31. Chapter 31
Chapter 31
DECLAN
I give Vivian her space. She has worked every night since the evening we were together, and I knew she was taking the bus, going to work, and coming home to sleep. There wouldn’t have been a ton of time for us to be together anyway.
But just because I know all of that doesn’t stop me from driving to her building every evening to watch her get on the bus and follow it to the hospital, then doing the same thing in the morning in reverse. She’d been attacked near her place, and I need to make sure she stays safe. At least that’s what I tell myself as a reasonable excuse for my behavior.
It is fucking torture watching her and not being able to get close to her. I ache when I see her face and how pale she looks. Is she resting enough? And what about food—is she eating? And when the fuck have I ever cared whether or not a woman has eaten?
Since Vivian, that’s when.
My brothers have searched hospitals within a hundred-mile radius and have come up empty on a gunshot victim with a leg wound having come in recently. We have no idea who the fuckers are that broke into my father’s house, and I feel certain it wasn’t an isolated crime.
My head is absolutely spinning between Vivian, the revelation that my father has a degenerative disorder that he has kept from us for over a year, and the fact that he is wanting me to take over the businesses within months. I also can’t shake that something more is going on with my dad that he hasn’t admitted to.
I don’t feel right about hiding the MS thing from my brothers, but my father insists he just wants to get a treatment plan all set. He wants to have his ducks in a row before he shares it with them. He wants to be able to answer their questions. I agreed to his plan, but it still doesn’t feel right.
I need to talk to Axel and Slade about me being the head if Dad retires too. Dad has assured me he has talked to them, but a man has to have the discussion himself. I also am not sure I want it all. I’m not sure I can shoulder the whole burden without my brothers.
Monday morning comes, and after I watch Vivian enter her fucking horror movie of an apartment building, I drive my route, checking on the buildings I need to. By midmorning, I head to meet with my brothers back at our house to talk.
I get back first and start coffee. The line at Dunkin had been insane, and I was too fidgety from all the shit spinning in my head to wait, so they’ll have to settle for drip. Slade comes in first with a box of Town Donuts from Dartmouth, the best fucking donuts in the area. Axel arrives about ten minutes later with a bloody lip.
“What happened to you?” I ask. Monday mornings are just check-ins. Usually the bloody lips come on rent collection weeks.
“A chick,” he says and grabs a donut, shoving it in his mouth, effectively ending the conversation.
I nod and grab mugs. “Pour your own,” I tell them.
Once we all have coffee and donuts, Slade is the one to rip the Band-Aid off. “Are we in trouble?” he asks as he shops the donut box for his third donut.
I smirk at him and take a sip of my coffee. “No, but the other day when Dad came to fix my door that you assholes broke—”
“That was Axel!” Slade announces around the large bite of donut he has in his mouth, wasting no time in throwing our brother under the bus.
I roll my eyes at him. “Anyway, he says he is thinking of retiring sooner than he thought.”
Slade nods, taking the information in while looking down at the table, but Axel searches my face. I know Axel. He is perceptive, and he’s trying to find out the why behind my father looking for an out much earlier. Axel knows something isn’t right, but he won’t ask me. He’ll try to figure it out for himself or go to the source, and I appreciate that because it isn’t my answer to give.
“He also told me that he’d talked to you guys about what the business will look like once he isn’t part of it anymore,” I say, trying to be as delicate as my nature will allow.
They both have eyes on me now, but I wait. I don’t want to be the one to say it. “You lead it,” Axel finally says, taking the discomfort away from me.
“Uh-huh,” Slade agrees, again around a bite of donut. I’m beginning to think he honestly didn’t bring any of the donuts to share with us.
“But what does that mean? What does me leading look like?”
Slade finally frees up his mouth and takes a sip of coffee. “Declan, I’m not the guy who can make solid split-second decisions. I know how to shmooze and win people over, but my in-the-moment thinking is usually to maim. And the direction that you want to take us in, the way that we are going, maiming people is not a great knee-jerk reaction for someone in power. So for me, I would prefer to be the PR guy, you know, and numbers—I like numbers and I’m good at them. So I could figure out where it’s best to invest more money. I’ve been taking an online class in investing—”
“You have?” I ask, and Axel has an equally shocked expression on his face.
