by Bethany-Kris
It looked like a cutter.
A wire cutter.
Lucia swallowed again—that lump was bigger, now. She needed to keep Christian’s attention on her. Renzo would only have cutters if he was going to cut something, right? Like the wires … had he figured out a way to disengage the bomb?
Would it still work if Christian pulled the kill switch?
She didn’t know.
Still, she could try to keep his hand off that kill switch on his phone for as long as possible. She needed a head start, right? Maybe Renzo needed one, too.
“You know,” Christian said, “you are beginning to become boring to me, Lucia.”
She smiled back at him, unafraid. “That’s funny.”
“Why?”
“Because you were boring to me from the first second I met you.”
That did it.
That pissed him off.
Christian spun around with a hand already raised to hit Lucia. Instinct made her turn her head, and raise an arm to cover her face, but not before she shot one last look at the screen where Renzo was working. She watched him cut the wire, and sucked in a sharp breath at the same time before she closed her eyes to prepare for that oncoming slap.
Christian didn’t miss it.
That slap never came.
“What was he doing?” Christian demanded. Lucia opened her eyes to see Christian right up against the screens again. “What did he cut? Why isn’t it counting down? What did he fucking do?”
His voice become progressively louder until he was just roaring. Lucia covered her ears because it hurt to hear it.
She didn’t have time to think on it for long. He was already reaching for the cell phone he’d set beside the screens.
“Kill switch it is,” he hissed.
No.
The word screamed inside her mind. She didn’t even hesitate to jump up from the bed, and smack the phone out of his hand. She heard the phone skid across the floor at the same time Christian swung around with a closed fist that connected with the side of her face.
Pain bloomed.
It exploded in her mind.
Her vision blurred and stars burst in her eyes.
Lucia was sure she hit the floor from the force of the hit, but she couldn’t be sure, either.
Holy shit.
“Fucking bitch,” he snarled at her, “stay down there like the dog you are.”
She blinked in just enough time to see Christian turning his back to her. He bent down like he was trying to find the phone as Lucia got up to shaky legs. Her vision still wasn’t all that great, and her ears were ringing like crazy.
It didn’t matter.
He couldn’t touch that fucking phone.
She grabbed the first thing she could to throw—one of the monitors on the desk—and threw it at his back. The screen crashed over the back of Christian’s head, and sent him sprawling to the floor. It wasn’t enough to keep him down, though.
When he got back up, he came for her. She didn’t even have the chance to turn and try to run before he was taking her to the floor. His punches rained down on her one after the other, and the only thing she could do was try to deflect them, or protect her face. Sure, she got in a couple of her own hits—she scratched her nails down his face, too, but it didn’t do anything.
He wasn’t the least bit fazed.
God.
But he didn’t have that phone in his hands.
He didn’t have the kill switch.
That was all that mattered to—
Pop.
The quiet noise was all Lucia heard before the heavy weight pinning her to the floor, and the constant pain echoing through to her bones was suddenly gone all at once. Christian fell to the side in a heap—a single bullet hole bleeding out of his forehead.
She gasped in air.
Tears streaked down her face.
Her whole body trembled.
“You got it, Lucian?”
Lucia looked up to see her father rushing into the room before he called over his shoulder, “Make sure they’re taken care of out there, yeah.”
“You got it.”
Lucia just kept blinking. “Daddy?”
“You crazy girl,” he muttered thickly, pulling her up from the floor with shaking hands. “You crazy fucking girl—why?”
Lucia sobbed as her father wiped the tears from her face. “I had to try. Didn’t I?”
“Lucia—”
She glanced over her shoulder to look at the screen where Renzo was still in front of the bomb. She looked in just enough time to watch him let go of whatever he was holding, and dart backwards toward the car lowered on the lift right next to him.
He disappeared.
She didn’t know where he went. Where did he go? She dragged in a heavy, painful breath. And the bomb blew.
The cameras went black and so did her vision right before she hit the floor.
TWENTY-ONE
Let go.
Let go.
Let the wires go, Ren.
It was a fucked up thing to know you were about to kill yourself when that wasn’t something you wanted to do. A bad analogy for it might be the Band-Aid—suck in a breath, and rip the Band-Aid off as fast as possible to minimize the duration of the pain. It was still going to hurt a lot, but at least by doing it quickly, it wouldn’t last as long.
That’s how it went, right?
Well, this was kind of the same.
Just a thousand times worse.
Renzo’s fingertips slipped on the wires ever so slightly. Certainly not enough to break the circuit and make the timer start counting down, but it was enough to get his fucking heart leaping into his throat. Which just reminded him all over again that this was not what he wanted. He was not fucking ready for this.
He hadn’t been given the chance to grow up into somebody. Never got married, or had kids. He didn’t know what the world looked like when he wasn’t pissed off at it. He couldn’t remember what the sky looked like when he woke up that morning, and now he was wishing he had one more morning to see it.
