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Out of the corner of my eye, I see Bianca spin Matty around and lead him back into the bedroom.

I look around at what’s happening, but everything is blurry.

“We have a shooting victim, non-fatal. 875 Burnes Avenue,” the man’s voice says again. And then…he touches my face. “Get up.”

I blink, raising my eyes. Hawke? But then the pain hits me and before I know it, something circles my body, and I’m swept up into his arms.

“Who’s going to pay?” my mom cries. “Huh, Aro? We can’t afford an ambulance. Why don’t you just leave us alone?”

My hand shakes, and I can’t stop it. Hawke carries me out, and I rest my chin on his shoulder, looking back into the house but not at my mother crying on the living room floor.

I want to take Bianca and Matty. “I’ll be back,” I whisper, my vision going black like I’m sinking further and further down a tunnel.

But then I faintly hear his voice. “You are never coming back here.”

And I’m not sure if it’s a dream, but in a moment, the fatigue and nausea from the pain takes over my thoughts, and I wrap an arm around his neck, holding on as he puts me into his car.

Hawke

She’s a mess. And I mean that in every conceivable way. Not once since tonight began has she made a single choice that wasn’t the complete opposite of something I would do.

As soon as she left the hideout, I remembered that I had no way to get in touch with her if I needed to, so I chased her down to give her phone back. What I saw when I got to her, was her seizing the first opportunity to commit another crime. I watched her drive off in Mr. Leong’s BMW, just as Dylan drove up behind me on her way home. She gave me her car, finished the last block home on foot, and I had no choice but to chase after the little thief. If she could leave a trail of shit on her way out of Shelburne Falls, she’d find her way back the exact same way.

She’s a time bomb. The police will be after her more than ever now. I can’t leave her to her own devices. Not when my ass is on the line too.

“Let me look at that,” I tell her, lowering myself to the stool in front of her and opening the first aid kit.

Blood drips from her fingers as her hand drapes over the side of the desk, her forearm resting in front of my keyboard.

I’m surprised I got her back into the hideout, but I’m not sure she even realizes that what just happened—what she did—was real.

“Aro?” I say, keeping my voice soft as she stares at the desk. Past it. “Let me see your arm.”

Gently, I take it and rip the small gash in her hoodie wider to see. The cut from the hammer’s claw is small but deep, and I waste no time, pulling on some gloves, washing it with wipes, and uncapping the skin glue. She doesn’t flinch in the least when I pinch the skin and apply the medical glue to close the wound.

“Was that your dad?” I ask her.

When she doesn’t answer, I search for her eyes, but they’re hidden behind her hair as her head dips down.

“The only people who know about this place are family,” I tell her. “You’re safe here.”

I haven’t had a chance to research her, so when I followed her to Weston, I didn’t assume she was going home. I hoped she was going to the Green Street garage. Thought maybe I could learn something that I could use against them, but when I spotted her with the little boy, I realized he was family.

I couldn’t hear what was going on, but I could see the tension in her posture when she spoke to the man in the living room, and when she pulled the gun on him, I knew she was in for it. Is that all she does? Fight?

I hold the skin together, giving it a moment to bind, and I still can’t even tell if she knows I’m here.

“I didn’t mean what I said earlier,” I tell her, but then backtrack. “Or maybe I did.”

At the time, I meant it. When I assumed I knew her just because she’s Green Street, poor, and from Weston.

I look at her eyes again. “But it’s a shitty thing to think, and I was wrong.”

Dylan had nearly kicked me in the nuts, and my mother definitely would have if she’d ever heard me say anything so ignorant. My parents dragged me around this entire planet to teach me how to see people. To teach me to listen twice as much as I talk. They knew that our environments shape us and that hurt people hurt people. They had such a life that I would never have to experience being that hopeless, so they showed me a world of people from the time before I could even walk, so I would know things even if I had never lived them.