by Cherrie Lynn
He’d often grumbled about his love for Candace turning him into a sap. It was nothing compared to what his love for Lyric had done to him. That little boy had unlocked an entire new world of emotion in Brian’s heart. He’d never been so happy and tired and so fucking freaked-out in his life. But it was all good.
As he walked to his truck in the dark parking lot, he pulled his phone from his back pocket and shot a text back to Candace: On my way, sunshine.
If he hadn’t been focused on doing that, he might have noticed the shadow creeping on him from the side. Too late. All he saw was a movement in his peripheral vision—quick, too quick, something, someone attacking, and all he had time to do was throw up his left arm before blinding pain sliced through his lower back.
With a roar of shock and agony, he lashed out, his right fist sinking deep into the motherfucker’s nose, crushing it, and he was rewarded with a yelp of agony and a string of curses. Mask, the guy was wearing a black ski mask. Black clothes. He recognized that voice, fucking hell…
White light in his head. His strength poured out, and he fell. This is it, he thought, seeing the flash of a bloody blade in the guy’s gloved hand, this is it, he’s going to finish it and Candace is waiting for me at home and I won’t get there. For what seemed like an hour but was probably only a few seconds, his assailant stared down at him, eyes twin pools of darkness that seemed to be sucking him down. Brian stared back, hanging on to what consciousness he had left. The guy lifted his hand to his mask and his shattered nose. When it came away, it dripped. Brian watched the red drop’s descent all the way to the pavement, then glared back up at him.
“Your blood’s at the scene, motherfucker,” he ground out. “Good luck with that.”
The asshole turned and bolted.
More than anything, Brian wished for the strength to chase him down, and even made a feeble attempt to get to his feet and do so before stumbling back down to the ground. No chance. Gritting his teeth until he thought they would break, he reached for his lower back and felt for the source of the pain. His shaking hand came away covered in sticky hot blood. Covered. Covered.
Cursing with the effort of putting one elbow in front of the other, he dragged himself toward his phone lying on the ground a few feet away. It was dark, there was no one out here, and if he lay here too long, he was going to fucking bleed out and die, and he couldn’t leave her like that. He couldn’t leave his son. Not now, not now, please God, not like this…
Making a grab for his phone, he only succeeded in pushing it farther away. His fingers were uncoordinated. He’d expended the last of his energy to reach his lifeline, but somehow, he dug deep into the only reserves he had left and shoved himself forward one more time. For Candace. For Lyric. His palm landed on the phone and his hand shook as he lifted it. It could’ve weighed a metric fuck-ton, and darkness was coming for him. Even breathing caused a blowtorch to sear into his wound. He fought it, focusing all his remaining faculties on getting his fucking phone to cooperate with his clumsy, blood-slick hands, had to get someone, anyone at this point, anyone who could get some help…
But the darkness, it was winning. His phone clattered to the pavement. He had time for one last desperate glance at the shining lights inside Dermamania before they blurred before his eyes and blackness pulled him down and didn’t let go.
***
Fucking nicotine fit. Starla fought it for as long as she could, but it had its claws firmly in her, and with all her drama lately, it was worse than usual. She’d been smoking like a freight train, and everyone noticed.
“Damn! You fiend,” Ghost commented as she grabbed her smokes from her purse and headed toward the back. “Your lungs haven’t shriveled up and blown away yet?”
“Go fuck a cactus,” she told him cheerfully.
Yeah, yeah, she needed to quit. She would. Someday. And someday might come a lot sooner if people would quit hassling her about it, damn. Besides, it was too nice a night to be stuck inside for more than an hour. That was another convenient excuse, and it wasn’t like she was busy tonight or anything. Two of her appointments had canceled on her last minute.
Stepping out the side door facing the parking lot, she pulled a cigarette from her pack with her teeth and glanced up at the sky. What were Jared and the girls doing? She missed them more than she liked to admit to herself. Missed the calming atmosphere at his place. Maybe if she called—
Wait. Why was Brian’s truck still here? Frowning around her cigarette, she glanced down at her watch. He’d left almost ten minutes ago.
When she looked back up for a closer inspection, her cigarette fell from her mouth, forgotten.
A dark shape huddled on the ground just a few feet from one of the security lights, a dark crumpled shape in a pool of red. Red, the only color she could discern in a spectrum of darkness.
“Jesus Christ.”
She reached him at a full run, falling to her knees, heedless of his blood getting on her clothes. “Brian!” she shrieked, wanting to touch him but terrified she shouldn’t move him. He lay mostly on his stomach, and she could see now that the trail of his blood extended for several feet, as if he’d fallen, and he’d crawled…
“Help!” she screamed back toward the shop. She screamed Ghost’s name, she screamed Janelle’s, she screamed until her throat was shredded by her own voice and she thought she might have to get up and go back in there to get help, but she didn’t know if she could walk. They probably couldn’t hear her for the music. Desperately surveying the scene in front of her, though she didn’t want to look, she didn’t…she saw that Brian’s phone rested only inches from his limp hand. It too was covered in his blood. She snatched it up and dialed 911, knowing that she had to find out if he was alive and not wanting to. She didn’t want to know, oh fucking hell, she didn’t. But the dispatcher would ask if he had a pulse, if he was breathing. How could someone lose this much blood and live?
