CHAPTER 24
“It’s complicated. All this murder shit’s complicated. And that’s good. Because if it’s too simple you’ve got no reason to try, and if you’ve got no reason to try you don’t.”
—Not What If
Heart Eyes still doesn’t move, and it’s the not moving that’s terrifying.
The meat cleaver from before is gone and a regular Halloween-style kitchen knife has taken its place, similar to the one gripped in Wes’s hand.
Even from so far away, I can tell Heart Eyes’s grip on the handle of the blade in his left hand is loose, casual, and his right arm is behind his back, like he’s some character from a Regency-era film who’s going to confess his feelings in the rain or in a crammed tearoom.
It’s only the slight shift in where the light reflects off the blade that alludes to the fact Heart Eyes is breathing, he’s real.
Otherwise, he is dead still. The slow walk, the ramming into the bathroom wall, the meticulous pummeling of his knife into hallway guy’s stomach—it was all so active. It was something we could react to.
But this…
“You’re gonna go back to the entrance,” Wes murmurs. His voice is barely above the sound of a breath and I need to lean in to hear him, shift away from John and the way the drying blood on his shirt makes my hand stick to the material. I peel my palm away from it.
“Once you’re there, go back upstairs. You hid before, you can do it again.”
It’s rule seven all over again: don’t run up the stairs. Not to mention all three of us trying to climb them—Wes and me holding John’s weight as we do, with Heart Eyes on our tail… It’s a death trap. Then I realize what he said.
You. Not us, you.
He’s taken himself out of the equation.
“We are going to go together,” I spit back. His hero-complex shit is really getting old. I don’t know if his abs can even make up for it at this point.
I look at John. His focus is firmly on Heart Eyes, too, but his eyelids keep drooping into prolonged blinks, his breathing heavy. At some point he dropped the Midori bottle on the ground to take over trying to stop the bleeding from his wound.
“I can’t carry John by myself,” I say as Heart Eyes keeps idling at the end of the hall. “And you’re not going up against that asshole; he’s got a knife.”
“So do I,” Wes replies, taking a step away from us, turning toward Heart Eyes.
Wes brings his knife into view and there’s a moment where, still caught in the middle of the spotlight glare of the flashlight, Heart Eyes shifts on his feet. His round, pink head tilts ever so slightly to the side. Like he sees Wes, he sees the knife, and he accepts the challenge.
“You guys just have to hide until help comes,” Wes whispers. “And help is going to come, okay?”
I can’t even bring myself to shake my head, not when we don’t know what will act as the starting signal for Heart Eyes to close the distance between us.
“Not okay,” I grit out. “Not okay in the slightest.”
Wes takes another step away and it takes me to a place of such unbridled panic I almost miss it when Heart Eyes moves his arm from behind his back.
A blade—the long, broad Friday the 13th kind—slides out from behind his thigh and glints like the disco ball currently hanging over the personalized intestine heart he made for me. His shoulder dips from the weight of his weapon, and Wes freezes.
Of course he brought a machete.
Wes’s knife is as good as those corkscrews I left in the bathroom, and he knows it. That’s why he doesn’t take another step forward, why he drops the knife to his thigh again as his back straightens, and why both he and John let out heavy sighs.
Wes takes a step back and I let out a strangled exhale.
The sound makes him look over his shoulder and meet my gaze.
The expression on his face, the emotion in his eyes—it makes me irrationally, intensely angry because how dare he look at me like that when he’s just all but told me to leave him to die?
“Jamie, you need to run,” Wes says, and I don’t like the way he’s using that soft, low voice.
I had hopes we’d be alone, away from here, wearing fewer clothes and not covered in blood when I eventually heard it.
His expression is still intense, meaningful, steady, and made to make my heart ache, and again we’re in the entirely wrong context.
It’s more suited for confessing that I complete him, or that he likes me very much, just the way I am, or that if I’m a bird, he’s a bird.
It’s not the right expression for a situation involving a machete.
And I refuse to let it be the last thing I see of him.
If I’m the Final Girl, then I get the final word.
I get the final say. And I’m not ready to be alone yet.
“I’m not leaving wi—”
“We’ll slow you down.’ ’
“I’ll slow you down,” John says, and again I’m brutally reminded of the fact he’s here bleeding out against a wall while I’m making intense “I don’t know if I want to stab you myself or turn our eye fucking into real fucking” eyes at Wes.
Damn it.
“John. No. We’re—”
“Jamie, look at me.” He moves his hand from his shoulder and there’s still so much blood.
Sticky, bright, corn syrup–looking blood.
There was so much on the bathroom floor, on my hands, soaking through the sleeve of his shirt.
He’s lost too much, and it’s a miracle he’s even still upright at this point.
“It’s okay.” He lifts his gaze to mine, those steel-blue eyes, that Bill Pullman entreating stare, focused solely on me. “Everything will work out.”
“John—”
His face crumples in pain just for a second, and it’s the only indication I have of what he’s planning to do before he pushes off the wall.
I reach for him, Wes does, too, but John’s already propelling himself along the carpeted hall, using all his strength to stagger-run past the flickering gas lamps, past the curlicue frames of the antique mirrors, right into the path of Heart Eyes.
Right for the knife he holds out like he’s offering a rose on The Bachelor.
My scream cuts down the walls like razor-sharp nails on a chalkboard.
“John!”
Wes grabs me around the waist, showing just how strong he is when he pulls me into his chest and my bare feet leave the carpet.
He turns and starts running before I can see John make impact with Heart Eyes, but I can still picture it.
Vividly. The way John would throw his body into Heart Eyes, lurch over his shoulder like they were sharing an embrace in the airport arrivals gate.
I can imagine the sound of the knife going into his belly.
The force of it. I can see it so clearly, even though all I actually see is the red and gold blur of the walls as Wes runs down the corridor carrying me like oversized luggage against his chest until I can pull myself away from replaying the image of John staggering right up to the killer and just… sacrificing himself.
I wonder whether Heart Eyes knew Wes and John were the ones I liked the most tonight.
Whether he watched our dates and saw the way John made me blush or Wes made me laugh and planned it so all three of my suitors could end up here and he could cut down the other two in front of me.
Give me no choice but to choose him by default.
When Wes sets me down and I find my feet, I grab the hand he thrusts toward me and we keep running.
My pulse pounding in my ears, my breath ragged, we sprint back to the entrance of the club and head for the stairs to the mezzanine (rules be damned).
As Wes and I are taking the steps two at a time, a quiet voice breaks through the haze of fright again to remind me that John and I didn’t even get to have that drink.