30. Chapter 30
Chapter 30
BERNIE
M y heart turned numb. It became a block of stone that no longer beat with the storm thundering down upon me.
No longer did I want this reality. If this was reality? My head pounded as I stopped clawing at the ground. I stopped fighting against the man holding my ankles.
She wasn’t here.
Wait, she?
No, he.
I’d failed Duncan.
I closed my eyes, wishing to be where I no longer fucking hurt those I cared the most about. Somewhere in my mind, my story ended differently. Where my mom would be better off without my impulsive immaturity. Raiden would receive all the attention he deserved, no longer masked by the shadow of someone as hollow as me if I wasn’t there.
Why hadn’t I been the one killed? Peace had been so close.
Dragging Duncan’s body around the corner, I tucked the gun into my shoulder and scanned our surroundings.
“Reyes,” Scottie whispered.
And there he was, perched up in a window of a building that should’ve been cleared before we arrived. That fucker killed him.
Incomprehensible shouting filled the world around me. Mud sloshed. Footsteps crashed around me. Mist clouded my vision, hiding Reyes and the body by my feet.
Hiding Duncan who—
A clammy hand wrapped around my wrists as weight pinned me to the ground. My eyes peeled open. Rain pouring down hid the anguished tears sliding along my cheeks as I locked onto a gaze above me holding a hollow soul. Reality and fiction, the past and present, were swirling in a cauldron of murky sludge.
Rain?
“Bernie!” Ford bellowed, sounding strained as if he had exerted himself.
I let out a shaky breath. Thunder pounded in my ears, drowning out the ringing as mud soaked against my back and hands wrapped around my throat.
“I don’t know— Is Matrix— Where’s Reyes?” I gasped, confusion swirling as quickly as the sight in front of me shifted from cement and dust to greenery and rain.
Rain? Why was there rain?
“Bernie, we’re home!” Ford grunted as the chokehold tightened around my neck. I sucked in desperate for air .
“You’re home! Reyes is already dead!” Ford roared again. “Fight, damn it! Fucking fight!”
My eyes snapped into focus.
Wet. Shards of grass poked beneath me as sharp as the needles of pain shooting through my lungs. Like tendrils of death, the branches from the trees around me shook, clawing to reach me as quickly as Death himself encroached.
“BERNIE!” Ford shouted once more, and a rush of adrenaline barreled through my veins.
Everything that had just happened, everything happening now flooded me as if a dam had burst.
It was as if Duncan himself wrapped his fingers around the hands of my enemy and loosened the choke just enough so my vision sharpened.
With a single cock of my fist, I splintered my knuckles against the jaw of the man attempting to kill me. His head snapped backward. I shoved my entire weight against his legs and threw him to the side.
The world turned as red as the blood that seeped from the split lip of my enemy. His eyes widened as I pushed myself upright and thrust the heel of my boot against his jaw. With a deafening crack, his neck snapped, and he collapsed to the ground.
“Where’s Kat?!” I shouted, spinning away from the body.
My focus shifted to Ford who had his elbow hooked around the throat of one scrawny gang member while holding another away from him by a fistful of his wet hair.
“Wyatt took her!” Ford shouted, tightening his headlock .
“Where?” I asked, sprinting across the meadow toward a man with bodies strewn about him. The muck swirled a deep burgundy, and whether those cartel members were dead or unconscious, I had no idea, and I didn’t care to ask. All I felt was the need to find Kat, to redeem myself, not just for her, but for Duncan. And I couldn’t do that without saving her—without making sure she was okay.
By taking down the man responsible for all of this.
“No fucking clue,” Ford grumbled as he tightened his choke even more and the enemy’s face turned purple.
“Let’s find out,” I snarled, shifting my gaze to glare at the gangly kid attempting to rip his hair from Ford’s hold.
I stalked up to the wiry, blond-haired boy who I’d seen once before and tapped his cheek. His frenzied eyes snapped to mine, pupils dilated so large that the colors of his irises were absent.
“Hey there, buddy,” I taunted with a grin, sending a sting with the next couple of taps against his face. He shook his head, still attempting to wriggle out of Ford’s hold, and sneered at me.
I let the smile fall from my lips and clamped my hand around his jaw, ripping him away from Ford. A few strands of hair remained in the fingers of my best friend.
“Where’d Wyatt take Kat?” I snarled. With a jerk, I yanked his face within an inch of mine and tightened my hand around his cheeks. The skin turned white around each of my fingertips, and his eyes widened as he clawed at my wrist. Yet, I felt nothing.
“Piss off,” he slurred through the pressure .
“Don’t make me ask again,” I hissed, clamped my free hand around one of his fingers, and bent. A sharp crack snapped through the pattering of rain. He shrieked and released his palm from around my wrist.
“Where did Wyatt take Kat?” I asked again and snapped his next finger.
“STOP!” he screamed, attempting to rip his broken fingers from my hand. “The hospital. He took her to the hospital to save his own ass. Please don’t—”
And I cracked a third knuckle.
His wail sheared through the dark sky as sharply as a knife through butter.
