Thirty-Eight
Elias
Get Up! (feat. Skrillex) – Korn
My fingers bite into the steering wheel as I weave through the streets of Bridgeport. Terror threatens to overwhelm me with the force of a fucking tsunami, but I push it down. I can’t afford to be anything other than laser-focused right now.
The city blurs around me in streaks of neon and brake lights.
Every slow-moving car, every pedestrian crossing the road, feels like a nail in the coffin on the seconds slipping through my fingers.
I’ve faced down monsters with guns pointed at my chest. I’ve lived through loss, through pain, through darkness, and felt less fear than this.
Fear sharpens my instincts and has kept me alive more times than I can count.
But this… this feels like something else entirely.
This is the sick, clawing certainty that if I don’t reach her in time, my world won’t be one worth walking.
“Gareth, I need you to fucking tell me where she is,” I grind out, gripping the steering wheel even harder, I think it might break.
Gareth sits beside me in the passenger seat, saying nothing but furiously typing on his laptop, trying to find where Kat’s cellphone last pinged. He knows better than to waste words right now. We’ve worked together for long enough that he understands the tight line I’m walking right now.
I focus on the road, willing myself not to think about the way her voice sounded, or I’ll lose the razor-thin control that I’m clinging to. I shift down a gear and speed through a red light for the second time since I got the call. The fucking call that nearly blew my soul to ash.
When she called, I was at the gym. I’ve spent the last fifty-four hours and thirty-six minutes giving her space.
I know she’s dealing with shit, and the last thing I wanted to do was push her away, but it got to me earlier today.
I was pacing all over the fucking house waiting to hear from her.
I even sent her a message before deciding it was a shitty thing to do and asked Cain to reverse it.
I was one snap decision away from showing up at The Ground and forcing her to talk to me.
So instead, I called Gareth, and we hit the gym together. Because what the fuck else was I supposed to do? The gym has been my way to decompress and get shit out of my head ever since things… changed. Push harder, lift heavier, and run faster until the noise in your head quiets down.
But when I saw her call light up my screen, I dropped everything and answered it on the first ring.
She said five words, and those five words shattered my world.
Her voice was small and weak, as if she was already halfway gone.
And then the line went quiet. I didn’t wait for reasoning to kick in.
I grabbed Gareth, and we got into the car.
“I got her! She’s at her apartment.”
I don’t hesitate. I swing the car around at the next intersection.
My tires scream against the asphalt as the car fishtails slightly before straightening.
Someone lays on their horn behind me, but I barely register it.
Nothing exists right now except the shrinking distance between Kat and me. I quickly dial Cain on the hands-free.
“Yes, boss?”
“Whatever you’re doing, drop it. Get to Kat’s apartment now.”
“I’ll be there in ten,” he responds curtly before hanging up. The switch is subtle, but I can tell when my friend has been replaced with my enforcer. And my enforcer is who I need right now.
“Traffic coming up, go left and avoid it,” Gareth says, watching the map on his laptop that’s lit up with red and green lines. We’re taking the green line.
I swing the car left onto Ninth Street and press the gas pedal as far as it will go.
The engine roars at me but I ignore it. My palms are clammy and my heart hammers in my chest as I draw nearer to her apartment.
I don’t know what I’m walking into. That’s never been a problem before—I regularly walk straight into danger without a second thought—but this is different. This is her.
Kat.
The woman who somehow managed to get under my skin without even trying. The woman who brings me to my knees. The woman who said she loved me and then disappeared into silence. The woman who I—
I stop the thought. She’ll hear it from my lips.
Her apartment looms in the distance, and an icy stillness takes over me.
My spine stiffens, and my heart slows. It’s the same calm that settles over me before a confrontation.
The same deadly focus that’s carried me through more violent nights than I can count.
But beneath it, something cold and dark forms in my chest. Because if I walk through that door and she’s already gone…
I don’t know the person I’ll become. That version of myself existed once, but I dug his grave with my own hands and swore I’d never let him out again. But I’d rip the earth open for her.
I skid to a stop outside her apartment, ignoring one of her neighbors yelling at me that I can’t park here. With everything I have, I run to her door, apprehension looming with each step I take. Gareth follows closely behind. Her door is locked.
Good girl.
I kick down the door with everything I have; the flimsy wood crashes into her entryway and scatters across the floor.
