Chapter 37
In Death, I Am Reborn
Nicholas hits the ground hard.
It vibrates off my skin, the ringing from the shot. I feel it in my ears, everything echoing loudly. I can’t hear anything outside of that echo. The world spins fast around me—the pressure destabilizing—pushing me into a tunnel, toward the only thing that matters: Nicholas on the ground, bleeding.
I drop to the floor, so I can study him. So I can ascertain where exactly he was hit and how to quickly help.
He is looking up at me, stunned but conscious. My hands cup his head, which is clean, unbuttoning his suit jacket, palming his chest. Which is when I see the red spreading out near his neck, coming from the top of his shoulder.
I rip open his shirt and reach for a napkin. A cloth napkin. I hold it against the top of his shoulder and apply pressure.
“You’re okay,” I say.
It’s a statement more than a question because it won’t stop coming at me—how much I need it to be true.
I pull the napkin away and look at the wound. There doesn’t seem to be a bullet lodged there. The skin cut through. Just a slick and awful graze. And still blood colors the napkin, sticks hard to all my fingers.
Nicholas looks up at Frank. “Are you insane?” he asks.
Frank is standing over Nicholas and me, the gun still in his hand. It’s down by his side, but still in his hand. Still cocked.
“You two walk in here speaking about mutually assured self-destruction, but I’m the insane one?”
This is when I stand up. And, with everything I’ve got, I turn to face Frank, holding on to his gaze. Not cowering. Not cowering even with that gun still cocked. Quinn and Teddy standing by their father, the security team ready to follow their boss’s cue.
I look at Teddy for just a moment, which is all the time he deserves, Nicholas starting to rise to his feet. He lets out a grunt, quick and guttural—holding tight to that shoulder. But he starts to rise all the same.
He winces—the pain visible on his face—but he fights through it. He fights through the tear in his shoulder, ripping through his skin.
“That’s the wrong way to look at this,” Nicholas says.
“What’s the right way?”
“Everything on that tablet never leaves that tablet. You know that’s true. It’s never left that tablet, even to my own detriment,” he says. “As long as nothing happens to my family, it never will.”
Frank moves forward, helping Nicholas the rest of the way up, as though he wasn’t the one who just shot him. As though he doesn’t still have the gun in his hand, firmly cocked, should he decide to use it again.
“That includes nothing intentional, of course…” Nicholas continues. “But nothing unintentional either. Not even an accident. A plane accident. A boat. Anyone in my family gets touched in any way and there is another party that will deploy it.”
“We don’t control a fucking plane,” Teddy says.
“Then I guess you’d better pray,” I say.
Teddy shakes his head, agitated. And disbelieving. But he stays silent. He stays silent because what is there to say? He and his sister created this situation. The only question now is how he gets out of it.
Frank moves in closer to Nicholas.
“This is why you don’t trust someone with everything,” Frank says.
“I guess you could say we both learned that.”
Frank nods, offers a small smile. It should make me more nervous that Frank is standing so close to Nicholas: the gun still by his side, the security guards with their hands on their pockets.
But something in how Frank is watching Nicholas makes me calmer.
I slow down—my breathing, my heart—and let myself know it.
The graze wasn’t an accident. If Frank wanted to kill him, he could have. He wanted to do something else.
“I think it’s time, Nick,” Frank says. “For that minute alone.”