Gant
“What are you doing, Dove?” I ask sluggishly. The heaviness I’ve been feeling for the past twenty minutes is caving in on me now.
Her wide eyes flicker to me, and the second they do, pure, unbridled pain blooms in them, and she tears them away to stare at Bart. Then that pain contorts, transforming into incredulous rage.
“What am I doing? What the fuck are you doing?” she snaps at Bart, then to me. “What the fuck are you letting him do?”
The room freezes then reanimates with sheer confusion and outrage at the help’s outburst. She’s a corseted worker, grabbing her boss and shattering glasses.
“How could you…” Her voice is shaky as she struggles to finish the sentence, but then it’s like she forgets about me, about the party completely, because those deep emeralds suddenly filled with concern again fly back to Hale. “Are you okay?”
“ Are you? ” he asks, searching her face with an equal amount of concern. “You’re deathly pale — ”
The screech of furniture scraping back, followed by the loud PING! of a golden tray hitting the hardwood on its axis, halts Hale’s words. I watch sleepily as it spins before clattering onto Bart’s outstretched hand. He’s sprawled on his back, having missed the settee a few paces away.
Zedd’s, whose tray Bart tried clinging to, eyes bore into mine desperately as he shakes his head imperceptibly.
FUCK!
“BART!” Delphine’s cry is followed by a dozen others.
The crowd rushes forward, and I rush to hold onto Hale, to my confused brother, who tries to catch me, but he can’t. I’m too heavy, dead weight. I don’t want to be held; I need guidance to the floor.
Hale seems to understand this as he drops to his knees beside me. My Dove does, too.
“?” she whispers, her heated voice from a second ago cooled into dire concern.
I can’t look at her. I’ll get distracted, lost in those emeralds. I need… Zedd.
“Someone call the ambulance!” Delphine cries, cradling Bart’s head in her lap.
She didn’t shed a single tear for her husband when we took him. The man she loved so much, she just had to marry him, despite his past with her sister.
Zedd. Where’s Zedd?
Bart looks at me despite his heavy eyelids. Despite his sluggish hands moving toward his chest, toward the inner pocket of his jacket. But I beat him to it, or I try to. The little glass vial slips through my lead-like fingers like water, and I swear the whole world is slipping through them, too.
That’s what Zedd was communicating to me. It was gone, but I knew Bart would have taken it as backup because he didn’t trust me, and he needed control over everything.
“Hale,” I rasp as Delphine’s fingers, polished in ballet pink, my mother’s favourite, shoot out to retrieve the vial that’s now rolling across the floor.”
His hands leave me, replaced by softer ones that climb from my chest to my face.
“ ?! ” Dove’s thrown herself on top of me, and for the first time, I can’t support her. I collapse halfway onto Bart’s chest, with her on my back.
Footsteps, scuffling footsteps. I see Zedd’s heel, hear Hale’s loafers and the click-clack of rushing stilettos. Glass shatters, glimmering shards and sparkling jewellery flying across the tile and grazing my cheek as a heap of tangled bodies plough into a display.
Glass…shattering glass.
No. Stay in the present.
Stay out of that car and in the penthouse.
Your life depends on it.
Our life depends on it.
My soul tie. My little dove.
Voices. So many voices are shouting. Fighting. Scrapping across the floor like animals.
“Give it to me!” Delphine’s screech sounds like it’s underwater as I listen to Bart’s heart slowing.
I force my head, that’s like a bowling ball on a toothpick, back and look up at him, my chin digging into his chest. He’s turning blue before my eyes, unable to speak or move. But his black eyes are sinking into mine, and nothing can break my concentration on him, not even Dove’s frantic words, as I slowly match his bluish hue.
I can hear the question on his parted lips, though no sound comes out.
‘Why?’
I struggle to reach behind me, to sink my fingers into Dove’s hair and gently tug her down to my side so that her chin is digging into my shoulder, her tear-stained, panicked face just centimetres over Bart’s.
“ ! ” She’s fighting to pull away from me, fighting with something in her hands. A glint of shiny plastic flashes between her fingers. A syringe.
A glitter heel appears near Bart’s head, then a loafer. Stassi and Hale. They’re pinning Delphine down and frantically hissing back and forth. I can’t hear them. I can only hear my own words.
