“Shhhhhh…” Xander whispered, following it with a giggle. “I’m here to be a bad boy. Naughty, naughty…”
Julian didn’t know how the man had gotten inside, or what he had done with Siobhan, but he didn’t have time to contemplate either. For the span of a heartbeat, Xander and Julian stood there, staring at each other, and then Xander’s face went into a mask of calculated rage and he charged Julian, the knife up and aimed right at Julian’s chest.
The instinct to dodge allowed Julian to dart to the left, avoiding Xander’s initial, uncontrolled attack, but Julian wasn’t a trained fighter, and as Xander whirled on him and charged again, Julian’s instincts were all he had. He dodged again, crouching down and rolling to the right, then quickly getting back on his feet and turning toward Xander just in time to see the man lick his lips in slow deliberation.
Julian put the couch between them, not trusting the piece of furniture to save his life but hoping it could at least buy him some time. His phone was in his back pocket, but Julian knew that if he tried to reach for it, swipe the phone open, type the entrance passcode, pull up his phone application, and dial 9-1-1, he would be dead before the operator could answer.
He needed something more practical, and he couldn’t imagine that Siobhan didn’t have a gun somewhere in the house. And it would be loaded.
“I’ve come to be a naughty boy…” Xander sing-songed, walking slowly toward Julian, the knife dangling from his fingers threateningly. “You’re not Siobhan. No, you’re not. I wanted to kill Siobhan tonight. I wanted to slide my knife into her sternum and just drag it down.” He ran his finger along the sharp edge of the knife, drawing blood that didn’t seem to faze him. “Down, down, down to the bad boy places! She would make such a messy, messy room. What a messy, messy, messy room.”
It was hard for Julian to concentrate while Xander giggled to himself and mumbled about his horrific intentions. What made it worse was that Julian was connected to the man’s emotions, and he kept getting flashes of glee, then pangs of regret, followed by uncontrollable rage. He didn’t waste effort trying to fight it; instead, he tried to channel it to turn against Xander himself.
As Xander grew closer to the couch, swinging his knife back and forth and drinking in Julian’s fear with total glee, Julian moved quickly, crouching down and shoving the entire couch toward Xander. The floor throughout the living room space was fake wood, and Julian had noticed earlier that the couch moved easily on it. When he and Siobhan had sat down to eat, the couch had moved backward, and then, when they were making out on it, their frenzied movements had moved it at least two feet from where it had started out.
Just as he’d hoped, the light, cheap couch slid forward significantly, knocking into Xander’s legs and throwing him off balance. Julian used the split-second he had to dart around the couch and run past Xander, heading directly for the table that was by the door—the one with the drawer that would pull out and reveal …
A gun! Julian had never been so happy to see a deadly weapon in his life, and he picked it up, spinning around just in time to come face-to-face with Xander, the knife raised in the air, ready to plunge down into Julian.
“I’ll shoot you,” Julian shouted. “Even if you stab me, I’ll still have time to shoot you.” His arms were outstretched, both holding the gun pointed right at Xander’s chest, only an inch between him and the barrel. “Don’t make me do it.”
Xander’s eyes gleamed with hate, and Julian felt it just as strongly. His finger itched to pull the trigger just for the sake of it. Just for the joy of watching the blood spread across Xander’s chest as his life drained out of him. But this time, Julian knew that emotion wasn’t his. It was Xander’s murderous instincts telling him to pull the trigger, but all Julian wanted the man to do was drop the knife.
“No, no, no,” Xander was muttering, his trembling hand still holding the knife raised high. “It’s not supposed to be you! It’s her. I want her. Where is she? Where is she? I found her house. I found it, and I’m a bad boy. I need her to see what a bad, bad boy I am. You go away. Go away. Go away, go away, GO AWAY!”
Xander shouted the last directive and reached for Julian’s hand to knock the gun out of the way, bringing his other arm down with the knife still in his hand. Julian pulled the trigger, and the gun went off with a loud blast that rang in his ears as the knife sliced into the hard muscle of his shoulder, the point of it digging downward toward his heart.
The pain was sharp and biting, and the sight of the blood that began to pour through his shirt made him sick and breathless, but he pushed those realities from his mind because Xander’s giggles had turned to moans. Xander was on the floor in front of him, his own blood spilling everywhere as he rocked himself back and forth, whimpering with pain. Julian couldn’t tell where the bullet had hit the man, and he tried to figure out what he was supposed to do. He didn’t want Xander to die—he was defending himself, not murdering someone. Especially someone who was probably mentally ill.
This was the time to call 9-1-1 and get officials here who could sort out this scene and get them both the medical help that they needed, and Julian let the gun slip from his fingertips, rattling against the floor as it dropped, so that he could use his good hand to reach into his back pocket.
His fingers had just closed around his phone, though, when Xander looked up and their eyes locked on each other, both filled with pain and rage. And just like that, the vision overtook Julian, and he, too, slumped to the floor, unconscious and lost in Xander’s world.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Siobhan
As Siobhan walked into her apartment building, she had a smile on her face. The whole drive home, she had been looking forward to slipping back into the apartment, padding her way to the bedroom, stripping all her clothes off, and sliding into bed with Julian to wake him up in a way that no man would protest. She fished her keys out of her bag quietly and slid her apartment key into the door, quietly turning the lock and easing the door open.
