by Bethany-Kris
20.
“Beni! Beni!”
August held onto that phone tight enough that the sides bit into her skin. It was the only lifeline she had left to the man on the other end—the sound of a gunshot so unmistakable and loud. It hadn’t shot her, but it certainly felt like something exploded through her heart with pain shattering it into a million and one little pieces.
“Beni!”
What was that sound on the other end?
Crunching?
Choking?
Both?
In her shock, August forgot that she was still standing in the empty bathroom of the movie theater. The last chick, who was taking way too long to wash her hands, although she just figured the woman was eavesdropping on August’s conversation, had left seconds before.
Now, it was just her alone.
With her fear.
So thick, she could taste it.
So cold, she couldn’t get warm.
She felt like a fucking lunatic yelling into the phone, with nothing to answer her back. Could he even answer her back? Oh, God. Was he even still alive?
Bang.
Was that ... another gunshot?
August jerked on the spot, a wash of dread falling down her spine as she stared into the mirror across from where she stood. Those wide eyes didn’t look like her. That chestnut skin of hers now had an ashy tone, devoid of her usual color.
That woman wasn’t her.
That woman was fear.
Except it was her.
“Beni,” she mumbled one last time.
August had never realized it was possible to feel so entirely scared, and useless at the same time. Like there was absolutely nothing she could do here to help him, and he was listening to her scream for him while he died.
And yet, she couldn’t say anything else.
Just his name.
It was the only echo in her mind.
Something crackled on the phone before a voice filled the speaker—not an unknown one, his tone was familiar enough to her, but barely.
“No time to explain,” Joe Rossi snapped, “he’ll be at the clinic.”
August finally found a way to make her mouth work, although how, she wasn’t sure. “What clinic?”
“Who is this?”
“August.”
The call went silent for three seconds, maybe just long enough for him to pull the phone away and check the screen. Then, he was right back on the call. “Jesus Christ ... he took a bullet to the chest. I have to get him to the doc.”
“What?”
“Are you with Camilla?”
“Yes?”
“She’ll understand. If not her, then Tommaso. I have to—”
“Don’t hang up the phone!”
“It’s that, or he dies.”
He didn’t give August the chance to choose, however, before he simply hung up the phone. She stared at the dead device in her hands for what felt like eons, although it might have only been a few seconds at the most.
Her heart was gone.
That was the problem.
It disappeared.
Turned to dust.
Apparently, it was that moment that Camilla decided to come and find August. How long had she been gone from the movie, now?
Fifteen minutes, or so.
Too long for the bathroom break she had claimed to her friend so that she wouldn’t follow her, and she could make that call to Beni.
“Aug—”
Camilla didn’t even get to push the door open all the way, or finish whatever it was she wanted to say before August spun to face her. Maybe it was the absolute terror in her eyes that did it, or the lack of color to her skin. It could have been the fact that she was still holding that dead phone in her shaking hands like she couldn’t let it go because her life depended on it.
It felt exactly like that.
Whatever it was that her friend saw, Camilla knew right away. Something was wrong. So very fucking wrong.
“What happened?” Camilla asked, rushing into the bathroom.
“He was shot.”
“What?”
“Beni was shot.”
Camilla’s hands landed to her arms, grabbing tight before she shook her just hard enough that her hazy vision cleared of tears that threatened to fall. “August, stop mumbling.”
“Beni was shot!”
That made Camilla freeze.
“When?”
“Just n-now—or a couple minutes ago. Joe said a clinic, o-or something ... I don’t k-know what he m-means.”
Great.
Now her fucking teeth were chattering.
Shock was a bitch.
Camilla hugged August tight, arms locking around her like bars to stop the sudden shivers that raced through her body. “It’s all right ... it’ll be fine. We’ll call Tommaso, okay? He’ll know what they’re going to do.”
But would it make a difference?
Or was he already dead?
He couldn’t be dead.
She just found him.
• • •
“This isn’t a hospital! He needs to be taken to an ER somewhere and—”
“This is where we can bring him,” Tommaso said sharply, quieting August almost instantly with the look he threw at her over his shoulder. All it took was the smack of his wife’s hand against his side for him to correct his attitude. “Sorry, Aug, I know you’re scared and freaking out ... Listen, we can’t bring him into a hospital. Not unless we just want to drop him off, and leave him there alone until they figure out who he is, and call people in for him. It’ll be flooded with cops. He’s a gunshot victim. And just his last name would be enough to tell them that he’s—”
“Connected to the mob,” she whispered.
“Yeah.”
God.
That pissed her off.
It made her so fucking angry for Beni.
“Why,” she demanded, “because you protect the Outfit first, and its people second? Is that how it goes?”
“August,” Camilla murmured, “they’re doing what they’ve always done. Beni would do the same, you know?”
No, actually.
