by Moriah Jovan
“Would you like to hold him?” the nurse asked softly. “The doctor gave his okay.”
“Yes, please,” he whispered and the tiny creature was picked up and placed in his arms. She led Bryce to a rocking chair and gave him a tiny bottle of formula.
“He’s probably not hungry yet, but—”
Bryce tuned her out. He’d done this four times already; he was an old hand at it.
He rocked that baby for hours as he waited for permission to see Giselle. The boy awoke, cried, and Bryce plugged his mouth with the bottle until he’d taken a few sucks. He looked into the familiar gunmetal gray eyes all newborns have and wondered if they’d lighten to Dunham ice or darken to Kenard emerald.
“I love you, kid,” he whispered and held him close as he fell asleep again, “and I desperately love your mother.”
“Mr. Kenard,” said a nurse softly, leaning over his shoulder, “your wife’s awake and asking for you. I’ll take the little one so you can go see her.”
Bryce gave his son back to her carefully, then dashed down the hallway and asked directions to find her. He found her room and ran in to see her in the bed, wan, listless, and her eyes half closed. He felt like he’d been kicked in the gut to see her like this, the strongest, most fearless woman he’d ever met—the woman he had to work to take, over and over and over again, the one who occasionally took him.
But. She was alive and awake, and that was all he cared about right now. “Giselle,” he breathed and she turned to see him, her face lighting up.
“Bryce! Have you seen him? Is he okay? They told me he was, but . . . ”
“He’s fine. He’s wonderful. How are you?”
“I have a headache,” she said, her face making that very plain, but her body radiated good humor and he needed it now more than he ever had.
Bryce pulled a chair up to the bedside, leaned in, and buried his face in her belly. He felt her hands in his hair, stroking him, caressing him as if he were the child. And he began to cry, long wracking sobs—for her, for the child, for the family he’d lost. For himself.
He had almost lost Giselle—again. Permanently.
It was a long while before Bryce could lift his head and he took her hands and kissed them. “Did they tell you?” he asked quietly. “You had an emergency hysterectomy.”
She gasped, her eyes wide, and then she grinned. “Fabulous! I hate having periods with a passion. There’s no such thing as an elective hysterectomy, you know. Saves me the trouble of begging someone to do it.”
He had to laugh at that, no matter how shaky it was. So, she’d been serious when she’d said she wanted no more children. Trust her to want exactly the opposite of what most any other woman would want. He’d started to grow bitter again, to feel guilty for bringing their future childlessness down on their heads, but her reaction quelled that.
He could not afford to bring more guilt into their marriage.
“How’s your head now?”
“Still pounding. I want aspirin but they’re being nasty about that.”
“You lost a lot of blood. They had to transfuse you.”
“I don’t care. Aspirin’s the only thing that works.” Giselle placed a hand on his arm and bit her lip, her eyes sparkling. “Bryce. We made a baby.”
He couldn’t help the slow smile that spread across his face. “Let me go get him for you.”
“Beat you to it,” said a nurse from the doorway as she wheeled in the acrylic bassinet. “Figured you’d be up to saying hello to him now.”
Bryce lifted the little burrito out and carefully laid him in his mother’s arms.
Giselle gasped and breathed, “Wow, look at that hair! It’s orange! I so didn’t expect that.”
Bryce laughed. “My dad’s hair was that color.”
She looked at him sharply, wary. “Are you going to be okay with that?”
Bryce smirked with the pride of a new father and ruffled the little orange curls with his fingertips. “I’ll be all right.”
Soon Lilly, Dianne, Eilis, and Sebastian joined them and the five of them gathered around Giselle and Duncan Elliott Dunham Kenard to ooh and ahh, because little baby feet are the best things in the world.
*
6:05 p.m.
When Justice was startled awake by the sound of Knox’s roars echoing in the storage room, three thoughts occurred to her at the same time:
He was alive.
He’d found her and the baby.
They had a chance.
