Murder

by Ella James

  I’m crying again. “I don’t get it.” I look from Dove to Michael, suddenly afraid. “Should I be worried. Like…”

  “It’s settled, Gwenna. Bear turned himself in, in Colorado. It’s all settled.”

  My pulse races. “He hasn’t called me.”

  Dove steps in front of me. “Gwenna. Do you remember that night? The night in Breckenridge, when you and Bear—” I’m nodding, so he pauses; when I don’t speak, he goes on. “He told you it was him, and you were very upset. Sliced your fingernails into his neck—” Dove points to his own throat— “cut up his face. He got in the snow and laid there so you could go at him, he let you punch him, got his nose all busted up, black eye right here…” Dove gestures to his own eye. “When we found him, he had called your friend Jamie and waited with you while she got there. I guess you passed out. We found Barrett walking through the woods. He didn’t know what day it was, what time it was. He was in shock.”

  “He thought that we were there to kill him,” Michael puts forth.

  Dove’s eyes hold mine. “That’s what he wanted.”

  His words slice at my soul. My poor Bear. I try to imagine myself beating him up, but I can’t remember. My chest aches. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Their eyes meet for a moment. This time, Michael speaks. “Gwenna, we understand your feelings. How betrayed you must feel. Angry. No one has been in your position here but you. And we respect that. We just wanted you to understand that Barrett loves you. More than his own life. He wants you to be happy. He wants healing for you.”

  I shake my head. Without Barrett, I can never heal. “It doesn’t make sense…” but it doesn’t have to. It’s my heart. “You don’t get it.” I put my head in my hands again. “No one gets it! I can’t be happy without Barrett! He’s my happy. Even if he did do something awful.” I lift my face and look at both of them, his friends who helped him. “I don’t care, okay! I know him, I love Barrett, I forgive him. There’s no other option. I’m a human being and not some robot. I was shocked and upset.” I start sobbing. “It wore off in like a day and then I realized that he didn’t— I know he doesn’t want to be with me.”

  Dove’s arms are around me again, squeezing me against his chest a little hard. “Gwenna.” His hands grip my shoulders. I look up into his brown eyes. “Barrett would do anything to be with you. He would have killed Niccolo in a heartbeat if you hadn’t shot him.”

  My mind hums. I get a heavy breath. “I killed him. I killed Jamie’s boyfriend.” I can feel hysterics gather in my chest, a heavy wall of weight that needs to be let out. “Is Bear going to be okay? Am I going to get arrested?”

  “Gwenna… Calm down.” Dove’s hand rubs a circle on my back. “If you can calm down, there’s some things we want to tell you.”

  Fear pierces my heart. “What kind of things?”

  The two men look at each other, and then at me.

  NICCOLO

  It was never really my fault. Were it not for Dad’s addiction to loose pussy, I would never have been on that road at that time. Who expects a person walking by the road’s side dressed in black?

  I was going faster than I should have been. You could say that. But I had snow tires. Again, I didn’t know there would be anybody walking on the shoulder. I didn’t see her face until it hit the windshield. From that moment forward, I knew my victim: Gwenna White, my new conquest’s best friend. Gwenna White, the guest of Larry Madison and family. She was even in his jacket.

  She was carrying a plant: a gardenia. It hit the hood of the car, the edge of the plastic pot leaving a tiny dent I never could get out.

  When I left her there, she seemed unconscious but alive. I couldn’t call the police. For starters, I didn’t have cell phone service. Since I had to leave the scene to go get help, why would I tattle on myself? And ruin my career? And ruin my reputation? Why? Because that would undo what had happened?

  I got to my brother John as fast as I could. I told him I’d seen a hit and run, and so I called it in—anonymously, of course. With our dad’s reputation, why leave names? John understood.

  Not long after that, something strange happened: John got a call on the same secret agent phone I used to call about Gwenna. He got a call from Barrett Drake. John rushed off, and only later did I find out why.

  Months later, we stayed up over gin and tonic. John asked me about Gwenna—what had I heard about the girl’s recovery—and I almost passed out. He didn’t know. Thank fuck, he didn’t know my secret. I was still with Jamie. He was curious, he said.

