Chapter Four, The Crash & Days After It
Being dead was never fun. An obvious thing to most people, but not something I had thought of until now. Now that I was dead.
Agony wracked every ounce of my body as I slowly and carefully tried to draw a breath whilst simultaneously not being noticed doing so. Barely a sliver of air was getting into my lungs, and it took all my effort not to cough and splutter like a fool and let everyone and their nan know I was actually alive.
I was supposed to be dead.
I was dead, for all intents and purposes.
At least I was pretending to be dead because it seemed the smartest thing to do, given the current circumstances.
Turned out that learning how to slow my heart rate and become unmoveable like a corpse had way more uses that just being good for a sniper. It could make me look dead and it could convince my best friend that I was a goner. Enough so that the devastation on his face before he had no choice but to escape the mess of his car and attempt to rescue our girl almost broke my fucking heart.
My playing pretend was enough that it could make the maniacal gang leader I had seen through the window presume me dead too, just so he would leave me alone and not shoot me in the head for fun. It was enough to make it so that I was the only one of my friends left in Linc’s car – the only one deemed a non-threat and left behind after the devastation of watching a man I considered a second father die in a way that nobody deserved. By being blown to pieces by a piece of shit gangster taking the coward’s way out.
Death being slaughtered by a psychopath playing games, as though that was the kind of way out a man like Malone deserved.
It was bullshit. It was more than bullshit. But as much as I wanted to sit and wallow in my fear, anger, and heartbreak, there was no time. My friends were being loaded into a van that was turning its engine back on, the Vice King scum behind the wheel, readying themselves to drive away to places unknown and continue their train of devastation, not a care for what they left in their wake. And my fucking girl was gone.
She was gone, and she was in danger and nothing else would be as important as a rescue of the ones I loved.
My hand wrapped around the glass buried in my chest, hurting like a motherfucker, but once more, not an issue for the moment when there were more important things going on. I yanked it free, cutting into my palm and letting out a roar of pain a moment before I unhooked my belt and fell down, attempting to cushion the blow with my arms. I failed and all but face planted the ground, only adding to my pain - but it was fucking worth it because I was free.
I was one step down in my rescue plan.
A face appeared in the open door before I could hit step two, a loaded and cocked gun with it, inches from touching me.
Widow Smyth had never once appeared scary to me. He was a good few years younger than me and held an air of lighthearted humour and innocence that reminded me of both Misha and Price. Yet now, now that we were in the midst of a battle and had begun to lose soldiers, I was not seeing two of my friends in Widow’s stare.
I was seeing Sapphire.
I was seeing the stone cold gangster’s child’s gaze that promised all amounts of violence and bloodshed were moments out from being delivered.
I was seeing someone who was willing to do what it took to win.
A man who held a monster in his soul and a thousand secrets in his eyes that would never see the light of day, because even an ounce of the truth he held was enough to kill for.
“Fucking hell,” Widow’s gun lowered from my face, his bloody and bruised skin dampened with sweat and blood. “I thought there was a zombie in here or something!”
“Just faking.” My voice was rough. But considering I had no choice but to crawl out of the car as I spoke and was seconds out from passing out, it made sense. “I saw John coming and figured he’d kill us all, so tried to do something.”
Sure, my intention had been to get a gun and shoot someone. But I hadn’t been able to get free whilst John played his sadistic games and my ideas of helping had been thoroughly pointless. The only bonus was that I wasn’t currently in a van with a bomb around my neck too, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I’d have rather been with my friends, in the shit together.
As I grumbled my complaints, Widow helped hoist me out of the car as best as he could, holding up most of my weight. Each movement made my head pound and the minute I got to my feet, something inside me felt off. Like my brain was shaken or something in my soul had been the slightest bit broken.
I tried to make sense of what I was seeing and work out a plan despite the fact I was sure I was minutes away from passing out at best, but that didn’t help the way I felt. There was an odd emptiness inside of me that had nothing to do with the pain and death that lingered in the air. It was like I somehow knew that I was injured more than anyone should be.
That I needed help before things became too much for me to handle.
“We need to get back to the house and-” Widow started talking, but I could barely listen to a damn word.
As I tried to stand on my own, the air left my lungs with the ferocity of a tidal wave, and I felt my chest tighten enough to make me suck in a pained gasp. My lips parted and my eyes were drawn down to the mess on the floor. I didn’t want to look at it, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was like my brain lost all sense for a moment and thought, what the hell, what’s a little bit of trauma to a man bleeding out?
Malone dying was one thing, but his desecrated body, pieces of it floating about the floor, was another.
It was… God, I could barely think of words to describe it.