He hadn’t said goodbye, even if he didn’t like goodbyes. He hadn’t told his brother and sister that he was sorry for being a fuck up, and that he loved them. He never got the chance to show them the better man he wanted to be, only the man they had always known. Was that a good enough man for them?
He never got the chance to tell his parents that he forgave them because he knew they just didn’t know how to be parents that loved their kids, and he didn’t think it was all their fault. They were sick in their minds—addiction and life made them that way. He wanted them to know he forgave them for himself, but he couldn’t ever forget.
He was never able to thank Cree for being such a prick because the man knew that’s exactly what Renzo needed to push him to make him break. Cree made him into a better human. He taught him the tools to slaughter and bury the parts of him that he didn’t want to be anymore, and he owed the man something for that.
He never got to tell Lucia he loved her again.
Every single morning.
All the nights of their lives.
Life owed him that—they wouldn’t get it.
Yeah, he wasn’t ready for this shit. He was never more aware of that fact than right now, and it fucked him straight up.
Instead of letting go of the wires like he should, because if he didn’t, there was a good chance the idiot watching the cameras would just pull the kill switch anyway, he was stuck in his head going over every single moment of his life that he could.
People liked to say when death came quickly, a person’s life would flash behind their eyes. This death for Renzo wasn’t fast—it was painfully slow.
His memories came in the same way.
Like a trickle.
One drop at a time.
It hurt more this way, he figured.
Way more.
Renzo let the wires go—he didn’t want to hurt anymore. He’d planned a just in case for when he le
t go of those wires, but he didn’t think it was going to work, but fuck him if he wasn’t going to at least try.
Spinning around fast after he let go of the wires, he ran right into the car that had lowered on the lift after John punched the metal control box earlier. Pain bloomed in his shoulder from the impact, but he didn’t even feel it.
The adrenaline was rushing through his veins, and all he could think was move, run, go. He could hear the timer on the bomb beeping behind him. He was hyperaware of that sound, and it also seemed like it was chasing him.
Beep, beep, beep.
It felt like it was echoing in the quiet warehouse. The same way it reverberated in his mind, and heart. His body became the echo chamber for those beeps and the seconds that they represented with each new beep.
Beep, beep, beep.
Six seconds.
Four to go.
Renzo dropped to his knees, and squeezed in beneath the car where it was covering the cement hole beneath the lift. He fell in hard. Once he got through that space, he dropped ten feet down, and his back hit the bottom with a crack.
If he broke something, he didn’t know.
It felt like it.
Probably his fucking skull.
Renzo stared up at the bottom of the car covering the hole for an entire second. The fall had taken his breath away, and he needed just a moment to catch it and realize how far he had fallen before he hit the ground.
It was long enough to hear the bomb beep one more time before he rolled over, tucked his body as close to the cement wall as he could, and covered his head with his arms. He still didn’t think this was going to work, but he also still needed to try. It wouldn’t be him if he didn’t go out of this world giving it all he fucking had, right?
Beep.
He’d done what he could.
Beep.
It was all on God now.
Beep.
Please, I don’t want to die, Renzo prayed. I’m not ready to die yet.
His thoughts were the last thing he heard.
• • •
What hell was this?
Or was it heaven?
Renzo didn’t think it was heaven—a person couldn’t physically hurt in heaven, right? Their bones didn’t feel like they were separating from one another when they were in heaven, surely. He was sure heaven didn’t make someone’s head feel like it was going to explode, either.
Heaven wasn’t supposed to be pain.
Why couldn’t he open his eyes?
“… the coma is …”
“… the team in, I’ll pay. Get them here …”
“… going to change your …”
It was strange, in a way. Renzo’s body was weightless—indefinitely floating on … something. Or nothing at all. He couldn’t feel his skin, or his hands, or anything else. But he could feel the pain.
The pain was ever-present.
Constant.
Behind the black space of where he was sure should be his eyes, all he saw was darkness. Not even streaks of colors, or the fuzzy shape of something. No, he just saw streaks of different shades of darkness.
And there was color.
Not a lot, sure.
Just a little.
A pin hole of color—bright, and yellow. It was warm, he thought. Warmer than his unfeeling body floating in a sea of nothingness. That light welcomed him closer, and called to him without making a single noise.
He just felt it.
Like everything else.
And nothing at all.
“… code blue …”
“… give me twenty more …”
“… call it after five …”
“… Ren …”
The light got smaller all of the sudden, and he was angry at it. He was angry that it promised something beautiful and wonderful and warm, and then it went away. He was pissed it became smaller, like a pin prick in the back of his mind that he couldn’t reach no matter how hard he tried to get to it.
He ignored the light, then.
