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Another gunshot.
A thud.
Quiet.
Slowly, Evelina opened her eyes. Her dress was soaked through with sweat, and she was shaking uncontrollably.
There, across the floor, Jerome lay on his side, clutching desperately at the knee that had been blown out by the stray bullets.
Evelina averted her gaze immediately. Brain fuzzy, she crawled out from under the table and took in the scene before her. Gerard was lying on the floor too, across the room, blood pooling beneath him. His breathing was shallow, gasping, but there. He must have also caught one of the stray gunshots.
But Evelina could not focus on Gerard. Her eyes were all for Thomas.
Seeing him there, leaning up against the doorframe of what she assumed was the bedroom, still clutching at the gunshot wound in his side, sent her panic into a new level. She hurried to his side and fell on her knees before him. “Thomas?” she pleaded. “Thomas?”
His eyes were wheeling around in his skull, as though he was trying to focus, but finding himself unable to. “Evelina,” he mouthed, no actual sound leaving his lips.
“No,” she said, shaking his shoulders. “No, Thomas, you stay with me. You cannot leave, youcan’t, not now. Not when we’ve only just found one another.”
Distantly, the part of Evelina that was simply a young woman with a young woman’s concerns—not this crazed, disheveled creature, covered in blood as the man she loved slipped toward death in her arms—realized it was true. They had only just found each other.
She’d thought they would have a lifetime.
How stupidly naïve. How had she thought herself so much worldlier and mature than her place in society would permit, just a few weeks past?
Thomas tried to say something, but again, no sound came out.
“Thomas?” Evelina prompted, begging, her throat thick with tears. She was hardly intelligible herself.
“I’m sorry,” he managed at last, as though the effort were costing every last bit of his breath. “Should’ve…shoulda trusted…”
His voice trailed off. It took a moment, but Evelina thought she understood. “You did trust me. In the end, you did, even when all the signs were pointing against it,” she said, realizing as the words left her mouth that they were true. “This afternoon, you wanted us to be together regardless of whatever turned out to be the truth, because you trustedme.”
Thomas nodded…or had he?
Evelina could not know for sure. He’d gone completely, frighteningly limp in her arms.