Closing her eyes, Starla said a prayer to the God her parents insisted was real and placed two searching fingertips on his neck, feeling for a pulse.
She almost fainted in relief when she found one. It was weak and fast, but it was there, and maybe her screams had been heard after all, because the sound of running feet and shouting voices was suddenly all around her. Ghost was there, and she’d never been so relieved to see him in her life. Janelle took Starla by the arms and tried to pull her up and away, but she fought. She’d almost forgotten she had the phone to her ear until a voice sounded. “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
Her inane babbling didn’t make any sense to her own ears, but somehow she managed to choke out the address and request an ambulance, running on complete autopilot as she watched Ghost try to find the source of Brian’s wound.
“Here it is. Fuck. Lower left back. It might be his kidney. Tell them to hurry the fuck up, Star, or he won’t make it.” He snatched his own T-shirt off over his head and wadded it up, his face a pale nightmarish image of horror. He’s scared—Ghost is scared, and that’s never good, she thought irrationally. “I’m putting pressure on it,” he said.
Her voice shaking, she conveyed all that information to the dispatcher, who kept her on the phone until the distant sound of sirens reached them. She thanked the dispatcher and hung up, her heart pounding in her eardrums.
Max had done this. Max had tried to kill Brian. This couldn’t be random, couldn’t be a coincidence. Because of her mistake, because of her not listening, because of her being a fucking idiot, her friend, her love—a husband, father, son, and brother—was dying in front of her.
When she found that goddamn motherfucking piece of shit, she would kill him herself. They wouldn’t be able to stop her. She would gladly face a life in prison to get her hands around his throat.
“Oh, Brian,” she said weakly, staring at his beloved face, so pallid now. At least he wasn’t awake to be in pain. She couldn’t think about the pain he’d just gone through pulling himself across the parking lot, the fear, the des
peration he must have felt. How he must have been thinking about Candace and Lyric.
And Candace. What to do about Candace? Starla couldn’t imagine making that call.
No. No call. She needed to be told in person, but not by someone wearing a good portion of her husband’s blood. Starla looked up at Janelle, who stood with her head down and her arms crossed, sobbing with huge, gasping breaths. She’d never seen Janelle cry, ever.
“Jan?” As the ambulance rushed into the parking lot followed by two police cars, Starla found the strength to stand and go to her friend. Janelle all but collapsed in her arms, and somehow she held on to her without falling herself. After a moment of pointlessly trying to comfort her, she said, “Someone has to go tell Candace.”
Sniffling, Jan backed away and nodded. “I can do that.”
“Are you sure? If you’re not—”
“No. I can. I don’t—I can’t be here, seeing him like that.”
They were all in some kind of shock, no doubt. Starla wasn’t sure how she hadn’t gone screaming into madness herself. Maybe that would come later. Right now, this was the top priority. Candace. Not her own shock and devastation, but that of the one who stood to lose her entire world tonight.
“We need to get his family too,” she said, realizing she still clutched his bloody cell phone in her hand. Hell. She shouldn’t have removed anything from a crime scene, right? But all the contacts she needed would be right here. Even as she looked down at it, a text message from Candace popped up. She couldn’t help but see it right there on the display, the letters branding themselves into her brain. Good! Lyric has been smiling and laughing all day. We can’t wait to see you. :)
Starla might have lost it then, but Ghost came over to join them, shirtless, bloody, his fingers laced behind his head. His skin was, well, ghostlike against the obscene red and his black ink. The police had secured the scene, and paramedics had shooed him away to take over. “Janelle is going to get Candace,” Starla told him.
Ghost dropped his arms and shook his head. “No. The cops want to talk to us. I’ll call Macy and Sam. They can go get her and Lyric and bring them to the hospital.”
Why hadn’t she thought of that? Candace’s best friends in the world would surely be a better option. Even better than Candace’s family, who would probably throw a party if Brian Ross bought it facedown in a parking lot. Bastards, the lot of them.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s better.” She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to hear what was going on down there on the ground fifteen feet away from her. Her heart was a trip-hammer in her chest, skipping beats, and someone might have to do CPR on her if the unthinkable happened and they lost him. But she had to look. The paramedics were in the process of moving Brian to a gurney, one of them fitting him with an oxygen mask.
At least he wasn’t on the ground anymore. It was important somehow. “Oh God,” she muttered, fearing that breakdown fast approaching.
“Let’s keep it together,” Ghost said, his voice as thin as the night air. “I have to go call Macy. The cops want to talk to us.” It didn’t escape her that he was repeating himself. His thoughts were as fractured as her own.
“I want to go with him,” Starla said. If these were Brian’s last minutes on earth, she didn’t want to see them. But she deserved to see them. She would see them, and she would carry that nightmare with her for the rest of her life as punishment for what she had done. Her fault, it was all her fault.
The paramedics loaded the gurney into the ambulance. She stared blindly until Brian was no longer in sight. A police officer climbed in with them. In case he wakes up, she thought. In case he wakes up and names his attacker before…before he dies.