Justice and Mercy still lay on the cot and she watched as Fen and Knox circled each other, slow dancing with firearms. Her heart thundered and she could barely see through her tears, her trembling.
“You and your wolf pack have sneered at me for years for not dirtying my own hands,” Fen hissed. “So here I am, Knox. I know I’m done, but I’m taking all three of you with me.”
Justice knew why Fen would want to kill her: She’d done what she’d told him she’d do after he’d threatened Knox. One scathing email to four of her closest liberal friends and his name had become hazardous waste nationwide—
—but in spite of her hesitation in bringing a child into this mess, she had never really believed that anyone would actually be willing to kill a newborn baby.
With that thought, Justice carefully and painfully twisted to lay Mercy behind her and lightly pin her between the wall and her body. She absolutely couldn’t turn over because it was too painful and too awkward, and because she was afraid she’d drop the baby. She slowly and carefully, with much pain, drew her knees up to her chest and folded in on herself to give any bullet that might come their way more mass to travel through. Mercy would not die while she could provide a shield. Justice and Knox wouldn’t live out the day, but Mercy would never be without love and family.
She tried to believe that Knox could protect them, and she kept close the memory of how he had killed Lionel Jones the day she had interviewed for her job and felt no remorse—how horrified she’d been, how outraged—
—and here Justice was, eighteen months later, having killed a man in defense of her daughter and husband—and felt absolutely no remorse.
Justice must have moved, squishing Mercy too tightly, because she began to wail again and distracted Fen just enough that Knox was able to close the distance between them and put his gun to Fen’s temple.
“So here’s how it’s going to be, Fen,” Knox muttered. “You can walk out of here and stay alive or you can go in a pine box. Your choice.”
“They’re going first,” Fen snarled as he pointed his gun at Justice. She closed her eyes so as not to see her own death.
The nearly simultaneous booms were deafening and Mercy screamed, held her breath as babies do, then caught another breath and screamed again. Justice had barely enough time to raise her head before the FBI broke in—
—more gunshots.
Shouting.
Pounding feet.
Justice glanced at the carnage on the floor. Fen lay on his back, nearly headless. Knox lay on his stomach close enough to Fen to touch, bloody and still, his beautiful blue eyes closed, his gun still held loosely in his hand.
Justice swallowed and closed her eyes tight, then sobbed when she heard him pronounced dead at the scene.
*
8:34 p.m.
“I’m so pissed at Knox,” Sebastian snarled as he paced the Den of Iniquity while Eilis lounged nude in bed, nursing Alex, enjoying the lush sensuality of motherhood. His hands on his hips while he paced, he continued to rant. “He couldn’t call, couldn’t show up—what’s that about?”
The phone rang then and Sebastian burst out of the bedroom to the studio to answer it. Chouteau County prosecutor’s office. “Knox, you bastard, Giselle’s—”
“Shut the fuck up, Sebastian. It’s Eric.”
Sebastian stopped and found his heart racing immediately, his anger turning to panic in a microsecond.
“Sit down and listen to me.”
Sebastian sat only after Eric began to
speak again. He fell back against the wall and slid down it helplessly, his soul dying with every painful word. He wasn’t aware when he dropped the phone and drew his knees up to his chest to press his face in them to sob.
“Sebastian, what—?”
He shook his head at the sound of Eilis’s voice above him, the feel of her hand in his hair, because he couldn’t form words, couldn’t make his vocal cords move.
“Get dressed,” he whispered, hoarse, when he could finally speak. “I have to go back to St. Luke’s.”
“Oh, no! Giselle?”
He shook his head. “You have to go to Truman Medical Center.”
She said nothing for a moment, then, warily, “Why?”
Sebastian swallowed the bitter pill of shame and guilt, of the heartbreaking loss of his brother, the pain Knox always thought he should know.
“Justice needs you,” he finally said. “Take diapers, clothes for Justice, for the baby. Justice needs . . . well, everything. She’s lost everything.” He choked. “We have lost everything.”
