28. Chase
She was injured, my sweet kitten had blood running down her face. The mark it would leave was going to stain her beautiful pale skin with a scar. And it was my fault. I left, making it all the way to the airport in Wyoming before canceling hastily, and boarding the next available flight back to Pittsburgh. I was sick the entire plane ride with worry.
A devastating emotion that pulsed through my veins with each passing minute. The sinking feeling left me struggling to breathe, like my lungs were full of sand. I didn’t understand why I had been feeling that way, only that I had to get back to Emma. That was the only thing I was certain of. Even as the dean of the college I was supposed to be visiting berated me over the phone, and when I hung up, through email.
Emma was the only thing I was sure of.
I followed her as she sat in the park mindlessly wiping tears off her pink cheeks. I followed her down fifth avenue as she made her way to the bank. I watched her card get declined twice and slipped in, hiding in the stairwell when her nose was in her phone scrolling frantically through her bank account. I’d been wiring money to her to make sure she wasn’t going without, the scheduled transfer I set up, didn’t go through. The plan was to step out of the shadows and give her the money she needed and beg for her to take me back. Everything went awry when those three fucks walked in.
Waiting for my moment in the shadows was hard, as bodies fell in heaps to the floor, I found myself praying to all the gods in existence that Emma could be spared for just a moment longer. I couldn”t give a shit about anyone else in that bank, but my heart was out there exposed.
When he pistol whipped her face, I knew he’d be my last target. The one I would savor. I wanted to taste his fucking death on my tongue and watch his lungs constrict. The shot of adrenaline I got imagining his heart stopping, his pupils relaxing with his oncoming death got my cock hard.
When I saw her sweet little body running towards me instead of out the door with the others, I almost didn”t believe my eyes. The lapse in time, the small moment it took altered everything.
He pointed the gun at her and my body just moved.
The echoes of her screaming could be heard, but she sounded far away. I couldn”t feel my lower extremities, the rest of me felt like I was pulling a sled of weights through quick sand.
Another crack of fire whipped through my body.
I couldn”t tell which way was up, my hands grabbed onto something, my eyes clouded by red, only seeing shadows. I felt the gurgle and warmth of life being spilled onto my forearms, and the fleeting pulse fading under my palms.
Reality seemed to effervesce, tiny bubbles of memories left in the aftermath. I finally felt relaxed. Peaceful even, as the water splashed across my face. I could hear the voice I”d come to love, I could hear my name on her full lips, dying to trace them one last time with my own.
It was getting dark.
The flashing red light from the overhead sprinklers no longer invaded my vision.
The smell of the stale water that sprayed creating human waste puddles on the bank floor no longer permeated my nostrils.
Emma was safe.
The only thing I did right in my life was make sure she still had hers.