Ignored the warmth.
Ignored it when it got bigger.
Pretended it didn’t come closer.
The pain was back again.
Fucking pain.
So was the floating feeling.
This is not what I asked for, he told God.
He was pretty sure he heard God laugh back.
“… Ren?”
“… Hey, Ren ….”
“… Renzo …”
“… I don’t want to hate you for doing this. Don’t make me hate you for this, please …”
• • •
“Can you … stop?” Renzo snapped.
The nurse took a wide step back from his bed, and he immediately felt like shit for barking at her like an asshole. He was just sick and fucking tired of being touched. Every time they touched him, it felt like his skin was crawling. Not to mention, the goddamn pain. With every IV change … the broken bones that were just beginning to heal … the hairline scar from where they’d cut open his head to remove three clots inside his brain from the trauma.
It all hurt.
It never stopped.
He was done with being touched.
Done.
“I’m sorry,” Renzo muttered, his throat thick and his tongue dry. “I just … been awake for two days, and you all won’t leave me alone.”
Not that those two days had done a lot for him. His vision cleared after the first day, and he could finally move today. Or … as much as was expected considering his injuries and the trauma to his brain. It was going to take a while for him to get out of this bed and even walk to the bathroom by himself, as much as he hated the very idea.
But it wasn’t this woman’s fault.
He bet this nurse took shit a lot from patients, and families. People didn’t understand the hell nurses went through on a daily basis. They were the people still at the hospital long after a patient fell into a restless sleep, and the family had gone home. They were here cleaning the patients, feeding them, and making sure they stayed alive.
Nobody understood.
Nobody appreciated them for what they did.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
The nurse gave him a smile, saying quietly, “I guess your IV does look okay—just a little bit of blood in the tube. I suppose I can leave it until just before my shift change. How about that?”
God.
That sounded perfect.
Renzo nodded as best he could against the pillow. “Thanks.”
Sometimes, his words still came out slurred or confused. Sometimes, he thought he was saying one thing, but he was saying another. It was annoying and frustrating, to say the least, but it was expected.
Or at least, that’s what the neurosurgeon explained.
His brain had to heal.
It would take a while.
He was grateful that the hospital managed to keep the detectives out of his room since he woke up. Although, he heard them loud and clear out in the hallway promising to be back as soon as the doctor approved it for them to have a conversation with Renzo. He didn’t know what to tell them—the last thing he remembered was going down an elevator.
He didn’t even know why he’d been in the elevator. He didn’t know who had been there with him, or why he left it.
He knew nothing.
The brain is a funny thing, his doctor said.
“Ah, your first approved visitor,” the nurse said, drawing him from his thoughts. She smiled at the person standing in the doorway, and it felt like it took minutes for Renzo to turn in that direction, too. He didn’t know who he thought would be standing there, but he knew very well who he wanted it to be.
It wasn’t who he wanted.
It wasn’t Lucia.
Lucian smiled in the doorway, and rested his hands at his front while holding a manila folder. “They decided—and by they, I mean your team of neurosurgeons that were called in from overseas—that I would be the best person to meet with you fi
rst. One person a day, and they will progressively allow in those who may cause you more upset or emotional reactions as the days passes.”
The nurse gave Renzo a small smile. “Do you understand what he’s saying?”
He did.
He also didn’t like it.
Something beeped hard in the room.
“That sent his blood pressure up,” the nurse muttered.
Lucian chuckled. “Yeah, I bet. Do you need to be in here, or …?”
The nurse shook her head. “No, but there is the call button should you need us. Do not hesitate to use it.”
“Will do.”
It felt like hours before the nurse was gone, and Lucian was sitting beside Renzo’s bed on a hard, plastic chair he’d pulled closer. He knew it wasn’t hours … but his brain just wasn’t connecting seconds, minutes, and hours to the reality of his situation.
It confused him more.
“A team?” Renzo asked.
Lucian seemed to understand what he was asking even though he hadn’t given him a lot of details about his question. In his head, he gave all the details … his mouth didn’t work to say them, though.
“A friend of my brother’s … he worked with a team of neurosurgeons overseas for an old head injury. Any medical professional worth their weight in head trauma say they are the best of the best, and we all knew that was what you needed, but you were never going to survive the trip, Renzo. They could barely get you into the OR without you coding for that first couple of days. But the clots became worse … they didn’t have a choice.”
“A team?” he asked again.
In his head, he asked, and they came here for me?
Lucian arched a brow. “They were worth every penny, clearly.”
Were they?
Renzo didn’t know.
“I know right now it seems like nothing is right,” Lucian said, “but that’s your brain, Renzo, and it’s just trying to heal. You’ve got to give it time to heal. Every day, something will get better or easier. The more frustrated you are with your recovery time, and the more you fight it, the longer it will take.”