  I told him the girl was living. Didn’t die.

  John told me about Barrett. How he couldn’t eat or sleep, was all thrown off and felt so fucking terrible. Boo-hoo. But it worked out. Because John decided he’d tell Barrett that his victim had lived.

  See, that’s the beauty of it.

  That one night, two hit-and-runs.

  Mine, and Barrett’s.

  His victim: some nameless native woman with dementia, living in a teepee in the forest. She wasn’t found for weeks due to the snow-packed ground and when she was, no obituary. Just a little news brief.

  How would Barrett know Gwen wasn’t his victim? He’d been so drunk, John didn’t think he remembered the correct road name. They’d left a dead victim, but who’s to say the dead never come back? That John hadn’t simply been wrong? In fact, the stories in the papers later said she’d done just that: died and returned. A murder with no dead.

  Lucky.

  So lucky.

  John cared so much for his friend, he helped his own brother. Only one of his accomplices, General Broomfield’s son, Michael, known in ACE as Bluebell, questioned the location of the wreck when John told all of them the victim had survived. But Bluebell—Michael—had been drunk as well. They’d all been drinking. And who questioned John—their honest, valiant Breck?

  Breck was a hero.

  When he died and it came out that it was Barrett’s fault—the pussy couldn’t shoot some desert rat and so the operation that day went to shit, with John covering for Barrett—it made more sense to me. There, the type of man who drove intoxicated, hit a woman, ran.

  Barrett—not me.

  I told myself that it made sense, the way fate played things. Up until the time when Barrett tracked his victim down in Gatlinburg, it all made so much sense to me. And after that, the nervousness. The fear. The fury.

  I tried hard to keep tabs on them. I tried to get Gwen to talk to me. I even used the fence-jump trick John taught me. I used his sed dart concoction. I failed, but things were still okay until she told Jamie about her dreaming. She remembered things about that night.

  The team I’d hired to watch Gwenna and Barrett came in contact with another team of snoops: this one far superior, a team of ghosts. As it turns out, they had an agenda, too. They were working for General Broomfield, Michael’s father, who was trying to keep an ACE scandal at bay.

  Those men told mine that they weren’t authorized to shoot and kill, but that’s what they thought their boss wanted. A tragic accident.

  Something awful.

  What’s worse than a veteran who’s lost his mind, who kills his girl and then himself?

  THIRTY ONE

  GWENNA

  March 30, 2016

  It’s something that I couldn’t think about. Not didn’t want to. Couldn’t. It wasn’t possible for me to think of Barrett as a murderer.

  He was mine. I’d stamped my love on every inch of him. Even the damaged parts of him, I wanted. Needed. I was damaged too, living a pseudo-life, and loving Barrett made me real again. It made me me again.

  How could I hate him? How was I to label something he’d done unforgivable?

  Maybe in a moment I did. I attacked him in the snow. And in that moment, maybe the deepest part of me, the animal, wanted to take him out—the way he took me out. Wanted to get him back: life for a life. But conscious Gwen? Thinking, feeling Gwen? She could never, ever hate him. I just loved him. Kept on loving
him. Because it’s all my heart could do.

  Love doesn’t give choices. It’s like an avalanche. It just happens. When it does, all you can do is hope you’re strong enough to live through it.

  Dove told me that Barrett tracked me down because he felt that we were linked. Like, karma. Somehow, ours became entangled.

  What he did to me, he felt, was done to him in turn. My life was wrecked. I couldn’t sing. I couldn’t act. I couldn’t even pursue Taekwondo semi-professionally. So, no shred of my former life remained.

  And same for Barrett. His life as an Operator: over after Syria. His best friend: gone.

  He tracked me down as penance. It would be the ultimate atonement. He could confess everything, release his awful guilt. He’d planned to let me decide what should be done to him. If I wanted him to turn himself in, if I didn’t object to him doing so, then he would. He’d come completely clean, and maybe then, he’d feel clean too.

