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“I love you,” I whisper, hating the way it seems to catch in the air and drift to her. She chokes on a sob, and just when I think she’s about to break out from Elia’s grasp, he hoists her over his shoulder and exits the same way we came in.
It’s the sound of her screams that haunt me when the bullet hits my shoulder; they keep me company as I drift off, aiming for the piping and tossing the lighter to the ground, engulfing the entirety of this nightmare in flames before I have a chance to remember that she didn’t say it back.
* * *
Juliet
Caroline tries to comfort me as we sit in the back seat of Elia’s parked town car; she wraps her arm around my shoulders and lets me cry into her dress, soaking it with my tears and staining it with our mother’s blood, still not fully dry from before.
Carter left with Liv and Orlando after checking to make sure I was okay. I’m not, but there wasn’t anything their presence would have added for me.
“She was trafficking people,” I murmur into her, unable to focus on anything else at the moment. I can’t think about whatjusthappened, don’t want to focus on the ache in my heart just yet.
My body is numb, my heart splintering with every passing second. Like someone’s reached in and injected it with a slow-acting poison, and left me here on this planet to suffer. A blackness so thick ebbs through me, tainting my insides with its vileness, making me shake.
I feel catatonic, my mind trying to disconnect from my body as it tries to cope with such monumental loss.
She smooths her hand over my hair, keeping my forehead in the crook of her neck. “We really got a raw deal in the parent department, huh?”
“Yeah.” My eyes burn, my brain struggling to catch up. I pull back to look at her, gripping my locket between my fingers. “But I got you from it. I wouldn’t change that for anything, and I’m—” A bubble in my throat cuts off the sentence, fire spreading through my esophagus as I consider how fucking lucky I’ve been all along. “I’m sorry you didn’t get quite as good of a bargain.”
She smiles, a tear rolling down her cheek, and cups my jaw between her hands. “You’re right, I got asteal.”
Fiona makes her way to our vehicle, nodding solemnly at Benito; Boyd went back with Elia to check out the damage after we heard an explosion in the basement, indicating Kieran had rescinded his deal with my mother. Ensuring my safety and preserving our town’s legacy.
Twirling a lock of hair around her finger, she shifts on her feet. “I was hoping I’d be a lot older before I’d have to bury another sibling.”
Sparks ignite in my chest, setting my soul on fire at her words, and all I want now is for the earth to swallow me whole in a completely different way than I used to.
“I told you not to believe every rumor you heard about him,” she says through a watery smile, her nose reddening with the effort it takes to suppress her own tears. “Kieran is—was, I guess—the most selfless guy on the planet. Cared too much about his loved ones, if you ask me. Loved too hard, burned too bright, and didn’t even realize it. A star like him, filled with perceived darkness and haunted by his demons, was bound to die out before his time, anyway.”
“Fiona, I’m so—”
Holding her hand up, she shakes her head softly. “Don’t apologize for his choices. He’d have done the same for me.” She shrugs, taking a step back, rapping her knuckles against the door of the vehicle. “That’s how you know it was real.”
Turning on her heel, she walks off, the sway of her hips lacking sorely as she makes her way back to the parking lot.
Another sob rips through me, and Caroline hugs me tighter.
It’s an impossible feeling, losing someone who, at some point, became threaded into the very fabric of your being. Who stole your soul, repaired it, and made sure it was returned before you even realized what he’d done.
A rock in a sea of loneliness, the first seedling of growth and understanding that spurred the beginning of your healing.
Who saw you when you needed to be seen.
How do you go back to being invisible once you know the warmth of detection?
I cry on Caroline’s shoulder until my throat is raw and scratchy and the tears dry up, spent. We sit in silence, and I appreciate that she doesn’t try to offer condolences or false security. She just holds me, lets me wallow, and it makes me wonder for the first time if maybe she gets me, too.
If maybe she has all along, and if that’s not part of what Kieran tried to show me.
And while it causes a slight stutter in my heart, an attempt at resuscitation, it’s not quite enough to bring back the dead.
Elia returns after a long, long while, hopping into the driver’s seat and rushing Benito in, his movements frantic, words foreign, as if he can’t contain his emotions and therefore can’t control what language he uses to express them.
Caroline sits forward as we peel out of the church drive, falling in behind a Jeep I don’t recognize. He floors the gas, weaving in and out of traffic, beeping at anyone that gets in his way.
“What’s going on?” Caroline asks Benito, who shrugs for a moment, staring at his crazy-eyed boss.
