Honor

by Jay Crownover

  He reached out his hand to grab the kid’s shoulder, and when the young man jerked away, I wasn’t the only witness to the scene that gasped. Nassir was playing a dangerous game and he was going to lose everything if the kid didn’t choose to play along. I was scared of losing him and my heart broke as he tried so desperately to make this troubled young man see that even in hell there were options. No matter where you were or what your future looked like, your life was a product of the choices you made. That was why I needed to be able to give the people here in the Point the chance to make better lives for themelves. Every action had a consequence and sometimes it was the consequences that could kill you.

  “You have the opportunity to make your shitty life into something better. Go get your sisters out of the system and give them a better life, the life they always deserved. Worry about saving them and yourself instead of ruining something that’s already been broken and repaired too many times to count. Put the gun down and make the choice to be something better than I am, to be better than what your old man tried to beat into you.”

  The gun wobbled a little and I thought my devil did his thing and bargained with his greatest asset—his life—and won. I tried to exhale a breath that felt like it was stuck in my throat, and I saw Chuck creeping closer and closer. His gaze was shifting between where I was still crouched behind the SUV and where Nassir stood with the young man on the other side.

  “How am I supposed to be anything other than this?!” The kid’s voice rose and I heard panic and something wild in it. “I didn’t finish high school. I have no money, no job, and my family is in pieces. In this place, being a man makes you weak, but being a monster makes you a legend.”

  He was going to pull the trigger. I saw it at the same time Chuck did because I screamed Nassir’s name and scrambled to my feet so I could launch myself across the front seats of the SUV to try to grab ahold of him. There was no way I was going to make it in time. The gun was too close to his chest and the kid had already made up his mind.

  The first blast made me deaf and had Nassir wilting to the ground as soon as it sounded. I wasn’t fast enough to get him before he hit the asphalt. The rapid blasts that followed had the kid’s body jerking in a morbid dance in front of my eyes as bullets tore into him, making the gun fall out of his hand. He collapsed on the ground across from his victim.

  I got out of the driver’s side of the car and fell onto my knees next to Nassir’s side. I couldn’t tell where the bullet had entered him because there was so much blood seeping onto his chest. The white fabric of his shirt was turning entirely crimson and he wasn’t moving at all. I pushed the sides of his suit jacket out of the way while I searched for a place to put pressure. I was watching him die right in front of me. Suddenly all those years of fighting to be independent, of struggling to make it on my own, felt wasted and foolish. I was more myself with him than I had ever been and now I felt like I was losing one of the best parts of me.

  Chuck dropped down on the other side of him and tapped him on the cheek. Tarnished bronze eyes peeled open with great difficulty to peer up at us. “Already called the law. They got the medics with them, boss, so you hang in there.”

  “I can’t see where he’s hit, can you?” I felt like I needed to put pressure on the wound, to stem the flow of blood rushing out of the man I loved, but I was useless and all I could do was grab his lifeless hand and hold on. His fingers didn’t even slightly twitch and I could see how hard it was for him to breathe.

  “I think he got hit more than once. Idiot. Trying to negotiate with a gun pointed right at his heart. What were you thinking?”

  Chuck seemed as worried and at as much of a loss as to what to do as I was. I leaned forward and pressed my lips to Nassir’s. They were so cold and all I could taste was my own salty tears and the tang of blood. There was no life in there to kiss me back.

  He was thinking he would offer the kid a break he had never been offered. He was thinking he would show the young man that when you had a reason, had a purpose, you could make choices that mattered. He was trying to tell him that even when you were broken and twisted deep down inside, there was always a way to get in there and shape all those mangled pieces into a better man. Maybe not a good man, definitely not a law-abiding and upstanding man, never an easy or agreeable man, but a man that was better than what he had been created to be.

  “If you die on me I’m going to be so mad at you.”

  I whispered the words against his unresponsive mouth and started crying in earnest when a warm puff of air escaped to touch my lips.

  He groaned low and deep but it meant he was alive still, so I would take it. Off in the distance, finally, the sounds of sirens could be heard. It wasn’t like attending to two victims of a gunfight was anything new or worthy of extra haste in the Point.

  “Theee . . . kiddd?” They weren’t words so much as they were expulsions of air huffed and puffed out.

  I looked over my shoulder at where the other body was sprawled, Chuck’s guys keeping a close eye on him, but I could see multiple places where blood was pooling and leaking out of the young man and staining the parking lot underneath him.

  I squeezed Nassir’s fingers and cried even harder into him when I felt his struggle to curl around mine. “He didn’t make the right choice.”

  I felt him shudder at my words but I couldn’t explain anything further because the cops and the paramedics were suddenly all over us. I was pulled one way and Chuck was pulled the other, both of us complaining loudly, as uniformed professionals moved around Nassir’s prone form. There was so much blood and so much noise I thought I was going to have a breakdown. When a cop tried to pull me aside to ask me what was going on, I swung at him without even thinking. Luckily, Chuck was there and wrapped me up in a huge bear hug while I collapsed in a sobbing mess into his arms.

