by Ace Gray
She could have saved me.
“I’ll take your secrets to my grave, Dantè.” Rousse’s voice was fading. “I can only hope it’s today. I don’t expect you to take mine…” His head lolled in my lap as his words went to nothing.
“Rousse?” I shook him and he didn’t stir. “Rousse!”
I was going to lose him today, but somehow it seemed more significant now than it had before. Somehow, the flames that had devoured his skin, and still poured from the vehicle, seemed like the flames that would burn my world to the ground. And if they did, I’d be left with nothing but handfuls of ash.
The first thing I noticed were the small pebbles against my cheek. Small. Gritty. Slightly annoying. Especially where they dug into my cheekbone.
I shifted enough to brush them away, only to realize I was lying face down near the edge of an orange sandstone ledge. I slowly sat up and started to brush the same small pebbles off my naked chest and thighs.
“Shit,” I swore as I looked around to find a pile of likewise naked bodies.
I twisted to let my feet dangle off the very real desert edge and tried to recall bits and pieces of the raving orgy that had taken place beneath the stars. And glow sticks. And whatever Molotov cocktail of drugs I’d snorted, swallowed, and shot up. The sweet sting of my ass was a small reminder of what had shown me fireworks. When I shot a look over my shoulder, the he and she responsible were lying closest to me. I shoved the heavy Indian headdress I’d somehow come to be wearing up for a better view.
Flesh lay behind me. Lots of it. Beyond, the edge of the desert gave way to the neon lights of the Vegas strip in the distance, the playground of the wild celebration I’d treated myself to upon fixing everything for that asshole Row. I couldn’t help the big laugh that broke out of me in the early morning silence.
The familiar buzz of a cell phone followed. I ignored it in favor of the slowly changing colors of the morning sun.
But then it went off again.
And again.
And again.
The fifth time had me clenching my jaw even harder than the withdrawals wanted me to, and I was sure my teeth would calf like glaciers. That’s what it was called when the ice busted up and crashed into the sea right? Calving. Like cows. Even though the sound had nothing to do with cows. Nor did it sound like anything a cow could do…
The sixth buzz cut my spiraling thoughts short, and I reached for the phone if only to shut it the fuck up. I had to shove at an ass and a thigh before I found the phone. My phone. Diego’s name flashed on the screen. I unlocked my jaw as I unlocked the screen.
“Hey man,” I drawled, still quiet and sleepy like the dawn in front of me.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he yelled. “Why haven’t you been answering? Is Mercy with you?” His words barreled out, each blaring in my brain.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I pushed the headdress off my head letting it fall onto the bodies behind me and started rubbing my temples. “Slow the fuck down and say all that again.”
“Where. The. Fuck. Are. You?” There was a nasty bite to his words.
“I went to Vegas to celebrate the app, yo.”
“You’ve been on a bender?” His temper punched through my eardrum.
I hung up. The answer was yes. Duh. Had he really expected anything different?
My phone started buzzing again.
“Yes?” I drug the word out.
“Mercy is missing. For over two days,” he seethed, and I sucked in a deep breath. “And Rousse is in the ICU, so I’ll ask again.” He paused long enough for me to feel my heartbeat ratchet up and thump in my teeth. “Why the hell haven't you been answering?”
“She’s not with me,” I managed as I pushed up from the ledge and looked around for my clothes. “And I woke up face down in the desert this morning. I don’t know where my clothes are or how I got here. But I can tell you that when I was balls deep in someone, rolling on God knows what, answering my phone was not a priority.”
“Well find some fucking pants and get back here,” he yelled again before he was the one to hang up.
I stared at my phone for a moment. Mercy was missing, Rousse was hurt, and Diego had finally fucking lost it. Was something coming for me? And when I thought about what connected all of us, the question that lodged in my throat was…Is Dantè Rogue coming for me?
The trek out of the desert had been tedious. Retracing my steps to find my things and flying standby had been obnoxious, but it was the plane ride from Vegas that had really amplified my hangover. Or coming down. Or whatever it was that made every muscle in my body ache, my teeth feel like they might shatter and had me throwing up in a doggie bag during our decent.
I slung my bag over my shoulder and shoved my sunglasses on as I walked out of the airport and dug out my phone to get an Uber. When I got to the curb, I noticed someone right beside me. I glanced over, and he seemed to be just another guy, waiting for something or someone on the curb, but the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
A Prius pulled up, and I couldn’t shake the spooked feeling as I slid into the backseat. I even turned to check the curb as we pulled away. The man I’d noticed had vanished. I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes.
When we stopped at a light, the same wave of nerves prickled along my skin. I opened my eyes to find nothing really weird. There was a motorcycle on either side of us and darkness had settled into the sky a little thicker. The lights of the city seared my dry, bloodshot eyes as we pulled away. I leaned my head against the window and focused on the wheels of the motorcycle instead. Watching the spokes swirl into nothingness just like my brain.
Even when the roads turned from the busyness of the city to the familiar calm near our home, my brain still felt fuzzy, and the urge to shut my eyes and sleep was almost overwhelming.
“Up here on the right.” My voice drooped just like my eyelids.
