by Anne Malcom
Too still.
His limbs were slouched unnaturally on the chair, knees knocking into each other and splayed on the side. His arms were drooped over the arms of the chair, wrists dangling limply.
Jade looked to me, her almond eyes glowing. “Nimbex.” She waved the syringe after picking it up off the floor. “It’s a nerve agent that paralyzes you but keeps you conscious at the same time. Used primarily for preparing the body for general anesthesia and surgery, but I think it’ll work just fine for what I’ve got in mind.”
I blinked at her rapidly, but then my eyes went to Gage’s.
“Anesthesia isn’t part of the menu,” she continued, pacing the room. “Because I want to make you hurt.” She yanked at Gage’s neck, jerking him to face her and then letting him go brutally so his neck lolled forward.
She propped it back up again, caressing his cheek before straightening and looking to me.
“I’ve got connections in the drug business,” she said. “I’m sure by now, Gage has filled you in on our history. He’s so terribly honest for a villain. Well, my family, the ones he blew up”—she narrowed her eyes at him—“their business was drugs. But not just the ones our Gage is a slave to. No, we dabbled in all sorts. That’s how I found out about the one that almost killed you.”
She scowled at me, walking forward to slap me.
It might’ve stung, but it was the utter fury and helplessness in Gage’s eyes that hurt more.
“You were all so fucking blind, weren’t you? I was right there in front of your faces the entire time. Women will always be the demise of men who think they’re strong.”
She smiled again.
“And you were the stupidest of them all. Because it was so easy.”
Her smile was gone, as if I’d screamed at her out loud like I was in my head.
“Why the fuck didn’t you die?” she hissed. “It would’ve been so much easier if you’d burned. But then I got to play with you after that. It was fun. Destroying you slower. But I was getting bored. That’s why I upped the dose. But you weren’t predictable, so I couldn’t give you enough. And then you wouldn’t fucking die. Then I wouldn’t have had to get messy and kill that idiot, frame Gage for it.” She smiled. “Though I will admit it was fun, playing with him, cutting him up just like a crazy man with a knife might.”
She sauntered over to Gage, leaning over seductively and yanking his blade out of its sheath.
His eyes bulged.
I tasted bile at the thought of her using it on him. Of him having another scar when that knife had already inflicted enough.
When life had already inflicted enough.
I exhaled when she straightened and clutched the knife before pacing again.
“Women can be villains too,” she said, her voice shrill. Unstable. “That’s the kicker here. We’re all in a post-feminist world, right?” She looked to Gage. “Even you bikers seem to understand the importance of equal rights. Maybe not in theory but especially in practice, considering every single one of those notorious ‘old ladies’ leads you men around by your dicks.”
She gave Gage a look, one that told me her sanity was frayed, crushed, nothing but a memory, if it ever existed at all. I couldn’t believe that she’d managed to hold it together, hide all that behind red lipstick and pencil skirts. It took a special and deadly type of insanity to hide it like that.
Gage was dangerous.
Deadly.
But he couldn’t hide that.
This woman could. And fear circulated through every part of my body thinking that meant she’d be the one who ended him.
She scratched her head with the barrel of her gun. “You see, all I wanted was to be that for you, Gage. Why couldn’t I be that?” Her voice was low. Pleading.
Gage didn’t answer. His entire body was still, courtesy of the chemicals she’d injected into his system. But he wasn’t still. No, his eyes showed the battle he was waging as his gaze zeroed in on Jen. It was in his utter stillness that I saw the ferocity of his fight.
He was powerless.
And that was one of the worst things she could’ve done.
That’s why she was more dangerous than a man with a gun and a temper. Because women like that were smart. When they wanted to hurt someone, it wasn’t with a bullet. It was with everything and anything they could.
She stopped, her eyes darting from me to Gage and then rushing to get into his face. “Why couldn’t I be that?” she screamed, spittle flying from her mouth. She stayed there a moment longer, gun clutched in her manicured hand. Fear that she was going to use it sent lances of pain through every single one of my already screaming nerve endings.
But she didn’t.
She jerked, as if she was being woken up abruptly by a deep slumber, her body snapping back straight. Her eyes fluttered rapidly as she blinked, as if trying to focus on reality. Her exaggerated inhales and exhales echoed through the silent room.
“What I was saying,” she said, voice terse, as if one us of had interrupted her, “was that women are better villains because we hurt. We hurt more than you. And we feel pain deeper.” She strode over to me. Cold steel kissed my temple, and Gage’s eyes widened in a silent roar. “That means a special number of us can inflict pain deeper.”
She was going to shoot me.
I was going to die.
My eyes hungrily took in every single inch of Gage. Trying to isolate him from the horror around me, hold on to him, imprint a goodbye on him.
Tears streamed down his face.
The pressure of the gun at my temple was nothing compared to that agony-filled stare, those tears on Gage’s face.
I barely noticed the release of that pressure, my mind too focused on what would happen to Gage when I was gone. The fear for his life with my death dwarfed everything around me, even the reality of the absence of my death.
A shooting and white-hot agony in my thigh was enough to plunge me back into that reality.