Blood coated the road beneath my feet, guts, bits of organs, and even a limb or two followed suit. His death had painted the road like a fucked up canvas and honestly, I had no idea how I wasn’t heaving and sobbing at the sight of it.
Kellan was – at least he wasn’t feeling great. He was throwing up on the other side of the road, blood on his head but otherwise looking alright, as Angel stood near him, trying to multitask. And surprisingly, not dead, much to my delight. Though that delight was short-lived when Angel span to me, dark eyes wide and anger flared, and announced a horrid fact to add to even more fucked up stuff.
He looked terrified, and I had no idea what sort of darkness could cause him to appear that way when the monsters chasing us had gone.
“Raya comes for us.” His words were rushed out. “Diamond tell me; there is danger. There is men at the house.” He flipped his phone around when he marched over to us, showing a blurry photo that contained a bunch of unknown men in black outfits holding guns.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was one man I did recognize in the center. A man I ought to have killed the moment he kept looking at my fucking woman with that predatory gaze, as though he had the right to check her out and leer at a goddess like Sapphire.
As though he had a right to even breathe when he’d been happily engaged to a fifteen-year-old girl.
“That’s Rocky.” I snapped.
Or at least I tried to – my voice sounded muffled and there was a ringing noise in my head. I was fairly sure my threat to kill Rocky came out as mumbled nonsense, but I meant it. He was dead for thinking about Sapphire already. Now he was extra dead for daring to break into her home and do whatever unspeakable things no doubt were happening right now.
“We gotta go.” I said. Or maybe it was more like gottahgo – one word blurring into a single sound.
Angel kept talking as Widow’s grip on me tightened and though it was hard to catch everything, one undeniable thing was clear.
Diamond was in trouble. The others at home were in danger.
And we were screwed. Again.
“Come on, Kody. You’re all good.” Widow spoke beside me, and I glanced at him, unsure of when he had pushed his wadded-up t-shirt against the rapidly bleeding hole in my chest, or why I couldn’t feel the pain anymore. “Just stay on your feet; Raya will be here in a sec.”
Oddly enough, the only thing keeping me on my feet was the sounds of Linc’s voice running through my mind, as he cursed at me and threatened me with all manner of violence to stay alive and awake.
Don’t die on me, you bastard – if you die, I’ll kick your ass.
I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t going to die. That I was too strong and stubborn and had far too much to live for. I wanted to scream at my best friend that there was no chance in hell of me giving up my fight for him, the others, and our girl, and doing something so ridiculous as dying or being too injured to help. Except… except I was fairly sure I had no choice in the matter because the world turned fuzzy and time lost all meaning. My head was spinning, my gut turning, and I swore to God I was feeling a shift in the air as my soul tried its darndest to escape.
“Kody; you gotta stay awake, man. Stay awake!” Widow yelled at me again, but it was like he was standing at the end of a rather long tunnel, on the opposite side to me. The tunnel that seemed to blur his words as he cussed and muttered something that sounded funny.
My messed up brain made it sound like Widow was speaking Russian, but that wasn’t right. He didn’t speak Russian. It must have been someone else there. Someone else’s voice floating inside my head… someone else who was staring at me and saying things I couldn’t understand.
As a handful of cars arrived with screeches of brakes that made my head hurt, and I caught a single glimpse of Raya’s concerned face before my vision went too and everything went numb.
I was drowning for a moment. My ears rang, a high-pitched sound so violent echoed in my head as I struggled to remain on my feet. Air wouldn’t enter my lungs and I swore nothing around me held any meaning anymore.
Vaguely a part of me registered Widow and Kellan grabbing me, holding me tight and yelling words that sounded garbled like I was underwater. But for the most part all I could feel was agony, as the worst sorts of pain radiated through me with a sudden burst of torture I hadn’t been expecting.
I wanted to scream, but no noise came out. Instead, something far scarier came.
Darkness. Darkness and doom.
I slipped into nothing but emptiness, and I had no idea if I would ever find a way to crawl back out again. It was as though I had been dropped off at the bottom of a pit with no escape, and the only thing letting me know I wasn’t dead yet was the occasional bout of light or strange noises. Noises like people swearing at me, or the beeping of a machine.
Sometimes I swore I felt a warm hand holding mine, whispering things in a language I could not understand. I wanted to laugh at the bizarreness of everything – laugh and laugh and laugh. But even breathing was hard. My lungs were wrong, my body wasn’t my own, and I had no idea how I was supposed to do anything at all.
All I knew was that when I could hear things; I heard a voice I thought I knew, and I wanted to keep listening to it for a single reason. That meant more to me than anything else in the dark.
Spanish. They were speaking Spanish. A soft hum of whispers and words that I enjoyed hearing and though my eyes were glued shut, it was that voice I clung to and used as a life raft to stop me from going over the edge. The voice that remained as the only thing I heard for heaven knew how long until suddenly it changed. It shifted and became something familiar, but just as soft and kind.