“That was for not answering the first fucking time I asked,” I snarled, released my grip from his face, and slammed a fist square into his nose. He collapsed to the ground, joining his buddy that Ford had choked out, and stopped moving just as a roar of two ATV engines echoed through the meadow.
I shared a knowing glance with Ford as Emma came racing through the tree line with Levi holding tightly to her waist and Beau behind her on the four-wheeler Ford had previously been on.
Emma slammed onto the brakes and then shoved Levi’s face against her back. “Close your eyes,” she commanded the little boy. Her glare sent a shiver down my spine. “What the hell?” she hissed.
“Wyatt took Kat to the hospital, let’s go.” I raced forward toward Beau whose gaze remained wide as his face paled.
“And what about…” Emma waved a hand over the grove that had become a shade of gray and red. “What about all of this? ”
I shrugged as Ford’s footsteps sounded behind me. “The cartel will take care of it. They’re not about to leave any evidence or mess that could be traced back to them,” Ford said as we reached the ATV Beau sat upon.
“Besides, with how muddy and wet the field is, other than the bodies, not much evidence could be found anyway,” I finished explaining and gently placed a palm over Beau’s eyes. His lashes fluttered against my skin as I helped guide his stiff body down from the vehicle.
“Hey, Beau,” I gently said. His hands began to tremble as I tucked his face against my shoulder. “Your sister got shot, and these guys were trying to make it worse. Ford and I couldn’t let that happen. You understand, right?”
His head bobbed against me as I waded through the muck to Emma’s vehicle.
“She’s headed to the hospital right now, but I need you to do something so important for me.” I carefully set his butt down on the seat behind Levi but kept him pressed into my body.
“What’s that?” he asked with a crack in his muffled words.
“You’re going to go with Levi and Emma to get your parents and Sawyer. Tell them that Kat is headed to the hospital because she’s been shot. Can you do that for me? For her?” I cupped his cheeks and gingerly peeled him away from my body but directed his face a mere couple inches from mine to cloud any possibility of seeing more of the gore around us.
His bottom lip trembled as he slowly nodded up and down. “You protected Kat,” he muttered.
I offered him a tight-lipped smile but said nothing .
“So, you’re a hero,” he continued as the tense lines on his face loosened. “You and Ford are superheroes.” A grin stretched on his lips as he straightened his back, keeping his eyes locked intensely on mine.
I was no superhero. Hell, I was no hero at all, but the comfort it offered the young boy kept my mouth shut as my heart pattered heavily in my chest. To be a hero one day…
He placed a hand against his little brother’s back and slowly swung a leg around to the other side of him.
“I’ll see you at the hospital, but I’ve got to go be a hero too,” he finished and wrapped his arms around Levi. “Just like Kat’s boyfriend.” He rammed his eyes closed tightly as mine flew wide.
Emma gunned the four-wheeler before I had a chance to say anything and flew off in a frenzy of mud and rain. The moment those two innocent souls left the valley of violence Ford and I had created, adrenaline ripped through me again.
I spun around to find Ford waiting on the other ATV.
Sprinting to the empty, wet seat, I threw myself behind him, and we ripped out of the meadow.
And it hit me.
As we raced toward the woman who had consumed all of me, I realized just how selfish I’d been this entire time. Only concerned about my feelings, and how guilty I felt over Duncan’s death. I’d never once asked my best friend how he was doing. Other than the damn group text the entire team was in, I’d never vocally expressed any condolences or comfort to the man who now drove us through the muddy field with no regard for his own life, his own feelings, all because of me .
“Hey, asshat,” I shouted above the roar of the wind and leaned closer to Ford.
“What?” he loudly asked over his shoulder.
“How are you doing? I’ve been so wrapped up in my own guilt, blaming myself, I haven’t asked you. Duncan…” I stopped yelling, unsure how to actually ask him.
His shoulders tensed as we raced around another bend. My grip on the cold metal handlebars tightened, yet he remained quiet. Nothing but the rain washing away what little blood and muck that remained as evidence against our skin danced around us.
“Like you,” he finally muttered.
I twisted my hand around the rod, holding me steady as Ford pushed the ATV as fast as it could go.
“I blame myself every fucking day for it. Just like you.” He was barely audible over the roar of the storm and rush of the wind.
I blew out and closed my eyes. “Thank you for coming home, man. I don’t think I’d have made it without you.”
His chest rumbled with a chuckle. “You need me as much as you need sex and Kat.”
I smacked his shoulder. “You need me as much as I need you, admit it.”
His head bobbed with a nod as we burst onto pavement and shot down the road, barreling straight toward Main Street and the hospital. “Yeah, I do.”
“So, when are you going to stop running?”
“I showed up here, didn’t I?” He raised a hand and flashed me the bird .
“You know that’s not what I meant.” I bopped him against the back of his head.
“I can’t hear you!” Ford shouted, louder than necessary.
“I said, fuck you!”
“What was that?”
Grinning to myself, I leaned back and let the rain pelt my face.
A weight lifted, even if momentarily. At least at this moment as I raced toward the unknown with Kat, hoping and begging whatever fate held my twisted string of life in their hands that she was okay, something felt a little lighter.
For half a second, before reality set in, before Wyatt shot Kat, I’d held the world in my palms.