“Lost everything . . . ” she repeated slowly. “I don’t und—” Her eyes widened and she released a strangled breath. “Sebastian, no. Please don’t say—”
“Fen,” he whispered. “Fen did it. Three weeks before the handoff and he just—” He looked up at her then, his cheeks wet. Her eyes darkened until they looked haunted and tears spilled over. Sebastian raised his face to the ceiling, holding his head as if it were going to explode, and howled.
“KNOX!”
*
11:02 p.m.
Justice carried a sleeping Mercy on her shoulder as she limped barefoot into the morgue. The painkillers had somewhat dulled the pain in her feet. Her burns had been treated and the glass extracted from her soles, but though she hurt, she had work to do and Knox’s daughter to love and care for.
Mercy had not come out unscathed and guilt rode Justice hard.
She dreaded this moment. She had been asked to come identify the bodies, but she stopped short when she saw the once-beautiful blonde woman already at the window. Her eyes narrowed. So. This was her mother-in-law.
Trudy Hilliard glanced at Justice but turned back to the window, its blind now closed. She wept, her face streaked with tears. Justice felt no sympathy. How could she?
“I hope you’re happy now,” Justice murmured as she took a place beside her, not looking at her. “You leave a trail of bitterness and hatred, death and destruction in your wake like slug tracks, don’t you?”
Trudy stiffened, then gasped, whirling to face Justice. She was livid, and Justice now knew where Knox had gotten his hot and quick temper as well as who had given him and Eilis their golden beauty. “How dare you! Who are you to say such a cruel thing to me?”
“I’m the mother of your granddaughter, the baby your husband almost succeeded in killing.”
The woman gasped and stepped back, her attention drawn to Mercy. “May—may I see her? Please?”
Justice looked at her then and she felt her power emanate from her, encompassing Trudy. Trudy’s eyes widened just a bit.
“If you touch her, I’ll kill you,” Justice said matter-of-factly, satisfied when Trudy took another step backward, clearly frightened. “Why should I think you’d treat your grandchild any better than you treated your children?”
Trudy swallowed, then took a step to escape around Justice, but Justice would have her say. She stepped in front of her. She was taller than Trudy and the fact that she was barefoot, had a baby on her left shoulder, and a limp did not in any way negate the badge she wore on the front pocket of the jeans Eilis had loaned her, nor the gun in the holster wrapped around her thigh that the FBI had not seen fit to take away from her, all things considered.
“Do you know what you have done?” Justice could see that she wanted to slap her, but was too terrified. “In case you haven’t actually thought it through, let me remind you.” Justice coldly, methodically ran down the list of everything that had happened from the first moment Trudy had seduced Fen.
“And that—” Justice pressed her finger to the morgue window when she finished her recitation. “—is the end result. Your husband is dead. Your son is dead, not that you care, but he despised you; your daughter hates you. You have no more family who will claim you—your sisters and brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews abandoned you a year ago.
“Your home and everything in it are mine. I sent the sheriff out there a little while ago to padlock it pending probate. OKH is mine. I’ll make sure to acquire everything else you own, too. Of course, it’s December and it’s cold and all you have are the clothes on your back and your car and whatever’s in your purse—which is far more than what you gave Knox when you kicked him out. I doubt you have a clue how to live on your own, working, earning money. And don’t even think about getting a lawyer to fight me for any of it because I’ll kick his ass from here to New York and back. Life as you know it is over. Ain’t karma a bitch?”
She let Trudy pass then, and the woman ran sobbing from the morgue.
Justice limped back to the elevator without identifying anyone, since Trudy had already done it, and rode it to the ground floor. Eric sat in a chair in the emergency room lobby, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. Richard stood facing a wall, pretending to read a dedicatory inscription there. Occasionally his shoulders shook and then he’d take a deep breath. Patrick sat on the floor with a bottle of beer in his hand, back to the wall, and stared at something. Hicks wandered around, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed.
