Every Stolen Breath

by Kimberly Gabriel

  As the day drifts by, I read through news articles, blogs. I even scan reporters’ social media sites, despite their nauseating and self-indulgent content, but my research is futile. Not one person even tries to speculate Dopney’s reason for his visit, whether he knows people in the city, whether he came here often.

  Two hours into my search, I find a related link at the bottom of an article: “Amelia Finch is lying,” right next to Emi Vega’s immaculate face staring at me in a way that makes my skin crawl.

  She would call me out on CNN and get my name added to the top of the Swarm’s hit list. Emi Vega’s so desperate to skyrocket her career out of this city and into the national market, she’d sell her soul. Or mine.

  I grate my teeth. While my dad never openly talked with me about his case, I once overheard him tell my mom that whoever ran the Death Mob also made sure the attacks received very little national attention. At one point, my dad convinced CNN to run a story about it—something his critics hailed as self-indulgent, which wasn’t true. More exposure would have pressured this city into action. He was interviewed, but the segment never aired. As much as I would love for this story to be exposed to a national audience, I don’t trust Emi or anything she has to say.

  I click the link and press my temples.

  A split screen shows newscaster Gregory Irwin and Emi side by side with the little banner in the bottom right corner promoting the CNN logo. Emi’s about to say something ludicrous and exaggerated for higher ratings. Of course, CNN is willing to air her side of the story.

  I ball my hands at the sides of my head.

  Irwin introduces the interview. “While others believe that gangs are not involved in the return of Chicago’s Death Mob, Chicago-based investigative reporter Emi Vega believes the Latino gang that has been implicated in these attacks is being falsely accused.”

  Thinking I misheard it, I start the clip over and turn up the volume. Emi is against the gang theory?

  Irwin continues. “What’s your stance on this, Emi? Do you believe city officials are wasting time pursuing gang involvement?”

  The screen narrows in on Vega, sporting a more toned-down look than she typically flaunts for Chicago news.

  “Yes, I do. Every gang in Chicago, including the Latin Royals, has denied any affiliation with the Death Mob murders. In fact, gangs have not claimed responsibility since the flash muggings in the early 2000s. Those assaults involved anywhere from ten to twenty participants, smaller numbers than the attacks that have plagued the city for the last decade. My sources insist gangs have had no part in these murders, and there is plenty of evidence to substantiate that.”

  A nervous energy rushes through me. I can’t believe she just disputed the whole thing.

  “What kind of evidence?”

  Emi cocks her head. “In the last five years, Chicago has spent over half a million dollars placing high-tech surveillance cameras around the city. Yet none of these cameras have captured an attack. Every attack has occurred just outside the cameras’ view. Anywhere from fifty to one hundred teenagers participate in these mobs, but there’s been no footage to identify any of them.”

  Greg Irwin leans in. “Are you suggesting the attackers have intimate knowledge of the city’s surveillance?”

  Emi lifts an eyebrow and tilts her head. Her caramel-colored hair doesn’t move. “I’ve heard claims that cameras were repositioned just before an attack. Gangs are well connected, Greg. But this suggests a sophisticated level of organization and involvement beyond the capabilities of local gangs.”

  I’ve waited months—years—for someone to agree with my dad’s theory. And of all people, it’s Emi Vega. I gnaw on my bottom lip and wait for the part about me.

  Irwin overgesticulates with his hands. “Has this ever been brought up before?”

  Emi nods her head. “Yes. It was part of Steven Finch’s investigation before he died.” For once she doesn’t rhapsodize a tangent, which makes me uneasy. She knows more about my dad’s case that she isn’t sharing. Things I don’t know.

  “Let’s talk about Finch’s daughter, who’s now the sole witness to the first attack proceeding her father’s. Finch claims this is a coincidence, that she was at Navy Pier to honor her father’s service to the city. Do you believe her?”

  I inhale a sharp burst of air.

  “It seems too great a coincidence for her to be on that pier at the exact time and place of the first attack since her father’s murder.”

