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‘Security footage,’ John hissed at the guy, who nodded, making a beeline for the building.
‘I need to see him,’ I said, my tears suddenly stopping, my weeping replaced with an absolute conviction that if I didn’t get to Dornan right now, he would die – and if he died, I wouldn’t survive. I’d already lost everything else.
Este had been shot, and I didn’t cry. I was still in shock. I didn’t understand what was happening. But nine years of missing him, his lopsided smile and the way he squeezed my hand tightly to reassure me when I was afraid, the way he held our son and promised me we’d get him back one day? I knew, nine years later, the pain of watching somebody bleed to death in front of you, the regret of not saying goodbye. Because they’re just gone, and nothing you will ever do for the rest of your existence can turn back time and make those moments appear again, those moments when you just want to say I love you. I love you.
John took my elbow again, pulling me along. He stopped short of the emergency doors and yanked me into a room with an empty bed, still messed up like someone had been sleeping there recently, an empty chair beside it. I wondered, briefly, if somebody had just died there. ‘They won’t let us in,’ John said, blocking my attempt to leave the room. His blue eyes were wild, his dark blonde hair all mussed up from his helmet. He hadn’t shaved recently, and I had to wonder what hell he had been toiling in. I mean, Dornan got the trafficking, what did John get?
Suddenly I needed to be sick. Very, very sick. I put my hand over my mouth, forcing my throat closed. I retched, but nothing came up.
I needed Dornan, and I needed him now.
‘They won’t let us in,’ John said again. I ignored him, trying to push past him.
‘Mariana!’ he yelled, taking my shoulders and shaking me. ‘Look at me! You can’t see him!’
‘Screw you!’ I said, fighting off his grip. ‘His wife will be here in ten minutes, John. His kids. Emilio. Do you think they’ll let me see him then? Do you think I’ll be allowed to go to his funeral if he fucking dies?’ I was crying again, great shuddering sobs that hurt as they bubbled up in my chest and left my body. ‘Do you think I’ll be allowed to live if he fucking dies?’
‘He’s not going to die,’ John said, with conviction. ‘He’s gonna live. I promise.’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep.’
I looked down at my hands. They were covered in blood, so much that I couldn’t even remember who it belonged to anymore. In the space of three hours I’d seen two lives end, one begin, and the person who meant more to me than anything barely holding on.
‘Fuck,’ I remembered, my hands shaking as I held them up to John. ‘I shot somebody. I killed somebody.’
John’s eyes narrowed, his eyes searching my face. ‘What?’
‘It was Allie. She shot Dornan through the window.’ I took in a ragged breath, reliving the moment all over again. The deafening blast. The way the light died in his eyes before they closed. So fast. It all happened so goddamn fast.
‘Where did she go?’ John asked, his tone dangerously calm. Too calm. I knew that tone. It was the eye of the storm.
It was hell about to be unleashed.
My skin hummed, where tiny pieces of glass were still stuck, and my feet were bleeding on the stark white of the hospital floor. My shoulder was pulsating where the bullet had nicked it. But it didn’t hurt. I was flooded with adrenalin, with the sharp sense that I had to survive. I was like a deer, eyes wide open, looking for the threat as the bullet whizzes into its body and tears it apart.
‘I shot her, but she wasn’t dead,’ I whispered, looking up at John with a mixture of dread and disbelief. ‘I put my hand over her face until she suffocated, and then I rolled her body into the marina.’
John released his grip on me and took a step back, swiping his hand across his stubbled chin.
‘You sure she was dead?’
I nodded, taking the gun from my waistband and holding it out to him. He looked around, seemingly shocked, before he shook his head and pressed my hand back to my side.
‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘You might need it.’
I nodded, replacing the gun in the hollow of my back, the metal against my skin oddly comforting as I rearranged my tank top to cover it.
‘I need to see him,’ I repeated. ‘Five minutes, John. I’ll shoot you if I have to.’
John tipped his head to the side, my threat apparently lost on him as he looked down at me. ‘No, you won’t,’ he said softly.
‘Alright, I won’t,’ I mumbled. Across the hall, I spotted a laundry cart, stacked with fresh sheets and what looked like hospital-issue scrubs.
I raised my arm and pointed. ‘Five minutes. That’s all I need.’
John turned, saw the scrubs. He sighed, his resolve crumbling before my eyes. ‘Wait here.’
He ventured cautiously into the hallway, looking around before darting over and grabbing a stack of folded green clothes. He brought them back into the room and tossed them on the bed.
