hadn’t said it in so many words, but it had been implied in a million different ways.

  Taylor shook his head. “You were right.”

  “Maybe. But I should have let you come with me. I wanted to protect you. It’s all I’ve been trying to do since Dad left, and it feels like I keep failing you.”

  Taylor stopped and I did, too, so he wasn’t left behind.

  “I am where I am, and who I am, because of you. Not despite it, Daniel. You have no idea how grateful I am for everything you’ve done for me. I know it was hard. I know I didn’t make it easy.”

  I shook my head, not knowing what to say. My throat was swelling shut as if I wanted to cry, but damned if I was going to break down in front of my little brother.

  “I’m so glad you’re safe,” I said, and my voice was thick.

  “Thanks to you,” Taylor said. “You’ll always be my big brother, and no matter how much we fight, I’ll always love you.”

  I nearly choked when he said that. It was so easy for him to say something like that. I hadn’t been able to do it, not once in all the years it had just been him and me.

  “I love you, too,” I said, and the words were foreign in my mouth. “You know that, right?”

  Taylor nodded. “It’s why you’re so hard on me. I get you.”

  There was nothing else to say about it. I nodded and clapped him on the back. He nudged me with his elbow. I shoved him, and we ended up in a tussle the way boys do. Emily turned and looked at us when she reached the front door.

  “Are you coming?” she asked. We both quit and nodded. She smiled and opened the door, letting herself and Sarah into the station. Before we went in, Taylor cleared his throat.

  “She’s a good woman,” he said. I nodded.

  “She really is.”

  “What do you think of Sarah?” he asked.

  I chuckled. “She’s crass and looks like a handful.”

  “So, nothing different than what I grew up with,” Taylor said dryly. I chuckled and punched him on his shoulder before I let him walk into the station first and followed.

  The station was swarming with police, and I felt like we were in a hornet’s nest. The place smelled of smoke and coffee and the sound of phones ringing, cuffs clanging, and printers spitting out reports was a nice backdrop to it all. We walked to a desk, and the officer we’d spoken to at the morgue sat down because it. One by one, he took our statements. He wrote it all down. When he was done, he nodded, leaned back in his chair, and lit a cigarette.

  “So here’s the deal,” he said and looked at me. “You were in possession of a gun that was licensed to the morgue. Everything that happened, the shootings, was self-defense according to the amount of weapons we confiscated from the men you shot. They were so juiced up on drugs I’m relieved they didn’t all have guns, too.”

  I breathed out in relief.


  “As for the drugs, all the ingredients were in the morgue. The redhead confessed to everything.”

  “What’s going to happen to her?” Emily asked. I looked at her. She seemed worried. Ever-caring.

  “Nothing good. A hell of a lot of jail time since this is a not a death-sentence state.”

  Emily breathed out in relief.