“We all do, Star, but we can’t.” More police cars were arriving. In a town as sleepy as this one usually was, this was a big night for the local law enforcement, Starla thought bitterly. And, true to Ghost’s word, it wasn’t long before the employees of Dermamania were separated to be questioned. Hell, the boss had been bleeding out in the parking lot from a stab wound while two of his coworkers were covered in blood—the night was going to be much longer than Starla had anticipated.
Chapter Sixteen
Jared woke to his doorbell ringing. And ringing. And ringing. As if someone was outside the front door leaning on the damn thing in the middle of the night.
“What the hell,” he muttered, thrusting back his covers. Someone was about to get their ass kicked. Morning barely stained the sky outside. But as immediately as anger had come, dread replaced it. Ashley and Mia were with their mom, and if something had happened…
Clumsily pulling on pajama bottoms, he stumbled and staggered out of the room heading for the front door, slamming his toe with a stream of curses in the process. But when he took a peek out the side window, all pain was forgotten. His eyes saw what was there, but his brain couldn’t process it.
Starla. Bathed in the buttery glow of his porch light, she was covered in something dark. It streaked her arms and hands and crusted in her blonde hair. In the light’s sickly pallor, it could’ve been mud, but somehow he knew it wasn’t.
Blood. He threw the door open and didn’t even have time to ask what the hell had happened to her before she practically collapsed into his arms as if a puppeteer had cut her strings.
Her limpness terrified him. What had that son of a bitch done to her?
“What happened?” he demanded as she sobbed into his naked chest, her fingernails biting in the flesh of his back. “Are you hurt?”
“It’s Brian. It’s Brian.”
Without another word, he scooped her up and kicked the door closed. Horror for her gnawed at his gut, but he tried to keep a clear head. She needed to get cleaned up, get all this blood off her. So much of it… If it all came out of one person, he wondered how that person could still be alive. He didn’t want to ask yet. He didn’t know if he was ready for the answer.
Jared didn’t know Brian, only knew of him, but he’d seemed like an okay guy. At least Macy had said so.
Starla was featherlight and trembling in his arms. What the hell should he do with her? Leaving her alone didn’t seem the best option, but neither did leaving her like this. He took her into his bathroom and set her on her feet, making sure she could support her own weight before he let go.
In this lighting, she was even more of a fright. Hair a mess and streaked with brownish red where she’d been pushing it back with bloody fingers. She’d apparently changed clothes, wearing a clean but very unStarla-like white T-shirt, but her skin was still streaked a vicious, disturbing dark crimson. He cranked the shower on. “You need to clean up. I’ll get you something else to wear.”
Sniveling, she nodded. “I didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t go home, I just couldn’t. And…and…”
“Starla.” He drew a deep breath. “Is he alive?”
Fresh tears streaming down her cheeks, she nodded. “He’s alive. He just came out of surgery. They won’t say he’s out of the woods yet, but he’s hanging on.”
Relief swooped through him that there was a chance. “Good, that’s good. Tell me everything.”
“It’s my fault.”
“Starla—”
“Don’t try to say it isn’t! Someone attacked him in the parking lot as he was leaving tonight and stabbed him in the back. The doctors said if the wound had been an inch to the right, he probably would have died before I found him. I know it was Max. I know it was. They tried to tell me, and I didn’t listen. It’s my fault, it’s my—”
What a frigging mess. Sighing, not knowing what else to do, Jared pulled her into his arms again as steam from the shower filled the bathroom. Her warm tears leaked onto his skin, but she was done with sobbing for now—only a thin tremor worked through her as he held her.
So she’d found him. The guy she loved more than anything, she’d found him bleeding. Jared was no stranger to witnessing something horrific happen to a loved one, but there was damn sure no immunity to be gained from
it. He’d just found her bloody and desperate at his front door and thought the worst. He hadn’t exactly stopped shaking yet himself.
He pushed his fingers through her tousled hair and held her closer, taking most of her weight as she relaxed into him. Ignoring how right it felt. “That’s crazy talk, darlin’. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known this would happen.”
“He tried to tell me, you know, at first when he told me not to get involved with Max. I didn’t listen. I got mad at him. I told him it was none of his fucking business. And he almost died tonight. I guess it was his fucking business, wasn’t it?”
“But he didn’t die. You found him, and you acted fast, and you saved him. You did. He’s strong, and he’ll pull through, all right? He’s made it this far.”
“That’s what Candace tried to tell me. She thanked me for saving him. She doesn’t know, though. She has no idea. You should have seen her. I had to leave. I couldn’t take it. She’s broken.”
“Did they catch Max?”
“No. I told them everything I knew, though. Everything. They want him for questioning.”
“When did you leave the hospital?”
“As soon as Brian was out of surgery. I don’t know. A few hours ago.”
“Jesus, where have you been since then?”
“I went back to Dermamania for a while. I thought about staying there, but I couldn’t. The cops held us there questioning us for the longest fucking time. They made me wait in Brian’s office where a fucking picture of him and Candace is on the desk, looking so happy. I couldn’t take it staring at me, so I had to turn it facedown.” She looked ready to keep stammering on about that, but he interrupted her.