Page 7

Chapter 7

Piers

T he blood on the floor is too bright, and there’s too much of it.

Every word out of my mouth tastes like poison. My body is trembling so hard I almost can’t hold onto my gun. If I don’t hold my breath, I’ll explode too soon, and all these cruel words will have been for nothing.

Armstrong and Barnes have their eyes on me, but I keep my gaze trained on Fantasia. In my periphery, they’re relaxing their guard. Barnes’s knife is hanging from his hand, and Armstrong’s finger isn’t firmly resting on the trigger anymore. And when I aim my gun at the back of Fantasia’s head, they take their eyes off of me. They anticipate the execution.

And when I shift my aim just enough, pointing the barrel of my gun at Armstrong’s shin, he doesn’t have the second he needs to realize what’s happened before I fire.

My bullet shatters his tibia. He screams, but the sound stops when my second shot goes through his sternum. As he falls, Barnes drops Fantasia and raises his knife. I duck inside his arm, plant the hot barrel of my gun under his chin, and blow his fucking brains out.

It started and ended in three seconds, but I’m breathing like I’ve run a marathon, sweating like I’ve just spent the night in a sauna. Armstrong is still alive, albeit breathing in his own blood and bone shards through shredded lungs. He’ll be dead soon, but I put a hole in his forehead just to shut him up.

Four gunshots, one after the other and in close proximity, have my ears ringing, but I can still hear Fantasia’s labored breaths. I crouch at her side.

It feels more like falling.

Putting my hands on her right now is like violence, but I have to turn her over onto her back to see where all this blood is coming from. There’s a bruise blooming on her pale jaw and blood on her busted lip. A ring of dark marks around her slender neck. She was struck and strangled by these monsters, which makes me want to put more bullets in their bodies. From the way she was hammering on the floor of her room, making as much racket as she could to let someone know she was dying, I’m sure the rest of her limbs will be covered with dark marks before the night is over.

It's her left side I need to focus on, but my eyes keep darting away in horror. There’s a gash in her shirt through which I see nothing but red. I peel the soaked fabric back- and breathe a shaky sigh of relief.

I’m sick with rage, but I’m more sick with terror. The first thing I saw when I barged into this room was Barnes’s knife going into Fantasia’s stomach. Now I see that his aim went awry, probably because I came in at just the right moment, a moment I’ll relive until the day I die.

But this isn’t a stab wound. It’s a gash across her left side, bloody and ugly, but survivable.

Fantasia’s face twists, her eyes opening for the first time. They’re misty with pain, with fear. She isn’t crying, but that’s almost worse somehow.

I know I need to check the wound’s depth. I need to see if it’ll require stitches. I need to clean it. Hell, I need to put pressure on it to slow the bleeding. But the idea of hurting Fantasia even more is so repulsive I almost can’t.

“I’m gonna lift you, love. Okay?” I say softly.

“What are… you doing here?” she croaks through a throat that must burn like hell.

I scoop my hands beneath her as carefully as I can, but I can’t stop her from whimpering or that whimper hurting me in kind. I almost set her on the bed because that might be more comfortable, but what I need to do is clean all this blood off her and bind her wound. Instead, I carry her to her en-suite bathroom and lay her out on the cold, hard tile. I snatch one of the fluffy cream washcloths off the towel rack on the wall and press it against her side, guiding her slender hand to hold it there.

“I forgot my duffle,” I tell her, trying for a smile and failing while I search for isopropyl alcohol and gauze in the cabinets. I was so fucked up after my call with Achilles and the things I said to Fantasia to convince her to let me go. I didn’t even grab my bag on the way out the door, and didn’t realize it was missing until I’d done a full angry lap through this secluded neighborhood. I knew it would be humiliating to go back for it after such a decisive exit, but of course all my clothes and my toothbrush were in that bag. I’d even begun to anticipate another argument with Fantasia as I trudged all the way back to the house.

It turned out that that simple mistake of mine might have made the difference between Fantasia’s life and death.

And that’s another what-if I’ll agonize over until I die.

I find the first aid kit below the sink and lay it out on the tile beside Fantasia. The tiny scissors inside it aren’t enough to cut her shirt off with, so I just tear it open from the place where Barnes’s knife slashed it. Fantasia winces again, but doesn’t complain. She cries out when I replace her washcloth with a hot wet rag to clean the area, but again, she doesn’t fight me.

She’s never been this obliging, and it’s scaring the shit out of me.

“Talk to me, love,” I tell her. “Whisper if you have to.” I understand her throat must hurt, but I need to be sure she isn’t losing consciousness.