“Sounds good.” The kid pulled into the driveway, and I watched the headlights bounce in every which way across the dark windows of the house. He slowed in front of the door, and I was grabbing my bag before he even parked. I shoved out of the door just when my driver added, “I’m surprised your friends didn’t just pick you up.”
“What?” My face twisted up, my brain barely processing, still stuck in the dust of my debauchery in the desert.
“Your friends followed us the whole way. Should have ridden with them.” He jerked his chin in the rearview mirror and I froze, halfway in, halfway out of the car, noticing the two motorcycles parked behind us for the first time.
Dread. That’s what I should have felt first and foremost. Something I’d done finally went too far. Even though that wasn’t me, that wasn’t my M.O. I didn’t do anything I couldn’t undo. So I swallowed the knot in my suddenly parched throat and forced a half-hearted chuckle.
“Yeah…” My voice disappeared into the dark of night. I stepped away, shutting the Uber door behind me.
The two men waited until we were alone under that liquid silver moon, then simply dismounted their bikes and stood, arms crossed, in the ominous night. I studied them, waiting for them to shift, to move. But they didn’t even flinch.
“Diego?” I asked even though I knew it wasn’t him. That he wasn’t there.
“Where is it?” A thick Eastern European accent asked, hidden behind an even thicker black motorcycle visor.
Shit. Eastern European was never a good sign. They dealt in death and drugs as far as I was concerned.
“Where’s what?”
“Don’t play games with us Riptide1345.”
“Huh?” The name was disorienting. I hadn’t used it in years. I couldn’t figure out how they had it. None of the rapid fire scenarios I came up with made sense.
“The list. It was useless,” the other answered.
Dread washed over me this time and I let it. I didn’t know what they were talking about. I always knew what people were talking about—I put the words in their fucking mouths—but t
his? I got the sense I was going to drown in this. The way my hair had climbed up my neck since landing was a forewarning in the end.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” My voice broke when I swore, betraying me, and I wanted nothing more than to suck it back in. But my words were punctuated with the click of a pistol—the fucking gangster kind—pointed at me from across the driveway and covering the fear with a facade became impossible. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I held up my hands. “What list? What fucking list?” My voice climbed at least an octave.
“The one that you promised us. The one we paid you for.”
“I…” I stepped back.
“Your app, it has a backdoor, no?” The man without a gun asked.
“I fixed it.”
“I’d un-fix it.” A new and deeper, darker voice suddenly lapped at my ears from behind, his breath hot and rancid on my skin as a third man pressed the barrel of a gun to the back of my head. I raised my hands up in surrender to the man that had snuck up to join us. “That list was a piece of garbled HTML shit instead of the social security numbers and bank accounts we were promised. The identities we promised to people scarier than us.”
“I duh…duh…dunno why you think I promised this to you. I don’t know why you think I owe you.” Tears trembled on my words as I felt the fury radiating off the man behind me. As I felt the second hand ticking on my own heartbeats.
“Is this your back account?” He pressed the gun harder into my skull as he reached around me with a lit up phone screen.
My hands quaked as I reached for it. When I pulled it closer, I almost choked. It was my bank account. My bank account with a fucking huge amount of their money. I couldn’t explain it—even if I could find words, I couldn’t explain any of it. Based on the cool metal against my flesh, they weren’t really here for explanations anyways.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I choked out a whisper.
“And yet, you did.” He used his pointer to show me the message boards. The message boards with my name on them. From an IP address that lead them right to this very driveway.
The lump in my throat grew. The last bit of my stomach bottomed out.
“We can work something out.” I tried to hand the phone back; all I wanted was to put my hands back up in surrender. “I’ll figure something out.”
“Take us inside and get us what we need.” He used the barrel of his gun to urge me toward my front door.
“Wait, wait, wait. Not here. I can’t here. I need my work computer to access the app.”
“Let’s go.” He reached forward and grabbed my arm, pulling me in the direction he’d come from.
“I can’t now.” The list of reasons was too long. Diego was waiting for me somewhere. Mercy and Rousse were…A sob seized in my chest as I realized.
There was a reason that I didn’t know anything about this. It wasn’t my doing. All the holes were there for a reason. He hadn’t wanted me to be able to piece this together. Dantè Rogue had wanted me wonder how. Wonder when and who and what the fuck. Just like I’d done to him.
I almost wanted to chuckle at his goddamn handiwork. He’d set me up, he’d ruined me—I felt the truth of it in what was left of my crumbling body—and pride flared in my chest for one blissful moment. That Dantè, the one who ripped life from limb, I could have loved him with the ruthlessness that he deserved.
“It’s now or never.”
Another part of his dastardly plan clicked into place.
I’d never figured out how the backdoor disappeared. One day it was just gone. Of course, I took credit—I’d gloated shamelessly about it—but I never knew…I suppose I never knew a lot of things.
“I really can’t.” I let defeat drip from my words. I’d been bested after all.
How would someone explain this to Row. Row, who sat behind his computer, like nothing more than an oversized paperweight, but really…I thought about the color of his eyes, about how the glow of his computer screen chilled them from milk chocolate to dark. He’d been cunning, that’s what I sensed underneath the surface. Cunning just like Dantè turned out to be. Dantè with his milk chocolate eyes.