Something in Hungarian. Something in the one language that reminded me of the home I used to have.
The one with my family – my parents, and my cousin and all the others who held my surname.
The ones I was never going to see again before I died.
“Please, Koko.”A voice cried a little, their soft, feminine whispers achingly familiar. “You need to come back to me. You need to stay with me.”
The voice came more than once. Other ones joining it sometimes. And though I was suffocating in the never ending abyss, for some reason I was more than aware that I was not alone.
I had never been alone.
Hours could have passed. Or days. Or even weeks. Time ceased to mean anything at all as I remained in the darkness with nothing but pain and my companion and the oddest bout of promises being whispered into my ear.
“We’ll get her back.”
“You’ll be okay.”
“Dad’s dead and I can’t lose you too – don’t make me lose you too.” Someone else I knew better than I knew myself cried and held my hand. “I can’t keep going without all of you – I’ve been barely holding myself together for years. I won’t cope without you.”
Over and over again the dark claimed me. It picked and pulled me to pieces, chewing me up and the spitting me out without a care. It kept coming without mercy, shooting pain and death and despair through every atom of my being.
Until it didn’t. Until a single sentence dragged me out of the depths of wherever the hell I was and forced me back into the light.
A single sentence spoken with such disdain and love rolled into one that there was no mistaking who was saying it because nobody else had ever spoken to me the way she did.
“You’re such a lazy prick, Koko.” A soft voice scoffed from beside me as the world began to turn more gray than anything else.
I groaned and writhed, trying to force the last of the darkness away from me so I could see what was happening and just what hell was like. I presumed I was in hell, anyway. It was kind of warm and my entire body seemed to burn.
“You think you can pretend to die? That is such a loser move.” The voice said again, adding to the odd beeping noises echoing in my ears, and the strangest scent of cleaning products that burned my nose a little.
My body wriggled again, eyes too heavy to open properly. I wanted to lift my lids and see what was happening, but for some reason it was taking a lot more effort than it should. My eyes were like sandpaper and the second I managed the tiniest little burst of energy to crack open my lids, the world was filled with enough light to scald me.
“If you don’t wake up right now, I’m going to kill you really violently. Uncle Dorjan taught me how to fight and he said I’m allowed to hit boys who piss me off and you are pissing me off.”The girl spoke again, this time with more anger in her tone. And though I was mildly sure I was dead or hallucinating, I couldn’t stop myself from getting excited and not just because she’d said my dad’s name.
Hand reaching blindly around me, I found a tube sticking in my nose. It was plastic and cold, and I instantly tried to pull it away from me, only to be stopped by the soft touch of a hand much smaller than my own.
For an instant, relief scoured through me.
Sapphire. It had to be sapphire. She was with me, and she was fine. It didn’t matter that the voice wasn’t hers; the perfume wasn’t the type she wore, or that she had never once called me Koko nor had she even known it was something that I answered to sometimes.
It didn’t matter that Sapphire barely knew a handful of words in Hungarian, or that she was only beginning her journey to learn it, and that the person who spoke to me now was entirely fluent.
I just wanted my girl. I wanted to hold her and see her and promise her that I wouldn’t leave her, nor would I let her be taken again.
With far too much force, my eyes fluttered open, head spinning, and though I was fairly sure I was as high as a damn kite, I was perfectly able to see who was there. And though the tiniest shiver of disappointment burned in my veins, I couldn’t be too sad, even if it wasn’t my girlfriend.
It might not have been the woman I loved and would marry one day, but it was still another woman I loved. One I had loved since I’d held her in my arms and vowed that I would keep her safe until she was big enough to look out for herself.
I gasped in a lungful of air that spluttered into a cough the moment I realized who was opposite me. “What the hell?” It was natural for my brain to switch back to Hungarian, knowing the ghost who haunted me spoke it better than English.
I hadn’t imagined it. I was hearing Hungarian. I had been listening to it in the darkness – it wasn’t a dream.
The world came into focus, and I instantly recognized one of the many rooms in Sapphire’s mansion that had been turned into a makeshift hospital of some kind. And though I felt like I had been run over by a truck – repeatedly – I was able to register that I wasn’t dead and nor was I alone.
A girl with big brown eyes that were just like mine, her skin a little darker thanks to her mixed-race father, stood about a foot away from me. Her dark brown hair had been dyed into a hideous shade of light pink, and she wore far too little clothing for my liking; a matching pleated skirt and cropped top made of a shiny sequined fabric that burned my eyes and showed off a little too much flesh I would beat a man for looking at.