“Justice,” Eric murmured as she walked past, “I went to your house to find your cat. I . . . didn’t know what else I could do for you. I took him to the vet. He had a few scratches and his whiskers were singed, but he was fine otherwise. Just thought you’d want to know.”
Dog was alive and well. She breathed a sigh of relief for that teeny bit of good news. “Thank you, Eric,” she whispered.
Eilis sat on a seat across from Eric, her hand on her bulging belly, shopping bags full of emergency provisions for Justice on the floor at her feet. Justice sat down beside Eilis to nurse Mercy under a light blanket, then she went to sleep at the nipple.
The Chouteau County prosecutor’s office had been the first to know what had happened. When Knox hadn’t shown up or called by eight, Eric and the rest of the county jurisprudence system had known something had to be terribly wrong. At 8:07, a pair of Kansas City detectives had burst through the courthouse doors and sprinted up the stairs to the prosecutor’s office.
Eilis had arrived at the emergency room before Justice had, once Eric had given her instructions, and stayed in the room where she was treated. She had left for a while to get diapers, assorted baby paraphernalia, and clothes for Justice, as she had nothing now except what she’d had on when she’d escaped with Mercy—Knox’s shirt and gray boxers. She had their baby and a few blankets. She had their cat. Their house, everything in it, the two other things Knox had loved, his bed and his books—gone.
Eilis and Justice sat together and cried slow, silent tears for Knox and for Mercy, who had lost her father—and her hearing.
Lilly and Dianne swept in just then, panicked, and Justice miserably recited everything that had happened that day. They both wept with Justice and Eilis, with Eric and Richard and Patrick and Hicks.
Justice glanced at her wedding ring every so often. Her official wedding to Knox was set for New Year’s Day at 12:01 a.m. It would be Knox’s second wedding-that-wasn’t and the reason for it made Justice begin to grow short of breath anew.
“Eilis,” she whispered, stunned at a new realization, “I’m a widow. A twenty-six-year-old widow.” Eilis wrapped her arm around Justice’s shoulders and they put their foreheads together.
It wasn’t long until the sound of a gunshot from the parking lot pierced the night. There was nothing really strange about gunshots outside Truman Medical Center, considering its location and its status as a level one trauma center, nothing strange a
bout doctors and nurses bursting outside followed by a gurney rolling back through the emergency room doors not long after that.
It rolled right past the four women, the sheet over the body’s face unable to hide the length of blood-soaked blonde hair that fell over the steel rails of the gurney.
* * * * *
108: BELLS AND WHISTLES
DECEMBER 31, 2008
11:58 p.m.
Justice looked at Richard when he spoke.
“Are you ready?” he murmured under the last soft strains of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9, which swirled around them like an aural mist.
“I think so.”
Richard smiled and patted Justice’s right hand where it lay nestled in the crook of his left arm. “At least you’re not late.”
Justice chuckled. “I think Knox would’ve killed me if I had been.”
“It’s not like he wouldn’t have had a reason to.” Richard glanced at his watch.
“Do I look okay?”
“Oh, Justice,” Richard breathed.
She blushed at his respectful tone and adjusted her bouquet: black pansies and violets woven in long braids to the floor interlaced with long gold, silver, and white ribbons. She swept a hand down the white silk dress overlaid with shimmering iridescent organza, making sure she looked as crisp as she liked. Though Giselle and Eilis had only just checked her over ten minutes before, she worried about how securely the strands of diamonds and pearls that wove in and out of her curls were fastened.
The music faded away, perfectly timed to the clock that began to strike midnight and, except for the rustlings of hundreds of people waiting, everything was still as the last chime faded away. Then—
Oboes, violins, trumpets, and harpsichords rang out at exactly 12:01 a.m. on New Year’s Day and echoed around the marbled Grand Hall of Union Station: Bach. The Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major, first movement.