  They flash to pictures of me leaving the mayor’s house. My Tory Burch coat. Cullen Henking and me outside my school.

  Heat crawls across my skin.

  “You’re saying that Miss Finch knew about the attack ahead of time?”

  “I am, which also implies she successfully predicted what local city officials and the FBI could not. If I’m right, what she knows could be enough to reopen her father’s case.”

  “Then why do you think Miss Finch doesn’t come out and share what she knows?”

  “According to Steven Finch, these attacks are run by people with power, wealth, and resources. They pull off premeditated attacks without consequence and frame gang activity for them. If his theory is right, and Amelia Finch has information that threatens the Death Mob’s infrastructure, she could be at risk.”

  Irwin smirks like this is amusing, an entertaining event. “Some might accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist.”

  Emi nods. “Let me put it this way, Greg. If something were to happen to her, it would show the world that the Death Mob is bigger than any of us have speculated. Steven Finch’s case would be reopened, and I’d imagine the city of Chicago would be under a tighter federal investigation than our city has ever seen before.”

  The video flashes back and forth between Greg Irwin and Emi Vega, who continue to talk like they’re experts on my life, but I don’t hear them. I can’t get past the fact that Emi just sold me out to millions of people as a liar and a marked girl.

  I jump to my feet and pace. She’s going to get me killed. For whatever reason, I think of my mom and what another family death will do to her. Then I envision Emi beaming over her own success at breaking into the national market without giving a second thought to what this has done to us.

  I grab one of the Chinese medicine balls and chuck it across the room. It crashes into the doors on our TV stand. Glass explodes like colorless fireworks, spewing shards around my living room floor.

  I stand there in silence, immobile and terrified, barely aware of the neighbor’s dog barking like he’s about to lose his mind, when I hear the loud and sudden rapping on our back door.

  CHAPTER 14

  They’ve come to kill me. Right now. In the middle of my living room. A hit man with a gun waits for me to open the door and end it all, while my body refuses to budge, trapped by the certainty that I’m about to die.

  Then logic kicks in. What kind of hit man knocks first?

  I shake life into my limbs and inhale the courage back into my spine. Halfway to the door, a searing pain shoots into the ball of my foot. It burns like hell, but I keep hobbling toward the door, unable to feel anything until I know who it is.

  A muffled silhouette waits on the other side of the sheer curtains.

  “Lia?” The voice is familiar. “Are you okay?”

  Ryan. I halt. Knowing who it is should relieve the tension, but it doesn’t. And I don’t know why. Because I can’t figure him out? Because I don’t trust him?

  The neighbor’s dog won’t shut up. It grates against my already frayed nerves. Someone needs to give that animal a sedative before a reporter from the front finds a guy from the Swarm on my back porch.

  Ryan bangs on the door again, making me jump. “Lia!”

  I unlock the door and open it a few inches. Ryan wears a brown crew neck sweater and fitted jeans. His hair is styled. His massive frame, capable of rendering me helpless yesterday, looks slender, athletic.

  I partially close the door, narrowing his view of me—my ric
kety T-shirt, my pajama pants.

  He peers inside like I’m hiding something—or someone.

  I cross my arms over my chest, hoping to conceal the gaping hole in the armpit of my shirt. At least I put on a bra this morning.

  “I heard a crash.” The concern on his face and in his voice throws me. Yesterday, through everything that happened, he remained serious and calculating.

  I don’t know how to respond. Ryan looks like a guy I’d go to school with or have a crush on, not a killer or a stalker or whatever he is.

  Then, like flipping a switch, his expression turns hard. He puts one hand on the door. “You’re bleeding.”

  I look down at my foot. Blood smears the floor beneath it.

  “I’m fine.” I lift it to find a shard of glass jammed into the ball of my foot, surrounded by a line of dark red. “I threw something at the TV.” Seeing the wound makes me realize how badly it stings. “It hit a glass cabinet.”