She didn’t know.
However, what she did know was that it would be better for her to just get in line, let them do what they were going to do, and hope for the best. There was nothing else she could do right now except hope and fucking pray.
“We have a trauma surgeon on call that works in this clinic,” Tommaso said, holding open the side door to a rather normal looking brick building. She had seen the sign on the front that explained it was, in fact, a walk-in clinic. “He’s handled this kind of thing for us before.”
Great.
That was just perfect.
“So, it’s a regular thing?”
Camilla gave her a look.
August just shrugged.
She couldn’t help it.
When she was scared, she got mean.
The second they stepped inside the darkened hallway of the clinic, August could hear the shouting. It sounded like pure pain. She didn’t need to be told to know it was Beni screaming like that.
“Hold him down, get him fucking still on the table! Let’s get this controlled!”
“Oh, my God.”
Camilla was at August’s side in a second, an arm locked around her waist like she was determined to keep her still. “You’re not going back there.”
“But—”
“It’s a bad idea.”
Did it matter?
Those tears were falling again.
“I’ll be right back,” Tommaso said, quickly added, “keep her with you, Cam.”
“Okay.”
She suspected they were in the back hallways of the clinic, if only because the darkened space didn’t offer anything to suggest the regular patients would be using the area. The one door she could see a few feet down had a sign on it that said STORAGE in black letters.
The shouting continued.
Aug
ust squeezed her eyes shut.
Not that it helped.
She didn’t open her eyes again until Tommaso’s voice echoed down the hall, reaching their spot where the two girls hugged one another before he ever did.
“Good news first,” he said, “it missed his heart by two inches. Bad news—the bullet hit a rib, broke it, and he lost a lot of blood. Joe is O Positive, so he was on hand to donate direct. We just have to let them get the bullet out, and—”
“While he’s awake.”
It wasn’t even a question.
August stared hard at Tom.
“They’re not equipped here to put him under safely, that’s all.”
Jesus.
“They have the tools on hand to take blood from Joe for him, but not to put him under while they dig a bullet out of his chest?”
“One doesn’t require a tube down his throat, given the severity, and monitors on his heart and brain while they work, August.”
Right, right.
She understood what Tommaso was saying. He made sense, too. It wasn’t that she couldn’t comprehend all of this, but rather ... her mind was trying to deal with it all in the only way it knew how. By picking apart every little thing instead of focusing on all the things she couldn’t control here.
This wasn’t in her hands.
She couldn’t help.
“Someone has to call his family—his mom and dad, his brothers. His twin.”
Tommaso nodded. “We already have.”
Good.
As for her ...
Well, she was just going to stand here and feel like she was dead already. What else could she do at this point?
• • •
“Hey.”
The greeting sounded like it came from so far away, but August felt the couch shift at the same time the word reached her ears. She felt the warmth of a man who looked exactly like hers a few doors down in the clinic, but nothing seemed real.
Now, she was just floating.
Sixteen hours later.
The whole clinic was closed for them. She wasn’t allowed to leave the space that was used as a waiting area, lest she wander too far and ruin the sterile environment they had set up. It was all over, now, and she watched them tote pail after pail of bloody water from the room—where Beni was currently recuperating—from her current position on the couch. It allowed her to look right down that hall and watch them move in and out of the room.
“He stopped shouting like ... twelve hours ago,” she said, her voice aching. “Or something like that—I guess he passed out.”
Bene rubbed at his chest with his left palm, wincing a bit as he let out a hard sigh. “Tom said you didn’t do well with the whole ... well, anything.”
“Would you?”
He eyed her from the side. “No.”
August nodded. “Yeah.”
“Where’s the doc?”
“Sleeping in the room on a chair.”
Or, that’s what she was told. That way, if the shitty heart monitor they had went off, he was right there to react. Problem was, he needed to sleep, too, so that was another reason why she wasn’t allowed to go down the hall to see Beni quite yet. She might wake the doctor up before he had a solid stretch of sleep to recharge.
“When is he going to wake up?”
“Who?”
“Beni.”
“When he’s ready to,” Bene murmured, “because that’s just Beni. Nothing is ever on someone else’s time, it’s always on his.”
Wasn’t that the truth?
“I don’t mean to interrupt, but would you like something to eat, sweetheart?”
August glanced up from where she folded her hands in her lap to find a beautiful, red-headed woman standing just a few feet away. At her side, a man stood stoic and quiet, arms folded behind his back as he nodded at a younger man across the room.
“I ... I don’t think so,” August said, “but thank you.”
Bene gave her a small smile. “August, this is our mother and father, Cara and Gian.”
Oh.
Oh.
She stared at the woman again, her soft features taking on a more familiar quality. She could easily see where the twins had taken after their mother, with just a dash of their father’s tall, dark, and handsome characteristics, too. They had her soft smile, but his dark eyes.