She also had streaks of mascara down her cheeks, tears burning in her eyes, and a scowl deep enough to make me shiver even though she was seven years younger than me and had the arm strength of a toddler when she hit me.
“What the fuck, Rika? How are you here?” I coughed again, the words too much for my dry throat.
“I decided to move early for college, and spend some weeks in your city seeing pretty sights. But when I landed in the airport instead of getting a taxi, your friends called me,” my little cousin Dorika, hovered by the edge of the bed, her eyes narrowed, “and said you were maybe dying, and they sent a car to get me so you would have a nice face to wake up to. Turned out you were just faking it all along and I didn’t need to rush – you’ve been napping for days like a baby.”
Considering she had been crying, and was never the sort to shed tears, I was fairly sure it had been a close call to me dying.
Turned out the darkness had been more than just a dream.
I had almost been lost to it.
“Faking it? You think I am that good at acting?”My voice was croaky, and I had the urge to cough again as I did my best to pull myself up so I could sit instead of lying down on the far too many hospital blankets that were making me sweat.
“No.”She smirked and shrugged with the arrogance only she could pull off. “But maybe you took lessons with all your rich friends and now you have actual skills instead of being a loser.”
“Wait.”My brain took a moment to come back to reality and comprehend what she had said as she handed me a bottle of water from the side table, lid unscrewed. “My friends? Which friends?”
“The hot blonde one with the tattoos. I think he said his name was Lincoln, but honestly, I wasn’t listening to a word he said. I just enjoyed watching the way his pretty mouth moved.”She fanned herself with a dark purple cushion from the bed before she hit me with it in the arm and cursed me out for nearly dying and abandoning her.
“He’s too old for you and taken.”I gasped out when she stopped her assault and I tried not to get too happy about the fact that Lincoln had spoken to Rika, which meant he was fine, even if I didn’t know how that had occurred.
“Yeah, I know. By your girlfriend apparently…”Her brows waggled. “It was funny watching people explain things to me. Then I told your parents to be spiteful, and it was even more fun seeing their brains explode. I was fairly sure your mom wanted to shoot you for not telling her that your new girlfriend was part of a giant harem and that she was a billionaire gangster.”
Once more I wanted to laugh even though I couldn’t. Though that desire was quickly squashed by my heart almost overflowing with emotion and far too much information for a man barely able to comprehend his own name.
“I can’t believe you tried to get me into trouble, you little bitch.”I coughed again. “They knew I was dating Saph, but I didn’t think they needed to know the rest, or that she was a Montana.”
Rika shrugged. “I can’t believe you tried to die on me. That’s so fucking rude and you know I have death related trauma. Were you trying to send me back to therapy? You know last time I was like seconds away from being taken to one of those cute padded cells for a little downtime.” Her eyes rolled as I tried not to get my hopes up once more by the fact she even seemed to know about Sapphire, even if my heart did pang a little at the reminder of what my cousin had already been through in her short life.
“Who bought you here?”I asked.
“A beautiful and rich Latina lady with an ass I want to bite.”For a moment, my heart leaped once more and then, as Rika continued, it shattered again. “She said her name was Raya. She’s a fucking cougar and really cool, by the way. I don’t know why she’d be friends with you, but if you can get me in there, I will forgive you for this dying thing.”
“Again, too old for you and mildly taken. By three mafia men who look like they could eat you for breakfast.”I snorted before my face fell as panic ate up my insides again. “My friends… are they… are they all…” I wanted to ask if they had all made it back to us, but seeing as Rika had only mentioned Linc, I didn’t want to find out the truth.
If it was just Lincoln, I would be happy he was alive but heartbroken far beyond comprehension about the others.
Them dying on me wasn’t even something I could bear to think about.
“I was supposed to get someone if you woke up, but if you promise to buy me a puppy, I will tell you everything. I really want a big dog, but I don’t have a bank account yet and looking for a job is kinda hard when you’re playing nurse to a faker.”Rika whined a little, and though it was ridiculous, I nodded my head and agreed that the most unorganized and insane sort of teenager I knew was responsible enough for a puppy that I would buy.
“Good, now do you want the good news or the bad news first?”She smiled softly, but there was concern for me there, too.
There were many things I wanted to know the answers to, and far too many questions desperate on the tip of my tongue. But only two were of the most important, even far more than wanting to know if I was alright.
“Tell me about my friends and my girl.” I nodded.
“Okay,”she took a seat on the edge of my bed, linking her hand through mine as her expression turned far too dark for my liking and she used the nickname for me she only chose when things were going badly. “I’m really sorry, Koko. But-”
My ears rang.
And with each word Rika spilled, I felt another piece of my soul return to the darkness.
A darkness filled with too many corpses of people I knew.
A darkness that didn’t contain my girl.