Her apartment is dark, and for a moment, I don’t see her.
My world tilts upside down when my eyes adjust to the darkness.
Kat is lying on her side with her arm outstretched in front of her and a red towel wrapped around it. No. Not red. Blood.
Her skin is pale, but her features are calm—she almost looks like she’s sleeping. If it wasn’t for the slight gray hue on her skin, I’d believe it. But I’ve watched this woman sleep enough times to know this isn’t right.
The copper smell hits me first. For a single, horrible second, my brain refuses to process what I’m seeing.
This is all wrong. Kat isn’t supposed to look like this.
She’s supposed to be rolling her eyes, giving me that stubborn smirk that makes me want to kiss her.
Not lying on the floor like a broken doll.
My body kicks into gear, and the next thing I know, I’m kneeling in front of her.
My hands tangle in her hair, which is soaked at the tips from the blood.
I turn her over and check her pulse. She’s colder than she should be.
I let out a long, shaky breath at the faint thud of her life still flowing through her veins.
Thank fuck.
My thoughts scatter in a thousand directions at once.
She fell and hit something.
Someone hurt her.
Someone broke in.
My gaze snaps to the entry points, but all doorways and windows are clear.
Gareth drops to his knees on her other side.
His hands are steady as he unwraps the towel around her wrist. We both hiss at the bloody sight.
It’s hard to tell where the blood is coming from.
It’s fucking everywhere. The metallic smell of it fills the small apartment, thick and stifling.
There’s too much of it. Far too fucking much.
“Can you fix it?” I ask, holding her cool hand in mine.
“It doesn’t look too deep, but she’s lost a lot of blood. She’ll probably need a transfusion,” he says, looking at me like he’s waiting for the go-ahead.
“Do what you can. Call Doc, and we’ll get her home.”
He sets to work, applying pressure where it’s needed while I rub my thumb over Kat’s cold jaw.
Every instinct I have screams at me to fix this.
To do something other than kneel here uselessly while Kat bleeds on the floor.
But Gareth is better at this than I am. There’s no one I trust more to patch her up.
Gareth has patched me up far too many times.
So I force myself to stay still, no matter how unnatural it feels.
I push her hair away from her face, tracing my thumb over her temple.
Her face is one of calm, blissfully unaware of the storm raging around her.
She looks peaceful, like she’s in a deep, dreamless sleep.
But her skin is too pale. Her full lips have lost their rosy shine and are now dull and blue.
Her head lolls slightly in my hand as I shift her, strands of her hair sticking to the blood on the floor.
Every second she stays unconscious feels like a ticking bomb in my chest.
“I’m so fucking sorry, little rebel. Please stay with me,” I whisper into her hand, willing my voice to be carried to wherever her mind is right now.
I should have been here. I should have pushed harder.
Should have ignored her insistence on space and forced her to talk to me like I always fucking do.
If she were anyone else, I’d have inserted myself, demanded conversation.
But because it’s her, I had to play the fucking good guy.
If I hadn’t, maybe she wouldn’t be lying here bleeding out on the floor.
The sound of a motorcycle outside breaks the tense silence, and Cain follows in shortly after.
“Fuck,” he says, standing in the doorway, pulling off his motorcycle helmet.
“Bring up the building’s security footage and fucking find out what happened here,” I order. He gives a curt nod and turns away, his phone against his ear.
She wouldn’t have done this without a reason.
She’s not reckless, or careless with her life.
Something must have pushed her to this. And whoever—or whatever—that something is…
I’m going to tear it apart. There are a million fucking things I want to say to her, but my mouth goes dry, words shriveling up with it.
Why couldn’t I tell her? Why did it take hearing the words through a dying phone call to realize how badly I needed her to hear them back?
“Doc’s on the way, he’ll meet us there,” Gareth says, holding his belt around her forearm with one hand and a fresh tea towel over the wounds with the other.
“Grab the cat and meet me in the car, we’re going home.”
Standing up, I pick her up and carry her to the car.
She feels wrong in my arms. Too fragile, her breathing shallow as I bundle her into the car and place her head on my lap.
Her blood stains my hands, my shirt, the leather, everywhere.
But I don’t even care. All that matters is the faint rise and fall of her chest beneath my palm.
I push back her blood-streaked hair and lean down, giving her cold forehead a small kiss. “I love you too, little rebel. Come back to me.”