“Look at her,” I rasp.
But he doesn’t. He’s focused on me. More underwater shrieks, more chaos far off in the distance.
I pull Elle’s head halfway over mine, forcing him to see us. Together.
“You wondered why I really wanted you two to meet?” My hold on Elle weakens by the second, though she’s gripping me for dear life. “I needed you to meet the future, Ms Auclair. The person that’s going to carry your legacy with me.”
More screams.
“I need you to see Auclair Enterprise's future. To see that I’m not like you. That Elle’s not like Marisol, who married you out of desperation and what you could give her. Elle loves me and only me.”
I can see in his fading eyes how much he disagrees.
Long golden strands mixed with ashy blonde locks are flung beside his head and strewn across his face as Stassi pins a crawling Delphine to the floor. Bart can’t even blink the strands away.
For once in his life, he can’t do a single fucking thing.
“She’s here. It doesn’t matter that she came to save my brother. She’s still here with me. And all you have is your cheap dupe, Delphine. She won’t touch my mother’s company, by the way. I’d sooner let Hale turn those studios into menageries than have a traitorous cunt at my side. Someone intent on having everything her sister had, including me. Including you. And that’s never going to happen because you’re leaving, and she’s next.”
I’m so fucking sleepy.
“I’m going to have black-haired, black-eyed children that my wife looks at with love and not disdain because she hates me and, by default, them.”
Dove’s tear-streaked face hovers over mine as she rolls me onto my side off of Bart, her fingers as cold as ice on my cheek.
“Look at me,” I tell her. There’s so much more that I need to tell her, but I only have a few words left in me.
Her eyes, which I need to find forgiveness in, are leaking with tears that drip onto my face as she gently taps my cheeks as if it’ll keep me tethered to this world. To her.
“Do you forgive me?” I whisper.
“What?” her voice breaks, her features contorting with so much pain. “He’s falling asleep!” Her eyes leave me to dart to someone I can’t see above my head.
“Forgive me?” I force the question out, forcing her eyes back to me. “Deathbed. I got on it.” Just like she said.
A sob wracks her as she nods furiously, unable to speak until something snaps in her as my eyes roll back and forth. Back and forth. Her eyes grow wide, her lips falling open in horror because she’s seeing something I can feel.
More glass, more tinkling. But this time, the shatter is tiny, followed by wails.
Zedd’s.
Stassi’s.
Hale’s.
Delphine’s.
Dove’s.
“I’m banging on the door,” I say.
“HELP ME!” Dove’s voice drifts over my face like a fluttering veil.
Death’s door.
“It’s opening,” I whimper.
“ Please don’t go. I didn’t mean that. Any of it. I’m a liar, just like you said. Someone do something! Help me!” she’s hysterical.
“It shattered,” Hale’s voice cracks with disbelief. “Go get another one, Zedd! In the kitchen!”
“They’re missing,” Zedd’s tortured voice whimpers. “Bart took the last orange top.”
“Orange?!” Elle shrieks, her voice lifting with an edge of hope, then she’s gone in a whip of red, her heels clacking down the hall.
Fuck…all gone? This is it…but how can I leave my baby, again?
She’s back after a slow blink, and there’s more fighting: Hale restraining Alistair, Stassi sitting on Delphine, Zedd ignoring his father’s betrayed gaze as Dove slides across the glossy tile toward me on her knees.
“I thought all I wanted was you,” I whisper.
“Shh, don’t talk,” Stassi’s cracked voice says near my ear as Zedd rips off my sleeve just in case.
“He’s losing his bowels!” someone shouts, but they’re not talking about me. Not yet.
“I had you again,” I go on as Elle’s clumsy fingers fiddle with the new vial she’s still unsure if she’ll have to use. “In my bed beside me. But you weren’t really there because you hadn’t truly forgiven me. Now that you have, I finally have it… I feel it, Elle.”
“Feel what?” It’s more of a cry than a question. Hot tears fall onto my cheeks, and I wish I could catch them with my tongue. Hadn’t I told her I’d drink them all?
My tongue’s so heavy, but I have to say this. He has to hear it. Dove has to hear it.
“Peace,” I say. The peace I’ve been trying to find for two years. “It’s right there,” I twitch my index finger to the ceiling. “And it’s so bright.”