  “She just watched two people get shot not even ten feet in front of her and one of them is her man. Can you cut her some slack?”

  The cop grumbled something but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying because they were strapping Nassir to some hard-looking plastic board and hefting him onto the stretcher. They weren’t taking him anywhere without me. I shoved at Chuck’s arms until he set me free, and bolted to the back of the ambulance, only to be brought up short by one of the paramedics.

  “Lady, he’s in bad shape. You need to meet us at the hospital.”

  I would have taken a swing at him too if I couldn’t see the other medic in the back of the ambulance swearing and rushing around trying to hook up Nassir to as many IVs and machines as the back of the emergency vehicle could hold.

  “I’m going with him.” I wasn’t about to give the guy a chance to argue, so I just pushed past him and took a seat on the hard little bench so I could keep my eyes glued to what was happening to my now dying devil. Nassir must have been in really bad shape because even though there were two medics and they were a lot bigger than me, neither one wanted to waste time arguing with me. Instead they pulled the doors shut and began frantically working on him.

  They had ripped his shirt open and I could see that Chuck was right. The kid had managed to get off more than one shot. There was a perfectly round hole up high in his shoulder almost in the exact same spot where I had taken a bullet, but there was also one lower and more toward the center of his chest. From where I was sitting, it looked like it was exactly where his heart would be.

  I started chanting “no, no, no, no” over and over again while the two men rushed around and muttered things to each other that didn’t sound encouraging.

  “His BP is crashing. Not good.” One of the guys grabbed a syringe filled with something and started pumping it into one of the clear plastic tubes going into Nassir’s arm. All I wanted to do was reach out and hold his hand, but we were moving too fast and I didn’t want to get in the way of the men trying to save his life.

  “Any word on the other GSW victim?” The guy that had tried to keep me from getting on the ambulance sho
ok his head.

  “He was DOA on the scene.” His gaze skipped over to me. “Seems like you were pretty lucky to make it out of there unscathed.”

  Oh, I was very much scathed. The one person in the world I knew that I would ever love and ever give myself completely to was struggling to stay alive and I could see him losing the battle with every minute that ticked by. It was grossly unsettling that Nassir could survive war, his own warped beginnings at the hands of a zealot, the corrupt manipulations of government and political power, and the streets of the Point only to be taken down by a kid that had been crafted in his mirror image.

  I dropped my head into my hands and pulled on the front of my hair so hard that it hurt. “I’m not feeling so lucky at the moment.”

  “You should’ve just met us at the hospital. It’s never easy to watch someone you care about hover on the verge of death.”

  I snapped my head up and glared at the insensitive ass. I didn’t need to know how close Nassir was to not pulling through. I could see it for myself. His normally golden skin was waxy and tinged gray. His lips looked blue and there was still blood oozing out of him in more than one spot.

  “I’m going to appreciate any time I have with him, even if that time is running out right in front of me.”

  Deciding I didn’t care if I was in their way anymore, I reached out and found Nassir’s hand so I could hold on to some part of him as we raced the rest of the way to the hospital. Once we got there, the doors to the ambulance swung open and an army of doctors and nurses rushed to attend to him. They were saying things like “shock,” words like “blood transfusion” and “nonresponsive” hit me like bullets. I didn’t want to let them take him out of my sight but I knew making the medical staff deal with a hysterical woman wouldn’t help him, so I bit my lip and continued to cry as I stepped out of the boxy vehicle and watched them take my man away.

  I don’t know how long I stood there in front of the hospital covered in Nassir’s blood, silently weeping and at a loss as to what to do with myself, but it was long enough for Chuck to eventually find me. When his arms wrapped around me and I was pulled to that barrel chest, the numbness that had been holding all my bits and pieces together evaporated and I became a wailing, noisy, sloppy mess. I started screaming about the unfairness of it all, about how I would never forgive Nassir for pulling me so far in that I couldn’t get out. I cursed a million different ways for his making me love him when he knew it was going to lead to this kind of heartache.

  I ranted.

  I raved.

  I raged.

  Chuck just held me and continued to pet my hair while I acted like a crazy person, and told me everything would be all right. When I finally calmed down, he pressed his cheek to the top of my head and gave a soft little chuckle.

  Indignant that he could find anything funny about this dire situation, I dug my elbow into his ribs until he grunted and took a step back.

  “How can you laugh at a time like this?” He reached out a hand and rubbed a finger over the frown lines that were dug in deep on my forehead.

  “I’m laughing because I had almost this exact same conversation with Nassir when you got shot.”

  That made my heart dip and Reeve’s words about our men being just as scared that something bad was going to happen to us drifted like smoke through my tumultuous thoughts.

  I rubbed my chafed and raw cheeks furiously and tried to suck in enough air to calm myself down.

  “Why would he take that kind of risk, Chuck? Why would he sacrifice himself like that?”

  That gold tooth winked at me as he offered me a tiny little smile. He reached out and hooked an arm around my neck so we could go inside and see if Nassir did indeed have the luck of the devil.