The smell of blood hit her immediately, and all her eager anticipation for the lovemaking to come flew out the window as the door opened further to reveal Julian lying unconscious on the floor, so much blood surrounding him that she was immediately certain that he was dead. Nobody could lose that much blood and live.
“No!” she shouted, dropping her bag and immediately going to his side, getting down on her knees with no thought for the fact that her jeans were soaked through with the sticky, dark-red blood that was all over her floor. Her hand went to his throat to check for his pulse as her eyes went to the wound at his shoulder, assessing it immediately as a knife wound.
There was a pulse in his throat, faint though it was, and her own heart leaped with relief. She pressed a hand against the wound, pulling her shirt off with her other hand to use as padding to stem the flow of blood. Then her eyes landed on the gun that was off to the side, also covered in blood.
The pieces of the puzzle all began to zoom together in her trained mind, and she knew without a doubt that someone had been in the house, that Julian had found her gun and tried to defend himself against someone with a knife, and that the residue on the barrel of the gun meant that he had gotten off a shot before being stabbed.
There was a lot to process about those conclusions, but all she focused on in that moment was that her scenario meant that it was possible that not all of the blood she was seeing was Julian’s. And that, along with his faint pulse, gave her hope, even though his face remained white and impassive.
“God, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, still pressing her shirt to his shoulder. “I wasn’t here. I’m so, so sorry.”
She hadn’t taken her phone with her when she went out to fly, and she didn’t remember where it was, but Julian’s phone was in his back pocket when she checked, and she pulled it out, unfazed by the lock screen that immediately popped up. Ignoring it, she hit the “emergency call” button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, and immediately the phone began
to ring, a 9-1-1 operator answering seconds later.
“Nine one one, what’s your emergency?”
“My boyfriend has been stabbed in the shoulder, and he’s lost a lot of blood. He’s unconscious. I just got home, and I have no idea what happened, but he needs an ambulance.”
“He’s completely unconscious? I can dispatch an ambulance. Your address please?”
There was deep skepticism in the woman’s voice, even though she remained helpful, and Siobhan knew that a girlfriend calling to report that her boyfriend had mysteriously been stabbed sounded a lot like her trying to cover for stabbing him. But that wasn’t important.
Siobhan gave the woman her address, rattling it off once, then again to double check what the woman had written down.
“Okay, I have an ambulance on its way to you now. It should only be a few minutes. What is your boyfriend’s current condition?”
“Unconscious,” Siobhan repeated. “Pulse present, but faint. Shoulder wound that looks jagged, suggests a knife entry of some kind. Extreme loss of blood—excessive, for the wound, I would say, although he’s lost a lot. There’s a gun lying beside him, and I think that he may have tried to shoot an intruder. The gun is mine. It’s a Beretta Model 92FS 9mm. Permitted, obviously. It’s a weapon I keep by the door for protection. Probably hasn’t been shot in over a year, but it’s lying here and there’s residue on it. To my knowledge, there’s no other person in the house. But I think some of this blood is from their injury, and there’s a trail …” She looked away from Julian for the first time, noting that there were drops of blood that led toward the hallway to her bedroom. “Shit.”
“Ma’am?” the operator asked, less skepticism in her voice this time. “Are you in a safe situation?”
“Fuck if I know,” Siobhan said, getting slowly to her feet. She didn’t want to leave Julian’s side, but she wasn’t going to be doing either of them any good if she left them open to attack from behind because whoever had assaulted Julian was still there and she didn’t take care of it. “I’m following a trail of blood that leads toward the hallway that takes me back to my bedroom,” she narrated for the operator. The woman couldn’t do anything to help her until the ambulance arrived, but she knew these calls were recorded, and if something happened, this would be the only documentation of the situation. Whether she was killed or ended up in court, she wanted a record of every moment.
“Ma’am, I have to urge you to find a safe space in the house and lock yourself in that space,” the operator stated. “I’m dispatching police cars to you as well. Please find a safe space within your home.”
Siobhan wasn’t about to listen to her, still approaching the bedroom cautiously. She wished she could have taken the gun with her, but they would need that for evidence and she couldn’t contaminate it. There was another gun in her bedroom closet, and as long as she didn’t get ambushed at the door, she would have time to get it.
“Bathroom is clear,” Siobhan told the dispatch operator, moving past the dark, empty room, her guard up and her body ready to spring into action. “Bedroom door is only halfway open …window in the bedroom allows for easy escape. This is a ground-floor apartment. My suspicion is that if someone was still in there when I got home, they’ll have left by now, if they’re able. Blood spots still on the floor, leading all the way into the bedroom.”
“Ma’am, I have to urge you to find a—”
Siobhan didn’t listen to the rest of the woman’s speech, kicking her bedroom door all the way open with one quick, sharp thrust of her foot. It was unnecessary force, but she wanted to enter the room with a bang, throwing off anyone who might be inside.
