Her smile.
Her belief.
Was this someone’s mother?
Their sister?
Their daughter?
Pain splintered and shook.
“You have to get up now.”
When he couldn’t, Phoenix fisted two hands in the front of his cut and hauled him to his feet.
“Fuck, man. We have to get the fuck out of here. Right fucking now.” He jostled him. “The police are coming. They’ll get her help.”
Phoenix forced him back down the hall and through the window that he’d come through, then basically dragged him through the three-foot grasses that clogged the backyard, the toes of Silas’s boots cutting through the soil.
Phoenix tossed him through a missing slat in the fence and out into the alley at the back.
Their breaths were jutted and harsh as the sound of sirens approached.
Silas suppressed a wail that threatened to rise from his soul.
“The fuck, man? You just let them go?” Phoenix wheezed it near his face, disbelief threaded into every word. “You were supposed to wait for the cue.”
But in that moment, it wasn’t about vengeance.
It was about setting something right.
Helping an innocent.
Silas didn’t know her name or her face, but he knew there were uncountable others just like her.
Pain finally broke through the disturbance, and he pressed his hand to his side. Felt the warm blood dripping free.
“You’re hit?” Phoenix’s demeanor flipped into concern.
“Yeah. I’ll be fine.”
Phoenix gave him a clipped nod, confusion woven on his expression before he helped Silas to stand.
He kept an arm around Silas’s waist as they fumbled down the alley in the direction of their bikes.
They stayed low the way they always did.
Undetected, pausing for a minute when an ambulance with its lights flashing and siren screaming sped into the neighborhood.
And he knew, standing there cloaked in a blanket of fog, listening to the sirens, that he wouldn’t take it back.
As he climbed onto his bike, wincing from the bullet lodged somewhere near the same spot where he’d been hit the night his mother had been slain, he felt something inside himself break apart and rebuild in a flash.
And he knew there was no going back.
SIXTY
BRINLEY
