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He glared at me. ‘I don’t want another one,’ he said. ‘But this one’s taken. By a man I call my best friend.’
‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Some best friend. You’ve got a lot of secrets for a best friend, John.’
He scoffed. ‘Most of them are yours,’ he said angrily. ‘Let’s not forget that.’
It was like he’d punched me in the face.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have called you that night.’
‘You should have called Dornan,’ John said flatly.
‘I did call Dornan,’ I snapped. ‘He was busy with his wife.’
John eyed me from the end of the bed. ‘Do you love him?’
I sighed, frustrated. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, throwing my hands in the air. ‘Yes, I do. But he’s not the person I met nine years ago. He’s scaring me. I don’t know how to help him out of this darkness he’s sinking into. It’s like poison, and I’m scared he’s going to pull me in with him.’
‘You gonna tell him about the baby?’ John asked, gesturing to my stomach.
I took a deep breath and let it out in a long whoosh. ‘I don’t know,’ I said again. ‘I don’t want to. I’m afraid of what he’ll do.’ I started to weep. ‘I just want my boy back. I just want to leave and never come back. I want to have this baby where no one will ever find her, or me, or Luis, and we can just stop being afraid.’
Oh God, how it felt to finally externalise that awful, aching longing I’d been carrying around for my Luis.
‘Her?’ John asked.
I nodded. They’d scanned me before I left the hospital after the shooting, and I was already far enough along for them to tell the sex of the baby.
‘It’s a girl,’ I said. ‘I can’t bring a little girl into this world, John. The things Emilio would do to her.’ I shook my head. ‘No. I get out or I have a termination. I can’t do this if I’m still here. But I don’t know if I have it in me to try and run. I don’t want to live every day of my life worrying about when a bullet’s going to hit me.’
John nodded, coming back to sit beside me and pulling me into his arms.
‘I’m glad you called me that night,’ he said.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
JOHN
Complete and utter carnage.
That was the only way John could describe what he was looking at. Dornan leaned against the basin in the small bathroom, irritation and fatigue competing for real estate on his face.
‘You stop in Canada on the way?’ Dornan asked.
John ignored the question. Dornan looked wild, still covered in the blood of the dead woman in the bathtub beside them.
‘You didn’t have time for a shower?’ John asked, looking his best friend up and down. Jesus, the smell of old blood in the room was overwhelming, crawling up his nostrils and burrowing in. He wanted to get the fuck out.
‘The shower was taken,’ Dornan snapped.
Mariana, who’d been explicitly told to stay in the kitchen, appeared in the doorway. Dornan stared at her, and she did the same to him. They didn’t speak.
‘We need to get her out of here,’ John said, positioning his body so that he was blocking Mariana’s line of sight to the bathtub.
At his words, Mariana stiffened. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said, and Dornan chuckled.
‘Not you,’ he said, studying his knuckle. ‘Her.’
Mariana pushed past John and laid eyes on the woman in the bathtub. John scrubbed his hand across his chin, glaring at Dornan.