  Except, he fell in love with me. And so it’s funny, how wrong I had it at first. He traded absolution, traded guiltless living, he traded a fresh start to be with me. He wasn’t with me because he thought he had to be. Being near me put his life at risk, it risked his friends’ lives. But he did it until he was worried it would risk my life. And then he had to tell me. Had to let me go. That’s what he thought, Dove told me.

  It’s a fucked-up story, this one. Hard to understand and even harder to accept.

  There were two hit-and-runs that night. One mine, and one that of an elderly Arapahoe woman. She died and stayed dead. Breck hid her body underneath snow, so the local paper didn’t report her death until a month and a half later.

  I died and came back.

  Another curve in the tracks: Breck telling Barrett, Dove, and Blue that the woman that he’d hidden was alive. Was me.

  Breck thought this would make it easier for Bear to live with what had happened. He didn’t know that Bear and I had talked that night at the bar. That we’d connected. Bear had called me “snowflake,” given me his scarf. We smoked our cigarettes together, and I loved his handsome face, his pretty eyes. I remember just that one thing: smoking with him outside. In my memory, I even loved his sadness.

  Sweet Barrett.

  Mine.

  I look at Barrett, and I want to hug him. Want to touch his hair and rub his scratchy cheeks. I want his lips on mine, his strong legs intertwined with my soft ones. I want him beside me at night so I can hold him, he can hold me.

  It’s the little things. That’s all life is, when you really start to think about it. Little things that are your story. No one knows them—no one but you and yours—but they’re what make a life. The twinkle lights I strung up on the ceiling for him. Him smelling gardenia petals. The flying pig bird bath.

  It’s the little things that make a life, and I’ve learned that they are all I need. Just Barrett in his Jeep. Just shower sex. Just my lover’s smile as I lie in his lap on our rock in the woods.

  All things I don’t have, because I haven’t even seen his eyes in forty-six days.

  “Hey there, sleeping Beary…”

  I climb into bed with him, the way I always do, crossing my legs before I take his big, warm hand in both of mine.

  “You know, I should tell you, hibernation season’s ending. I’ve seen Papa almost every day the last two weeks. Even Cinnamon is waddling out of her little nook some days, and you know females are the last ones to wake up. I want to let you know. As a Bear, you have a certain schedule that you need to follow.”

  My throat tightens unexpectedly. I look down at his hand and trace the scars on it, trying to tickle with my fingertips. Some days, I’ll feel his fingers twitch a little, and my whole body goes hot, then cold—with hope he’ll wake up and fear that he won’t.

  It’s just so tricky. So confusing. So unknown. His number on the Galsgow Coma Scale is an eight. A three means totally unresponsive, and a fifteen is the best score: what I’d score. Anything over an eight would mean he’s not technically in a coma anymore. If he would just say anything—even words that don’t make sense—he’d be a nine. But…Barrett doesn’t.

  When the nurses or one of the therapists do something that hurts him, sometimes he’ll recoil. Last week, when they re-casted his broken ankle and moved it in a certain way, his eyes opened. He drew a deep breath, and I thought I would pass out from pure joy. Then his eyes shut and his vitals leveled out again.

  If he can feel pain, he’s still here. That’s what I tell myself. If he can feel pain, he can feel pleasure. So I spend some time each day massaging joints the PT thinks are sore, rubbing his feet, stroking his hair. I kiss his cheeks and face, his hands, even his arms. I put my own scented lip gloss on his lips and kiss them softly.

  If only life were like a fairy tale. I know I would have the magic kiss that woke him up.

  Nic only lived four days after the gunshot. On that fourth day, he got a blood clot. Before he died, on the third day, when he was seeming more stable, he confessed to hitting me, to leaving me there in the snow rather than taking me with him in his car. It’s true, he didn’t have cell phone service, and after he left, he called as quickly as he could. But I find I don’t care about those details. In my mind, he left me there because he didn’t give a shit whether I lived or died. I doubt that I would feel this way had he not done what he did in the woods that day.