“I’m not stupid,” Slade reminds us with a smirk, “and yes, it’s not just you who wants to better themselves, Declan Jude.”
His tone of a hurt sorority girl has me laughing, and even has a slight smile crossing Axel’s face.
“What about you?” I ask Axel.
“I like behind-the-scenes stuff,” he says. “I want to take over security and tech for our places. Maybe branch it out a little bit.”
“Okay.” That all makes sense. “And I would be just the figurehead?”
“You’d be the boss, Declan,” Slade says, and Axel nods.
I shake my head. “No, it’s a family business. I don’t want to be the only one making decisions.”
“Someone has to,” Axel says. “Too many people making the decisions gets messy, gets things fucked up. It can get people hurt,” he says, and shadows fall over his face.
He’s right. There can only be one head for the final say. “I want us to be something great,” I say, feeling a little uncomfortable saying it out loud. I feel like I’m baring my soul to them. “It’s going to be work, and it’s going to mean change, and it won’t be without mistakes or growing pains,” I tell them.
My brothers nod solemnly. “We trust you, Dec,” Slade says.
I’m trying to name the emotions I have at my brothers putting all their faith in me. I’m wondering if I am worthy of their belief when my phone starts ringing on the table, but I don’t recognize the number so I send it to voicemail. “I know Dad isn’t retiring tomorrow, but I didn’t want to push this conversation back,” I tell Axel and Slade. Again, my phone lights up with an unrecognized number, and once again I punch decline on the phone face. “We should make these kinds of decisions together always,” I say, but again my phone rings, and I pick it up beyond pissed at the interruption and ready to rip whoever is on the other end a new asshole.
“Falco.”
There is a pause on the other end before a timid voice speaks. “Uh, Declan?”
“Who is this?” I demand. No one has my phone number who doesn’t one hundred percent know who they are calling.
“Uh, it-it’s Bailey. Viv’s roommate,” she stutters out.
My heart begins to jackhammer in my chest, and I stand from the table quickly, sending my coffee spilling and my brothers shouting. “What is it, Bailey?” I ask, trying to lighten my tone.
“Is she with you?” she asks, her voice a little high-pitched. “Vivian, I mean.”
“No.”
“Oh,” she says and silence fills the line.
“What’s wrong, Bailey?” I bark out sternly, trying not to shout into the phone but unable to keep the urgency out of my tone.
“It’s just, well, I’m at work but someone I know from here, she lives on the same street, in another building, and she just got told a building is on fire, and I think it might be ours, and I don’t have a quick way to get home so I called one of your bars and they gave me your number because I was really hoping she was with you,” Bailey says, her voice quavering. “And Vivian is home, and she has no phone, and she sleeps like the dead after working nights…”
I don’t hear anything else she says, her voice drowned out by flashbacks of my words when I was leaving Vivian’s building the other night, when I ran into Tim. “You better get it done or I’m going to light a fucking fire under your ass.”
He’d muttered something to my back, but I hadn’t cared to hear it. What was it? I push my brain to dig deep and decipher the words that he had spat at me. Then it comes to me. Tim muttered, “Oh, I’ll light a fire.”
Fuck.
I hustle out the door, not bothering to say anything to my brothers, and once outside, I look in the direction of Vivian’s building, even though it’s clear across the city from my place. A cloud of black smoke is billowing into the air.
I run to my car and speed away from my house. I break every traffic law ever created as I rush toward the smoke, praying the entire way it’s a different building. I go to turn and nearly careen into the side of a cruiser blocking off access to Vivian’s street.
There are fire trucks everywhere on the street, every hydrant is in use, and flames shoot high in the sky from Vivian’s building.