Into the absence of death.
Pain was the ultimate absence of death. It was the only way we knew we were alive.
“See, you ripped out my heart and laid it bloody at my feet. And you didn’t even care!” she screamed, yanking Gage’s knife out of my thigh, the steel soaked with my blood.
I glanced down at the steady stream of crimson. It didn’t hit an artery. It hurt—a lot—but it wasn’t going to kill me.
Jade would.
Eventually.
If I didn’t fight.
If I didn’t battle.
She paced the room.
I fiddled with my binds.
“Now I’m going to do the same to you,” she said, her voice suddenly low. “Just not metaphorically.” She glanced at me, and I immediately stopped struggling. “And not your heart. Because I know the way to hurt you, really hurt you like you did me, is to take away the one person in your world who makes sense. And then you’ll be thrust into chaos, into insanity like me. And then I’ll make you live with it.”
She ripped my gag off.
“Kill me,” I said immediately. “That’s what you want, right? Revenge for stealing your man? Well that’s what I did. I stole him. He did everything to me that I’m sure he never did to you. He loved me,” I taunted her, my death wish born from desperation.
I wasn’t thinking logically at that point. No, there was no shape or form to my thoughts, a kind of crazy similar to Jade’s. But mine was about saving the one I loved rather than punishing them for happiness.
I didn’t look at Gage because I knew I’d see the accusation in his eyes. The fury. The pain. He didn’t want this. I was being cruel, making him watch someone else he loved die in front of him.
Logically, it would’ve been kinder to take that pain on myself, go through the unfathomable horror of watching him die if only to spare him more pain.
But I was working on love. And it wasn’t about being kind. No, it was being cruel, even if that cruelty was him drawing breath when I couldn’t.
“I’ll do anything for him,” I said, working at my binds that were finally loosening.
She smiled again. “I know,” she whispered. “Why do you think we’re all here?” She waved the gun around. “I’ll do anything for him too.” She moved away from me and a sick bitterness erupted on my tongue. “Including putting him out of his misery.” She pointed the gun at Gage’s chest.
It was then that I looked at him, saw the panic turned to relief as he met the barrel.
“No!” I screamed at the same time the gun went off.
At the same time blood covered Gage’s chest, a crimson rose blossoming before my very eyes. His heart bleeding from the inside out.
In all the movies, time slowed at those moments. Gave the doomed heroine and hero the chance to say their goodbyes in a lingering glance, where a lifetime was contained. Gave them a moment to communicate all the pain and love into it.
But this wasn’t the movies.
And I wasn’t a heroine.
Gage surely wasn’t a hero.
So time didn’t slow—it snapped into a cold, loud, agonizing blur, where the glance wasn’t lingering, and a lifetime wasn’t contained. It was snatched away in the most violent way possible.
The gun in Jade’s hand was still smoking, and she was looking at it in vague wonder and surprise that only existed on the face of someone who’d broken from themselves and couldn’t quite figure out anything from the pieces.
Then, as blood spurted hideously from Gage’s mouth, she smiled in a cold and lucid realization.
“I exploded your heart,” she said, voice brimming with glee.
My binds gave way.
Another thing that happened in movies: the struggling captive broke free of their shackles just in time to save themselves, save the world.
I didn’t save myself.
Or the world.
Both were lost to me already.
But I launched myself at Jade anyway, my fingernails sinking into the flesh of her cheek, grotesquely tearing away at the skin.
She let out a shrill and garbled scream, but it was too late. I’d taken her down with the weight of my body, heavier now with the weight of my sorrow.
Dead weight.
I itched to tear her apart with my bare hands so her skin and blood and bone crusted under my fingernails, so her death sank into my skin.
But there wasn’t time for that. Not when the whole world laid dying beside us.
So I reached for the gun in her flailing hand, even with my ruined shoulder that had popped when I wrenched myself free from my ropes. It was laughable how easy it was to get it off her. But she wasn’t fighting now. What was the point? She’d gotten her wish.
This was the ending that no one told you about. The one where the villain won.
I held the gun level, hot from her grip, cold from the grave she’d called upon with it.
I didn’t hesitate to jam it against her temple and squeeze. The resounding bang was loud, maybe. My ears were filled with a low and painful roar, so I didn’t much notice. It did go off though, her body going limp as blood, brains, and pieces of her skull splattered over my face.
I didn’t even pause, didn’t let go of the gun, just scrambled over her body, crawling through the growing pool of Gage’s blood to get to him. It was sticky and warm, but when I gathered him in my arms, he was so cold.
All of his warmth was seeping out onto the floor.
All of his life.
His eyes were staring at me, blank and glassy, and I was taken back ten years, assaulted with the very same stare I’d received from my brother. From the other half of me.
I shook uncontrollably, certain I was looking into the grave again. That another part of me was being torn, ripped, clawed out of me.
But he blinked, slowly, and purposefully, in such a way that it seemed like an effort to wrench his eyelids back up.
Tears ran through the flesh and bone on my face. “You’re not dying,” I told him. I ordered him.