  Ryan pushes the door open and glances at the TV as if to assess the damage. He makes a noise—either a grunt or an attempt at laughing, I’m not sure. Then he stalks into my house—uninvited.

  “What are you doing?” I hobble after him. Even if he’s dressed like a normal person or someone I’d know, he can’t just walk in.

  Ryan surveys the glass, stepping over the broken pieces, and retrieves the stainless steel medicine ball from the floor. He sets it on the coffee table. Somehow, it doesn’t roll off.

  Ryan scrutinizes the living room and kitchen.

  I limp over to the table and set the medicine ball back into its little wooden box. My foot throbs harder with each pathetic attempt to walk.

  He rounds the corner into our main hallway.

  “Where are you going?” I call, wanting to chase him down and shove him back outside.

  His footsteps head toward the front of the house, followed by the opening of doors—the office, the hall closet, the bathroom.

  I prop myself against the arm of the couch. “You can’t just barge in and walk around like you own the place.”

  The pain in my foot intensifies. I brush fallen strands of hair back into my ponytail before inspecting it. Of course. I managed to step on the longest piece of glass, which has burrowed itself under my skin like a parasite.

  Ryan returns to the living room. He leans over me to study my foot. His shoulder grazes my hair, making me hypersensitive to the narrow space between us.

  Thank God I brushed my teeth.

  “You need tweezers.”

  I make the mistake of breathing. He smells clean, outdoorsy. My stomach flips—a disturbing reaction for all kinds of reasons. This guy is in the Swarm. “Why are you here?”

  Ryan walks over to the kitchen cabinets next to our fridge and opens them. He pulls down our first aid kit and rifles through it. “You weren’t at school,” he says, like I’m not aware of that.

  “Why aren’t you at school?”

  I doubt he goes to school at all. For all I know he lives on the streets—except he’s well-dressed and drives a silver Audi with leather seats.

  He grabs a handful of God knows what before closing the lid. “Wanted to check on you. Tweezers?”

  It takes me a second before I realize he’s gathering all of this for me. I’m not the damsel in distress he’s making me out to be. “I’m very capable of taking care of myself.”

  “You can barely walk.” His tone is dry and condescending.

  I’m about to point out that sitting on a couch all day doesn’t require a lot of walking, but somehow that makes me sound pathetic. “How did you know where our first aid kit is?”

  Ryan shrugs his left shoulder. “Everyone keeps it in the kitchen.” He goes toward the front of the house and heads up the stairs.

  “Now where are you going?” I shout after him.

  I think of my room littered with clothes, my underwear lying in the middle of my floor. “Tweezers are in the bathroom at the top of the stairs. Left drawer.” A hint of panic taints my voice, which I hope he doesn’t recognize.

  If he stops at the guest bathroom, he won’t pass my room—if he’s even looking for tweezers at all. For all I know, he could be upstairs planting bugs or cameras around my room for the Swarm, who wants a tighter hold on my activity.

  I listen to him rummage through the drawer in the bathroom. Then everything is still.

  I hop off the arm of the couch and limp toward the front of our house. Just as I turn the corner to the hallway, I run into him. I stumble backward on my stupid injured foot. My leg buckles, and my hand flies out to brace myself against the wall. But Ryan catches me by the wrist. His grip is solid. It immediately steadies me.

  He pulls me upright, one hand pressing against my right hip to balance me as if I might fall again. His hands are cool, drawing my attention to how thin my pajama pants are.

  Goose pimples fan across my hip, my stomach.

  I shake his hands away, grit my teeth, and hobble back to the couch. “I couldn’t hear you.” I fall into the couch and prop my leg on the coffee table.

  Ryan sits on the edge of the table and lifts my foot. His hand is rough—from years of fighting, I imagine—but he’s gentle as he studies it. Maybe I should shake him away and kick him out, especially with my body overreacting every time he gets close. But with Emi’s claim that I’m lying, the Swarm could be on their way over to find out what I know. It suddenly makes being alone less appealing. As long as Ryan’s not the one here to kill me.