It was then that she noticed all the other people now standing in the waiting area, too. Shock really was something else—it could take someone to a whole different world, and make everything disappear while it took over.
Like now.
Next to the new people in the room, on another couch in the corner, Camilla had fallen asleep while her husband sat next to her. Joe, on the far end, hid under the weight of his leather jacket where he couldn’t be seen, probably sleeping, too.
It was August who couldn’t close her eyes.
Even if her body begged for the rest.
“And that’s Marcus,” Bene said, pointing at the man Gian had been nodding at, “our oldest brother.”
“Hello,” Marcus greeted from his position near the clinic’s front door.
“And Corrado.”
He gestured to the man talking in hushed tones to whoever was on the phone. Angled slightly away from them, all she could see was his profile. Although, the side of his face matched the man he stood beside.
“Chris, his twin,” Bene explained, “our other brothers. We’re missing a couple—Les stayed with Ginny because she’s pregnant, but he’s coming tomorrow. And Val, Chris’s wife, stayed behind with their daughter.”
The whole family was there.
And now they were staring at her.
Even the one on his phone because he literally turned around to stare.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Bene said quietly, “but I explained a bit about you and Beni ... so they would know. Figured, in case they wondered who this woman was that loved him, might be better to let them know ahead of time.”
Right.
Because they hadn’t really gotten that far.
Now, they would.
It was just the worst possible time.
“I don’t mind,” she said quietly.
Bene nodded.
Cara smiled warmly again. “Are you sure you don’t want something to eat or drink? One of the boys can run out and get whatever.”
“No, I’m okay. I just want him.”
Silence covered the room.
Thick, and oh, so heavy.
It might not have been the right thing to say.
It was still the truth.
Cara cleared her throat, giving her husband a nod before coming to sit on the couch on the other side of August. “I hear you come from New York.”
“I do.”
All eyes were still on her.
She didn’t mind as much with Cara talking to her.
“Which borough?”
“Brooklyn, when I was younger. Queens later.”
The shock lessened as the conversation continued. The others joined in, making her talk, and filling the silence in between with stories about them, and their family.
It really was the worst time to meet them. August was grateful that she did, though, because it was impossible to deny how strong the group felt huddled together in that waiting room of a clinic that was not meant for this purpose. Beni’s family was welcoming, and oddly familiar to her, in a way she couldn’t explain.
They felt like him.
And she needed that.
So much.
• • •
Eighteen hours.
That was how long August had been sitting in that clinic before she was finally allowed into the back room where not only had they operated on Beni, but they kept him to rest, too. She vaguely remembered the doctor coming out, bloodstains still coloring his dress shirt and pants a ruddy brown, to tell them they could visit Beni a couple at a time, if they would like.
She said his parents should go first.
&nb
sp; Then, his twin with Marcus.
The other two brothers.
She went last ... if only because August didn’t know how she was going to react once she was in that room, and she didn’t want a witness to her pain. Wasn’t it bad enough that she already felt like she was staring down at herself from above, and not really there?
Now, sitting at Beni’s bedside, watching his heavily bandaged chest rise and fall, she was finally starting to come back to reality. If that’s even what she could call this ... feeling. Everything became sharp and clear all at once, from her pain, to the thoughts screaming in her mind. For too long, sitting in that waiting room, she felt nothing, her vision cloudy from tears that continued to fall, and her ears feeling like she was underwater.
Someone had cleaned him up—thankfully.
White, crisp sheets covered him.
An IV had been put in his right hand and leads attached to his chest kept the heart monitor on the other side of the bed beating with a steady sound. All was well. It looked good, including him in his deep sleep, face relaxed, and unconcerned that his bandages appeared as though they would need to be changed again soon.
The room still smelled of bleach.
Joe helped with that.
Seemed he knew how to clean up blood ...
She didn’t ask how or why.
There wasn’t much to see in the space, and even the bed Beni rested on wasn’t really a standard, issue hospital bed. It was one of those hard, rubbery pedestal beds one would find in their family doctor’s office. Not at all meant for healing, or a restful sleep, but as she had been told time and time again ... they were making do with what they had.
Doing what they could.
She wasn’t the only one unhappy about that.
Beni’s mother didn’t like this, either, but Cara was a lot louder than August about it. If only because she could be, maybe, where as August didn’t think her opinion counted for very much where these made men were concerned.
Letting those thoughts, and her constant worries, drift away so that she could focus on Beni and the present, she slipped her hand under his. Careful not to squeeze, just in case she did something to his IV, she settled herself on holding his hand, and taking those few moments to herself before someone came to interrupt it.
“You know, I don’t think he would mind if you took a moment to rest.”
August glanced toward the door, finding Marcus leaning there. “I can’t sleep.”