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Regardless, with everything that was changing—the wonderful and the terrible—it was nice to know that our relationship was staying exactly the same.
Whatever the reason, we were basking in the lovely day. Granted, we had a ‘tail’, because both Karson and Jay were overprotective, vying for the most over the top alpha male award. Then again, Wren was carrying Karson’s child and hadn’t changed anything about her lifestyle, apart from making her cocktails virgins and taking prenatal vitamins.
Wren was talking about names when it happened. “Striker for a boy, and Hudson for a girl,” she smiled. “Karson has tried to veto these, of course, but his name is Karson? How can he think that he has a leg to stand on?” She shook her head as we walked out of the store.
I was smiling back at her when the world exploded.
Everything was stark. Flashing images.
Blood.
Noise.
Pain.
Screaming.
It might’ve been me screaming. Must’ve been. My hands were covered in blood. From trying to staunch the bleeding. Wren was not glowing anymore. She was pale. Lifeless.
Loud booms, loud enough for my teeth to crunch together. Glass shattering. Hearts shattering. Blood flowing through my fingers, too quickly for me to do anything.
I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Not a thing.
Then there was more noise, people trying to pull me from her, pull me from Wren. I fought them. Fought them hard. But apparently not hard enough.
Jay
He’d hoped that things would happen quietly. That he would be able sort this shit out with the Russians through discussions, with phone calls, paperwork, subtle threats. He might not have been as well established and powerful as the Mob, but he was pretty fucking powerful, and he knew there was a weakness in such long-standing power. A complacency. He was working a lot behind the scenes. Moving a lot of different parts.
Things were tense.
Dimitri’s threats had gotten more and more overt, doing things that his father never would’ve done even on the eve of war. Jay had had occasion to deal with the Pakhan. Shrewd. Dangerous. Ruthless and old school. Though he’d killed and tortured many people, had ordered the murder of many more, he stuck to a code. He believed in honor among thieves, so to speak. Jay had appreciated that and had done some work with the man after he’d killed Heller.
But Jay had established boundaries. Getting tangled up with the Mob was the surest way to die early, and his job already gave death close proximity.
Then he got the phone call.
Death was not just in close proximity. It was reaching in to his fucking chest and ripping his heart out.
Stella
No one was telling me anything.
I’d screamed at first. When the hands were on me, trying to take Wren from me. I’d screamed and screamed, then it was blank. Not black like everybody seemed to describe unconsciousness. It wasn’t dark, murky. If anything, it was pure white, stark bright nothingness. Just a blank space. After that, I was here, inhaling the sterile smell of the hospital. Cleaning products and decay. The sheets scratched against me, sounds echoing through my ears as if through water. It took me too long to get my bearings, to make sense of what had happened, to come to the horrific realization that what had happened had actually happened. It was not some gruesome dream. Not some hallucination. I wished harder than I ever had that it was the thing I’d been most afraid of. That my mother’s illness had suddenly rushed forward, that it was madness that had put me here instead of reality.
It was laughable really, how quickly, how hard I wished for my worst fear to be true, how much I longed for it.
My mouth tasted dry and cottony. My limbs screamed in pain, and my heart was in shreds in my chest. Plus, the man in front of me with the combover and ten-thousand-dollar watch was ignoring me. He’d come in after I woke up, the nurse checking my vitals, rubbing my hand with warmth and sorrow, whispering that the doctor was on his way.
If I had been able to get my bearings, I wouldn’t have even waited for this manicured and superior looking doctor to enter the room. I would’ve gotten out of this bed and torn the fucking hospital apart to get some answers.
But the sounds, the smells, the pain, most of all the scattered memories of what had happened, had me stuck to the shitty, thin mattress, unable to hold on to a clear thought and unable to get up from the bed.
“Ma’am, you need to rest,” the doctor uttered gently but almost dismissively when I’d started asking questions. There was a distance in his eyes, a distance I assumed that he needed to get through each day. There were countless sick, dead and dying.
I sat up in my bed, a small twinge radiating through my body as I did so.