Well fuck me.
He’d been right there all along. Watching. Waiting. And I’d been a fool, fucking on acid and ego, and it had ruined me. Ruined everything.
But before I had a chance to think about the consequences or the beauty of what he’d done, pain ripped through my body. The blast rang in my ears a second later. I sucked in a deep breath but it rattled and wheezed in my tight chest, more like painful champagne bubbles in my chest than a shallow breath. I looked down and red seeped across my shirt. My hands shook again as they lifted to collect the weeping crimson.
As I tried to stop my bullet wound from bleeding.
I sat in the dark staring at my laptop. At the vague but also pissed message on the board. I didn’t need to follow up to know it was done. Or that it was going to be any minute.
The pieces I’d managed to plan were falling into place, but still I stared. Blankly. Into the dark of our apartment. My limbs ached from my entrenched position. I’d been stuck in this spot for twenty-four hours, wondering if I should be here at all.
Rousse had sent me reeling. Sure, the mangled bits of his body as he laid in my arms had seared into my brain. I could see the blood, smell the charred flesh. But his words were what had leveled me.
He felt guilty.
Mercy wasn’t involved.
I repeated those two sentences over and over and over again. They wiggled in and ripped at my stomach. Did they change anything? I slumped back onto the couch and let my head roll back and forth.
Oh God. Oh shit. Oh holy fucking shit.
I rubbed my hands together over and over then shoved them through my wild hair, repeating string after string of expletives. The rolling thunder of swearing blended with the background buzz of the hospital: low murmurs, beeping machines, distance phone lines ringing, and the hum of the fluorescent lights.
What were they saying? Were they talking about me? About us? Were they going to hurt me? Someone was going to…
Danger had been shot. Left for dead. If I hadn’t gotten home when I did, he would be. I shoved the thought aside as I wiped a lone tear from my cheek.
He was down the hall from Rousse. The same nurses attended both of them when they came in. They’d both seen me here, waiting. They’d seen me with my hands tied. They’d stood there, in light blue scrubs and squishy clogs, haloed by shit lighting, and watched my world crumble.
I bet they wished it was me.
“‘Scuse me.” I reached out and grabbed the wrist of a nurse walking by, “can you tell me anything?”
“What?” she asked as she tried to pull her arm from my grip; I just squeezed tighter.
“Is he okay?” I asked sharp enough that she arched back. “Danger Reed, is he okay?” I yelled.
“Sir, please let me go.” She pulled at her arm again.
“Is there a problem, Clara?” An officer sidled up to us and crossed his arms across his bulletproof chest.
She eyed me, neither of us answering. When I didn’t let go, she nodded her chin ever so slightly. The officer clamped down on my arm the same way I had on hers. The pressure made me release her automatically.
“Come with me.” His voice was as stern and strong as his grip while he hauled me down the hallway toward the entrance.
“Dude, you don’t understand,” I protested. “My friend—”
“Will have to survive the night without you.” The automatic doors slid open and he jostled me a little as he shoved me out. “You cannot manhandle nurses. You cannot overreact like that.”
“I wasn’t overreacting!”
My best friend had been shot. My second best friend had been burned to a crisp. The love of my life was missing. My stomach roiled, I felt bruised. I felt like I was bleeding. Considering the way my world was disintegrating, I was actually holding my shit together pretty well.
He raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms again. “Go home. Blow off steam. I don’t want to see you until morning.”
“But—”
“Don’t force me to make it permanent.” His words were a layered threat that I very much wanted to rail against. The rat-bastard didn’t give a damn that my world was being razed to dust. No one did. Except maybe those boys lying down the hall from each other. They were the only reasons I bit my tongue.
When he strode back inside, he turned and once again, puffed up his rooster chest as he resumed his wide stance and crossed his arms. I eyed him as the rage simmered inside me. And when it finally bubbled over, I screamed into the darkness. My fists clenching, my veins popping as my bellow seemed to rattle glass. The guard moved back toward me for a moment, but then I turned on my heel and walked away.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed the same number I had a million times in the past few days. Just like before, the ring in my ear clicked as she sent me straight to voicemail.
“Goddammit, Mercy, answer your fucking phone,” I seethed. “You can’t do this to me. You’re mine!”
I hung up and shoved the phone in my pocket as I hailed a cab. The Prius pulled up, and I hesitated when he asked for an address. I wanted to find her. I wracked my brain for a place she might be, but her life revolved around that house. It always had. Dantè was the only one that’d ever seeped outside of it. Then again, he was the only reason that she’d stayed.
No! She’s mine. I’ll make her be mine.
“Home,” I finally offered then gave the driver the address to the house on the cliff that held our secrets, our sins, and far too many ghosts.
The world blurred outside the car, houses and lights and forests turning into a mesh and meld of color. But I didn’t hear a sound as we drove down winding roads. The electric engine was so far from the snarl synonymous with Rousse, the wicked elegance of Danger. My heart clawed at my chest.
What would I do without them? Could I do without them? A sob knotted in my throat.