“I’m just… thinking,” Fantasia pants, her voice sounding like sandpaper.

“Thinking?!” I repeat, prodding the newly cleaned wound with careful fingers and trying to see how deep it goes. It will absolutely need stitches, but the lining of her gut wasn’t punctured from what I can tell. “Thinking about what?”

“About… why the hell you stopped them.”

I freeze with the isopropyl alcohol poised over her side, my caught breath painful enough that I might as well have been the one strangled. Fantasia isn’t even bothering to look at me after dropping that bomb. Her eyes stare up at the ceiling, empty and disinterested in what’s been done to her.

I press another rag, this one soaked in alcohol, into her side. Her face twists in pain, finally too much to power through. Her body arches to escape it, and I’m forced to hold her down while she writhes. One horrible, plaintive shriek explodes out of her, but when the burning agony fades, she falls mostly quiet once again.

Controlling my tone takes every ounce of my strength, and now I’ve got to sew her up, which requires my hands to be steady. “Why wouldn’t I stop them, Fantasia?” I ask evenly.

“Because- because they were right,” she forces out. “And you were right. What you said-”

“I was fucking lying !” I fail to get the fine silk thread through the needle the first time and have to try again. My hands are red with her blood. It’s under my nails. It’s in my nose and on my clothes, and I can’t get away from it. “I was saying whatever I needed to get them to put their guard down. I didn’t mean a goddamn word of it, all right? How could you even-”

I clamp my mouth shut and focus on what my hands need to do. Finally, I get the needle threaded.

“I saved your goddamn life and you’re telling me I shouldn’t have bothered?” I demand, setting the needle aside and unbuckling my belt. “Is that what’s happening right now?”

“Maybe, yeah…” Fantasia’s eyes focus long enough for her to look up at me, accusing me of wasting my effort. “Maybe you need to hear it.”

I stuff my belt into her mouth, more than a little spitefully happy to do it. “Bite down on this, you ungrateful brat,” I hiss, and grab up the needle again.

As the perpetual oldest kid in the orphanage growing up, I’ve sewn up several wounds before. Never one this large or dangerous. I’m expecting Fantasia to begin crying, but she’s terrifyingly silent and still once again. Her eyes are firmly closed. She’s breathing through all the pain she’s in, deeply but unevenly. Despite my horror and disgust at her casual nihility, I can’t help but be impressed.

“Remember when you were fifteen, and you climbed that fucking tree behind Wesley Hall?” I ask, more to myself than to her. Fantasia doesn’t respond, but I know she’s listening. The needle works through her pale skin, drawing more blood in its wake, but slowly, slowly sealing the wound. “You tried to follow my exact path up, but your arms and legs weren’t long enough. Your foot slipped off the side of a branch, and you didn’t have a good grip and… you fell.”

As a kid, Fantasia was loudest when she was least injured, but once the real pain began she’d go quiet as a ghost. She’d come to me to bandage her papercuts, tears in her big green eyes. It was her delight to be doted on, by Achilles, by me, long after she became old enough to tend her own wounds.

But that day, when I watched her tumble out of that tree-

“I thought you were dead,” I say. “You were so fucking still, and it looked like you’d fallen so far. I thought I’d just watched you die. And that it was my fault.”

Fantasia’s careful breathing falters. I pause in my gruesome sewing checking to see if I’d hurt her, but her gaze is steady on me, if tired. She’s listening. Maybe that’s helping her get through this as much as it’s helping me, so I go on.

“Your arm was broken in three places. The pain must’ve been intense. But after you got back from the hospital with your huge cast, you told me you’d just been embarrassed that you’d fallen. So embarrassed that you didn’t want me to know how much it hurt.” I shake my head, laughing weakly. Only a few stitches left now.

“I couldn’t believe how… obsessed you were with maintaining your image. When I was younger I thought it was some kind of narcissism. But now I see it as strength of will. Misguided, yeah, but goddamn impressive too.”

I knot the thread and trim it, then slather it with petroleum jelly and carefully wrap gauze around her waist. Another damp washcloth wipes away the drying blood on her stomach and ribs while Fantasia pulls my belt out of her mouth. There’s deep impressions of every one of her teeth in the firm leather. Very carefully, I turn her onto her side and wipe down her back too. There’s blood in her hair- there’s blood all over her still- but this is the most I can do before I somehow get her back on her feet.

And before that happens, I need to make one thing very clear.

I lean over Fantasia, my shadow falling across her face. She blinks up at me, exhausted and hollow. I move closer, and her eyes widen just a little.

“Don’t ever question why I saved your life again,” I tell her, and kiss her hard.