  Had he not tried to kill me. Had he not tried to kill Bear. Had he not deceived my best friend, wasted years of her life and now broken her heart and strained our friendship. Things are getting better slowly, and I know time will heal the awkwardness between Jamie and I right now. Our friendship is too strong, too old, to be severed—even by my murder of her lover.

  But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate him for what he did to her. It doesn’t mean I don’t secretly, shamefully wish sometimes that Bear had killed him and not me.

  Barrett threw a martial arts star at his back, aiming for a certain spot between two vertebrae. But Bear’s left handed, and his left hand doesn’t work, so the star got buried in Nic’s shoulder. When Nic was on the ground, he somehow pulled it out and that’s how he got Barrett in the throat.

  I have the star—it’s cleaned up, hiding in an old pot in my garage—and that thing is razor-sharp. So it’s not surprising that it did so much damage to poor Barrett.

  How he went from almost bleeding out and suffering a broken ankle to being in this coma… That’s the part that no one really understands. He went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. That’s why they had to shock him. I’m told that happens sometimes when people get really low on blood. It’s not good, but it’s not rare, either.

  Then they got him to the hospital, and they couldn’t tell whether he was stable enough to put him under general anesthesia, so they went ahead and cauterized his artery with him awake. Sometime around then, Barrett’s blood pressure shot up, then he passed back out. No one could find evidence of a stroke—they still can’t; images of his brain look perfect—but in retrospect, they think something must have happened around then.

  At the time, however, he seemed okay, so they put him under. They operated on his ankle, adding screws to keep it stable, and then they fixed his trachea and closed the torn up tissue around it.

  When I got to him in the ICU, he had a temporary trach—so, a tube punched into his trachea a little further down from where the damage was. He was covered with hot blankets, because losing blood makes the body temperature drop. His ankle was elevated, in a cast, and his beautiful face looked gray.

  A few times those first two days, his eyelids fluttered. Both times, I leaned in close to him and whispered to him, kissed his cheek, and told him how much I loved him. They still had him on painkillers, and after the fourth day, everyone had realized something was wrong. Maybe his old brain injury had flared up somehow. Maybe something with the painkillers. So they cut back on those. They took him for imaging of his brain, and Cleo, Kellan, Dove, and I all sat together, terrified. (Michael had to go back overseas
). But everything looked fine.

  And still does.

  The trach is gone, and he can breathe. As of last week, every single medicine they had him on, the anti-seizure meds, a sedative, a sleeping pill… All, gone. And still, he sleeps.

  I’ve heard the nurses talking about moving him out of this hospital. Somewhere designed for longer-term care.

  Cleo and Kellan are still here, and they come every day, and we watch movies, eat dinner, talk— so Barrett knows he isn’t by himself. No one is more empathetic than Cleo. She knows exactly what I’m going through. In the mornings, Cle and I go for a run together. It was her idea, or rather her insistence. She tells me it will keep my brain chemistry balanced so I don’t get super depressed. As if…

  Midday, while I’m here, they watch out for the bears and do their Cleo-Kellan things. They ride our bikes sometimes, which I know Barrett wouldn’t mind. And in the afternoon, when I leave home to run errands, they go sit with him. I come back at dinner, and we’re all there, and then “we” leave. I think it’s funny they don’t know I spend the night most nights. I guess because I leave the hospital at 5:30 every morning, drive back home, and shower, they wake up and see my car and think I stayed the night in my own house. I know when Cle finds out, she’ll be on me about how I should stay at home in my own bed, but I’ll call her a hypocrite.

  Today, I watch Fifty Shades of Gray and giggle with Bear’s nurses as they come in and out. When it ends, I pull the covers down and climb in bed with him. I can’t always do this, but one of my favorite nurses is on, and she doesn’t care. There are some tubes and wires, but I know how to rearrange them so there’s room for me. Right after Shayna checks on Bear and leaves, I duck under the covers and rub my finger over his pig tat. Dove told me that he got it two weeks after New Year’s: a pig flying through a snowflake storm. It’s done in gorgeous color, just over his left pec. The tattoo means a lot to me, because without it, I’m not sure how I’d have known for sure that Barrett really wanted me. Not out of guilt, or out of loneliness, but out of love.