  Ryan picks up the tweezers. “Were they showing clips of you and Cullen Henking?”

  I try to avoid his eyes narrowed in concentration, the straight line of his lips.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You threw a metal ball at your TV. I’m guessing you saw something you didn’t like.”

  I tug at the bottom of my shirt to cover my midriff. Heat creeps up my neck at the thought of him seeing that charade with Cullen. I feel like I should defend myself, make it clear I would never actually date that pompous politician-in-training. Ryan and everyone else in Chicago must think I’m some flighty, superficial schoolgirl like all Cullen Henking groupies.

  The tweezers grip the glass, which tugs at my skin. When he slides it out, my foot feels like it’s being sliced open. I clench my jaw, hoping he can’t tell how much it hurts.

  “Emi Vega called me a liar,” I say, trying to keep my voice from sounding strained.

  Ryan’s expression remains controlled. He concentrates on my foot and the giant shard of glass he just pulled out.

  “She told the whole world I know something about the Death Mob.”

  He glances up at me before depositing the glass on a paper towel next to him. It’s thin but longer than I expected—an inch at least—and smeared with blood.

  Ryan picks up a wet washcloth—from our linen closet—and presses it against the cut. After a few seconds, he pulls it back and examines my foot. I’m acutely aware of his fingers wrapped around my heel and ankle. His hand is still cold, but every nerve ending in my foot ignites where he touches me. I adjust myself, trying to sit taller as he begins dabbing the wound.

  “I’m not saying my lie was good, but . . .”

  Ryan stares at me with an intensity that clamps my mouth shut. His dark brow furrows, and his grip on my heel tightens. I can’t help but wonder whether I’ve made a mistake by sharing.

  It feels like forever before he looks away. He tosses the washcloth aside and picks up a bandage. “It’s deep,” he says, applying the adhesive sides. “Probably could use stitches.”

  “I’m not about to spend another minute in the ER.”

  His eyes flicker back to my face. That intensity again. I press my back into the couch and pull my foot away.

  “There has to be a reason,” he says, so quietly I almost miss it.

  “For what?” It takes me longer than it should to realize what he’s talking about.

  “Vega liked your dad.”

  The way he says it, like he
knew my dad, like he knew things about him that I didn’t know, angers me.

  “Emi Vega wants a national spotlight,” I say, like it’s not the most obvious thing in the world. “She’s unethical. She’d do anything to boost her fame.” Including sell me out to a band of savage teens that probably wants me dead.

  Ryan grabs the glass, the bandage wrapper, and the washcloth and heads toward the kitchen.

  I get stuck on the washcloth. If he went through our linen closet, he definitely passed my room. I turn my entire body toward him, staring him down. “How did you know my dad again?”

  Ryan throws the trash away beneath our kitchen sink. “I told you.”

  “You’re the one who told me not to trust anyone.”

  “I got in trouble. He helped me out,” Ryan says, heading toward the pantry. When he comes back with a broom and dustpan, it hits me. He’s too comfortable in my house.

  I jump up, forgetting about my foot until I’ve already put weight on it and it’s burning. “How do you know where everything is?”

  Ryan’s steps hitch for a fraction of a second.

  “The first aid kit? The trash can? The broom?”

  I know before he says anything that it’s from watching me. He’s been stalking me for who knows how long. I glance at our kitchen windows and imagine him outside in the dark, staring at me as I eat dinner, do homework, watch TV. Is he the one who took the picture? Wrote the warning on my grill? I become self-conscious, as though millions of insects are crawling all over my skin.

  “Get out.” I choke over the words.

  “Lia . . .” He starts toward me and speaks in a calm, collected voice like he’s speaking to a child.

  I grab the phone and dial 911.

  “It takes the cops exactly seven minutes to get to my house. I suggest you get a head start.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Ryan’s eyes are callous, metallic, the color of stainless steel. “Put the phone down.”

  My thumb hovers over the send button.

  “I’ve been here before,” he says, “with your dad.”

  It’s a trick. I’m sure of it.