The rumpled bed was the first thing she saw, and she stared at in disgust, the place where she had made love to Julian just hours earlier now a bloody tangle of sheets. “Blood on the bed,” Siobhan told the operator, her voice thick with the rage that comes so easily when your space and safety are violated. “Someone was bleeding there. Significant blood loss.”
“Do you see that person?”
Siobhan rolled her eyes, and she decided to stop playing nice. “No, you eejit,” she said, always getting a touch more Irish when she was mad. “I don’t see the person. If I saw the person, I would have mentioned that first, don’t you think? I’m a trained investigator, and you are a college dropout. This is not about you—I’m making a recording of my findings by staying on the call. So just shut your mouth, okay?”
The room was so still that Siobhan knew without even looking at the open window that the person who had bled all over her sheets was no longer there.
Even still, she checked the closet and under the bed with due diligence, narrating it all to the miffed and silent operator who wasn’t allowed to hang up on her but also no longer had any interest in helping her. Siobhan didn’t care about the woman’s feelings at that particular moment, and she focused on clearing the room, then retrieving her gun from the top of the closet and shoving it into the back of her waistband.
There were sirens in the distance, and with the house clear and the ambulance almost there, Siobhan decided she no longer needed the recording. She hung up on the operator and hurried back out to Julian, crouching beside him again and touching his face.
Guilt washed over her, almost swallowing her up as she looked at his still, lifeless features. She hated herself for being so selfish as to leave him in the middle of the night to go fly over the ocean and process her feelings. If she had thought for a moment that he wouldn’t be safe, she would never have left him, and she knew, in the logical part of her mind, that she couldn’t possibly have predicted this.
But it was still her fault that he was hurt, and if he didn’t come back—
She broke off that thought, her throat suddenly tight with emotion. When the paramedics arrived, walking straight in through the front door that was still open, they had to forcefully remove Siobhan from Julian, as she had laid down beside him, her head on his uninjured shoulder. Covered in his blood, Siobhan sat on her couch, which was in the wrong place and at a strange angle, and watched as the paramedics stabilized Julian and lifted him onto the stretcher.
There was nothing she could do, and as she followed them out to the ambulance, getting into the front of the vehicle with the driver so she could ride with them to the hospital, she had never felt so helpless in her life.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Xander
It wasn’t fair.
He never got to win.
Everyone was out to get him, and it made him so angry that his hands vibrated and his legs shook and his brain popped with the thoughts of all the things he wanted to do to make this world finally realize just how badly it had treated him.
For his whole life!
No one had ever loved him—not for one minute. He was the whole world’s punching bag, and it made him want to put them all through as much pain as he felt.
His mother. His grandparents. His mother’s new children with their perfect life, perfect home, perfect father, perfect car, perfect clothes, perfect petting zoo afternoons. Why couldn’t she have given him those things? Had she hated him the moment that he came out of her? Had she looked into his eye and known what a bad, bad, bad boy he was?
“I’m a bad boy,” Xander whispered, lying out in the woods on the dirt and leaves and the bugs that littered the forest floor. “I’m a bad, bad boy. So naughty.”
The pain in his arm had dulled to a throb, though he still held it with his other hand, keeping the injury pressed up against his side.
That stupid, disgusting, cruel man had shot him. He’d ruined everything, fighting back against Xander, when he should have known that he deserved to die for what he’d done.
Xander didn’t know exactly what the man had done, but he was sure that it was terrible. He had gone to that apartment looking for the blonde woman—Siobhan—who had attacked him earlier that day and accused him of the most awful things. How dare she say he was a murderer? How dare she threaten him? He
wasn’t a murderer! He was just righting wrongs. He was a superhero!
He giggled to himself. “Make way for Bad Boy—the superhero of Boston.”
It had been so easy to get out of the mental hospital she’d forced him into. He’d done it plenty of times before, always escaping the places where people tried to confine him. And it had been easy to find Siobhan. People always talked too much around Xander, assuming that he was stupid just because he talked to himself. He wasn’t stupid at all, and he’d listened to every word that she and that man who had shot him said.
She was Siobhan MacFaddan, and he was Julian. They worked together, although Xander didn’t know what Julian’s job was. He was mainly focused on her anyway, especially since she said she had documentation on him and she knew all about his past. He didn’t like for people to know things about him. At all. He lived the kind of life that nobody should notice, even though sometimes people thought he was weird. He kept to himself, worked at a job where he got paid off the books, and lived in an apartment that he’d taken under his fake name. Nobody was supposed to know anything about him.
But she did.
She was out to get him, just like the rest. He couldn’t let her live. She was in his way. She didn’t understand him. She didn’t know why he was this way, or that it was everyone’s fault. Everyone’s! She would never let him complete his mission, and so she had to die.
Why hadn’t she been there that night? He had worked so hard to find her address on the internet, and he had bought a brand-new knife, just for her. He’d waited outside her apartment. He’d known that she was in there, because her car was outside. The car that she had forced him into when he was gagged and helpless.
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