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Even if it was for my own good.
Talking about that stuff while some idiot tried to get me to talk about my feelings over Play-Doh was not how my brain worked.
The gun was warm in my hands, and I clasped it tightly as I checked it over. It was loaded, heavy with bullets, and the safety was off.
I skidded away from George once more, and making sure I covered Mom, I leaned my elbows on my knees to rest them there, then pointed toward the walkway. Just in case.
A shower of Russian voices came and went, then there was Italian. I heard it. And my heart surged up and out of my chest, almost like I was in a cartoon.
“Where’s the Westie boy?”I translated, grateful and ungrateful for the fact that I understood Italian thanks to eight months there when I was seven.
I didn’t know why they called the Irish ‘Westies,’ but I’d picked up on it when a kid at school had called me it. I’d broken his nose for the insult, but the term had stuck with me.
It was how I knew the men were looking for me.
It was happening.
Somehow, I’d known they’d come for me. Where the guy I’d seen on the TV finally realized I’d seen what I had.
When he knew I was a liability.
Declan’s world was rife with danger, but I’d been born outside of it. Yet, somehow, I’d been fated to walk this path.
To take this path. One where peril and death were a part of my every day.
I tried to calm myself down, tried to stop the shake in my hands.
I’d practiced for this.
I’d practiced so much just in case they ever came for me.
Footsteps tapped on the boardwalk above our heads, but I didn’t move, I just stayed focused on the one field of vision I had—the sidewalk that led to the Aquarium.
Even as I prayed that they’d leave me alone, that they’d think we’d gone elsewhere, I knew that wasn’t in my future.
My future was blood red.
In the near distance, above the roar of the ocean and the sporadic flood of screams as bullets cascaded into the sand, I heard brakes squealing.
The cops?
They were too late to save me from myself though.
A guy walked down the sidewalk. He paused, looked over the underpass to the left, then, he twisted to the right. The second he did?
I pressed the trigger.
And my soul was awash with blood for the fourth time in my life.
* * *
AELA
When I woke up,I was in bed.
The only trouble was, I had no idea how that had happened.
I remembered being in Coney Island. Remembered eating ice cream with Shay, and I remembered—