  Chuck pressed a kiss to my temple and whispered in my ear. “He did it because all the love you showed him proved that he could have turned into a real boy.”

  I gulped and felt a fresh wave of tears well up. I loved that Nassir was a real boy but I hated that being one meant he was just as vulnerable and fragile as the rest of us, and I couldn’t help but have the fleeting thought that robots and puppets didn’t bleed.

  Nassir had to pull through. The Point hadn’t seen the kind of hell on earth that would follow if he didn’t.

  Chapter 18

  Nassir

  I had been on the slippery edge of death more than one time in my twenty-seven years of life. I’d been shot, stabbed, blown up, starved, beaten, and even had my own hands in the mix by giving in to weakness and overdosing just to stop seeing the bodies drop and the blood flow. All the times when I knocked on death’s door, the reception was exactly what one might have expected. I saw the fields of lost souls I had cultivated. I saw my mother, and even in her incorporeal state, felt the disappointment that still hung around her because I hadn’t lived up to all of my potential as a killer and avenger. I finally had a face-to-face with my father, and in my limbo state he condemned me for not being a man of faith or conviction. Before, when I’d hovered between life and death, every action and its subsequent consequences played out before me, taunting me with the knowledge of how all the things I set in motion would eventually come around full circle. Violence and vengeance did not occur in a vacuum, and as everything inside of me struggled to fight for life, the loss I was feeling mingled with the pain was a constant reminder that there was no escaping from a lifetime of misdeeds.

  This time, as I chased death down, it was distinctly different. I knocked on the door, probably harder than I ever had before, but for some reason death wasn’t answering. No one was. So I was just there waiting to be let in or sent back.

  I was caught in a void. No memories. No regrets. No family. No accomplishments. No demons. And maybe the most noticeable absence was that of love. I had never experienced love before, most assuredly not from my mother and definitely not from any of the other people that had filtered in and out of my life since I set myself free of the shackles of the man I was supposed to always be, but ever since Keelyn, there had been something different, and now that it was gone, I knew what it was.

  Even when she wasn’t mine, there was still love. It was prickly and sometimes uncomfortable. It was too big to fit anywhere. It was complex and often hidden behind things that were easier to identify, like lust, anger, and frustration, but regardless of all of that, I could see now that it was love and I missed it dearly while I was lost here in this nothingness.

  I missed the bite of it and the softness that followed. I missed the way it was the only thing that filled me up when I had spent my life being so empty of everything. I missed the way it challenged me and forced me to do more, to be more. I missed the way that love made me think and consider my actions and their effect on others. I was not a thing anymore. I was a man . . . a man that loved a woman, had loved a woman with every broken part of me that the past had left me with, and now that it was gone, I really and truly understood what my hell was supposed to be like.

  This . . .

  This emptiness.

  This nothing.

  This void.

  This hollowness.

  This was actually hell, and sure, maybe I deserved it for all the bad things I had done in the past, but that didn’t make the knowledge any easier to accept or the struggle against the constant blackness any less arduous.

  I don’t know how long I floated lost and alone. It felt like forever, and every single second that passed that I spent without the one thing I felt like I needed if I were to have even a slight chance at survival, I could feel myself sinking deeper and more fully into the abyss. It was pulling me under and I was helpless to stop it.

  Just when I thought it was time to give up, time to surrender to the darkness and let the pit of nothing take me, I felt something . . . something sharp and awful.

  Pain like a raging wildfire lit up all over me from the inside out. All that nothing was replaced with agony and ache like I had never experienced before. I was hollowed out, so empty of anything
else that the pain ate me up like a meal. There was so much room inside of me for it to crawl into and settle down. It was a whole new kind of suffering and torture, but I welcomed it. I knew that as long as I was feeling something, even if it was something that would make most men wish for the quiet and enveloping blackness of death, I was alive and that thing I needed to live was out there somewhere, I just needed to find it.

  I burned for days. Hotter than any fire, brighter than any star, more furious than any kind of hungry flame. The pain fed on me and then, somehow, some way, it took all I had to give and burned itself out and all that was left of me was ash. Light and fluffy ash that floated on soft breath, breath that whispered across my barren soul. I heard a voice call my name over and over again and the remnants of who I was picked up speed and tried to chase the noise down.

  I tripped in the air. I free-fell from the nothing and the pain back into love.

  It was there waiting with open arms to catch me. I heard it calling to me, guiding me in the only direction I could go when death didn’t answer my knock. It was a journey that felt like it took forever. Every time I thought I was making my way to where I needed to be, to where I heard love calling me, something would get in my way. I would lose the sounds, the fire and pain would flare back up, and the darkness would again sneak up on me and try to pull me under. I didn’t let it. Nothing mattered but getting to where love was waiting. Nothing could stand in the way of me getting to where I was always supposed to be.

  I felt it all around me. Love wasn’t just guiding me, it was pulling me, prodding me, filling me up, and pushing everything else out. Love was going to win and I simply had to let it happen, so I surrendered the fight and let love take me by the hand to lead me the rest of the way out of the darkness.