His mouth quirked up. “You know I like it when you’re bossy,” he croaked, spluttering.
Warm blood sprayed on my face once more.
He wasn’t paralyzed anymore, no longer in the clutches of whatever Jade had plunged into his body. It was draining out of him. Like his life.
“You’re not leaving me,” I hissed. “You promised.”
As if moving through sand, he slowly raised his arm into the air until he cupped my face. “I’ll find you, Will,” he coughed. “I promise I’ll find you.”
He made a horrible hacking sound in his throat, the rattling of his failing lungs cutting through my eardrums like blunt knives.
Then his eyes flickered, exploded with light.
Then they didn’t.
Then everything left them.
And he just stared at me.
I blinked, hoping it was a trick of the light. The absence behind that stare. I pretended I hadn’t noticed Gage’s weight depress into me. That the blood on the floor was warmer than his body.
“You can’t do this,” I whispered to Gage’s lifeless face, rocking him gently, as if such a tender motion might counteract the violence of before. “You can’t do this!” I screamed. But not to Gage—to the air, to whoever was in charge of this torture chamber that was the world. “You can’t take another thing away from me! You fucking can’t! You cannot take him.” I squeezed Gage harder, my arms protesting, the bones of my ruined shoulder grinding together in what I was sure should’ve been agony. “I won’t let you take him!” I screamed with the last of my voice before that too gave up on me.
The silence that followed was heavy. Unnatural. Disgusting. It haunted me. The air was thick with death, and the loneliness hit me hard. I had Gage in my arms, but there was no one inside of him. He’d seeped into that air, and I couldn’t hold him anymore.
I continued to rock him, my eyes unseeing like his.
I must’ve really unseen something, because I didn’t see anything else for the longest of times.
Twenty
“Come on, honey, why don’t we go get you showered?” a soft and kind voice asked. “Get that blood off you.”
I looked up robotically, my left arm hanging useless at my side. No one had noticed it yet. But I’d come in with a dead man, screaming and covered in blood, so it was kind of easy to miss.
I saw Lily, sure I did. She was right there, standing in reality. And I was living in reality. I didn’t have the luxury of escaping it. The pain didn’t let me. The demons didn’t. They’d chained me to the horrible, stark, and ugly truth that I was living with.
She flinched when we made eye contact.
I was sure I looked bad.
Dead.
I sure felt it.
“Why should I shower? That’s not getting the blood off me anyway,” I said, my voice flat.
I slowly moved my gaze back to the man in the bed, my good hand clasped around his scarred wrist. I squeezed as tight as I could, digging my nails into his skin. I wasn’t going to tenderly wake him up. That wouldn’t wake him up.
“Pain is how we feel alive, Will.”
The voice was so sure, so loud, I was convinced it was him speaking.
If he didn’t have a tube down his throat and wasn’t currently conversing with the gatekeeper of Hell.
My nails dug in harder.
It wouldn’t be tenderness that brought him back.
It was going to be pain.
“Lauren, it’s been two days,” a less gentle voice than the rest said. “You haven’t eaten. Slept. You’re still covered in freaking blood. That’s just gross.”
Amy was trying, and failing, to soften the sharp edges of the moment.
“This is Gage’s blood,” I replied. Then my brain showed me the explosion of Jade’s skull as a bullet ripped through it. “Some of it,” I corrected. “I’m not cleaning this bl
ood off me until he wakes up and I’m certain he’ll bleed again. Till I’m certain I’m not fucking wearing the last pieces of the man I love.”
She sucked in a harsh and audible breath. “Wow. You’re so fucked up. You guys are perfect for each other.”
“No we weren’t. And that’s the point.”
There was a long pause where Amy didn’t try to offer me support, empty words of reassurance about Gage’s strength. She didn’t tell me to have faith or hope.
She knew such things didn’t exist here.
And she knew that no matter how strong Gage was, there was nothing to guarantee he would get through this. That I would get through this. It didn’t matter that every couple before us merely brushed by death, maybe got a deep graze that would never quite heal.
We were nothing like those other couples.
Death had already sunk its teeth into us; only time would tell whether it would completely and utterly tear us apart.
“Gage is gonna be pissed when he wakes up. That you’ve been sitting here, letting the life waste out of you,” a husky and even voice said.
I didn’t look up. “If he wakes up,” I corrected.
Various nurses and doctors had been moving around, speaking to me, speaking at me, knowing it was futile to say such things as “visiting hours” or “proper procedure” near me anymore. I was a bloodied and unhinged part of the furniture.
They spoke about blood loss, about infection, about “low chance of survival.” I didn’t listen. There was no point in listening. Either he woke up or he didn’t; listening to them wouldn’t change that.
“When he wakes up,” Bex repeated, moving into my eyeline, which was at Gage’s side since he was always in my eyeline. I wanted to be the first to see those eyes when they opened. Or the last to witness his final heartbeat.
I didn’t answer Bex.
She didn’t talk. I saw her look at the fresh, ragged nail marks up Gage’s scarred arms. Most normal people would have something to say about a person scratching the skin away from a person in a coma.