I park my car where it skids to a stop and run full speed to the building. I ignore the cop shouting at me that I can’t park there and run through the people who have gathered in the street to stare. I go to the front of the building and look around at the people who are wrapped in blankets, people who are covered with smoke soot and look to have been evacuated. I go from person to person, move from huddled group to huddled group, but none of them are Vivian.
I look up at the building and make my way to the entry when a man in firefighter gear and a big white hat stops me.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks, his tone saturated in condescension as he looks me up and down.
“My girlfriend is in there,” I tell him.
He shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “I checked the place personally; everyone is out.”
“No, she isn’t, because she isn’t here,” I tell him, plotting all the ways I will inflict pain on him once Vivian is safe.
“Look, guy, maybe she wasn’t home, because that place is empty.”
“You’re wrong.”
I watch the veins bulge in his forehead. The little man here doesn’t like me telling him the truth. I look at his name on his hat—Deputy Perkins. “I told you,” he says through his teeth, “I checked every place—”
“No, you didn’t, and something tells me you don’t even believe that. My girlfriend is on the third floor, in the back of the building. She works nights and she sleeps during the day.”
“Look, asshole, your bitch isn’t home,” Deputy Dickhead says, and I clench my fists, ready to hit him and then make my way inside, but thankfully he is called away.
I run to the back of the building, hopping over hoses, and to the rusted-out fire escape on the side of the building where Vivian’s apartment is. I grab the ladder, shaking my head in disgust as some of the metal disintegrates in my hands, and climb, hoping like hell it will hold my weight.
Please let her be okay, I pray over and over again as I climb up the escape to the third floor window. I can’t see in through all the black smoke in the way. I cover my head and kick the window, throwing myself immediately down on the fire escape, expecting flames or smoke like I have seen in the movies. But instead, all I hear is a loud roar as the flames on top of the building grow, windows popping out on the floors above.
I waste no time and hurl myself through the window and into Vivian’s kitchen. I see her bedroom door shut and run to it, touching it. It’s thankfully cool, and I shove it open.
Vivian sits straight up from the bed on my entry and screams.
“Vivian!” I shout, the roar of the flames suddenly like a freight train around us.
“Declan?” she asks, looking so confused, and then immediately the confusion is replaced with fear as the situation around us becomes clear to her. “What’s going on?” she screams.
I don’t answer her, and instead stride to her side, gathering her in my arms, and make my way out the door of her bedroom. The way back has completely changed in the seconds it’s taken me to get Vivian. Smoke has come seemingly out of nowhere, and I’m unable to find my way back to the window. I cough against the onslaught of smoke, my eyes burning from it. Vivian is coughing too, and she seems unable to stop as I try to make out where the window was.
It becomes too much, the smoke consuming all around us, and so I drop down and try to get below it. I’m able to see a sliver of light then, and begin to drag myself and Vivian toward it. I can hear the crumbling of the structure around me, but I try to block that out and focus on getting us to safety.
“Is there someone in here?” a voice shouts from the fire escape.
“Yes!” I shout back, and cough immediately after. I don’t know if I imagined the voice, but I keep dragging myself and Vivian to where I hope the escape is. Then there are boots before me. I grab Vivian and shove her up to the figure, and he lifts her and quickly leaves. Something catches my eyes as I crawl in the direction the figure came from, and I reach out and grab it just as I am also lifted to my feet and brought out to the fire escape.
The bright blue sky instantly replaces the black smoke I was just in, and two men help me down the fire escape. When we get closer to the alley and I see Vivian already on the ground, her face covered with an oxygen mask and her chest rising and falling, I relax a bit.
I’m put down beside her and a mask is pushed to me. I attempt to smack it away, but the paramedic isn’t taking my shit. “It’s either this or you don’t stay with her,” he threatens, and I realize begrudgingly that he has the upper hand on me. So I take the mask he offers, and I turn to Vivian. I hold her face in my hand. “Vivian?” I whisper and watch with relief as her eyes flutter open and meet mine. It’s only then that I really feel the clean air in my lungs. That I am really able to breathe.