Page 43 of Stolen Sin

The scene hits me hard. The front room is a fucking mess of torn-apart tables and splintered wood. The walls are riddled with holes.

And blood’s on the floor. Rachel’s blood, and a lot of it.

“Hold still,” I bark at her, rushing over and helping her down to the floor, cradling her in my lap. “Ethan, call an ambulance! Call them the fuck now!” I don’t know if he can hear me. My head’s a pounding wreck as I check Rachel over for wounds.

Two gunshots. One in the arm, the other in the chest. Not her heart, thank god, or else she’d be dead. But I need to stop the bleeding.

I rip off my shirt and use the fabric to plug the hole. It doesn’t do much, and the girl’s face is pale, her lips moving. “Help,” she whispers. “Please, help.” She’s barely moving, and that’s a bad sign.

This can’t be happening. This is Emily’s friend, someone she’s close to, and she got shot because of my fucking war with Santoro. I never wanted this to get anywhere near my wife, and now a person she cares about is bleeding out in my fucking lap. This is a nightmare, an absolute nightmare, and a mixture of rage and horror ring through my body.

“Ethan!” I shout, and the manager appears with his phone in his hand, already talking to the emergency dispatcher.

I’m going to kill Santoro. I’m going to hunt him down and murder him with my bare hands for hurting this girl. If she dies and Emily ends up crying at her funeral, I am going to tear this goddamn city to shreds hunting down every last member of the Santoro organization, and I am going to make sure they suffer.

“I got you,” I whisper to her quietly. I ask her questions, lame stuff, about movies and TV shows, shit to keep her talking. Her answers get weaker and weaker as time rolls past.

The ambulance takes forever. It’s probably less than ten minutes, but it’s an eternity. I keep whispering to Rachel, speaking to her in a low voice, keeping her cradled in my arms. “You’re okay. You’re okay. I got you. When this is over, you’re coming over to my house. You can have dinner with me and Emily. Did you know we got married?” I maintain pressure on the wound. I do everything I fucking can, but she’s so pale, so damn clammy, and her eyes keep fluttering open and closed.

“Married?” She grins for a beat but it turns into a pained grimace. “Thought she disappeared.”

“I’ve been keeping her to myself.”

Her eyelids flutter. “Lucky girl,” she murmurs, voice slurring.

“Don’t pass out,” I warn her. Fuck, this can’t be happening. Not this girl. Not this fucking girl. Of all the people in this damn city, not one of the few people my wife really cares about. Not now. “Don’t you dare do it.”

“Tired,” she says and sucks in a deep breath. “Wanna sleep.”

The EMTs arrive a couple minutes later, but by the time they roll her onto the stretcher, she’s not moving anymore.

Chapter 25

Emily

Rachel’s funeral is on a Wednesday. Birds sing high in the oak trees overlooking the shady burial plot as her parents stand near the casket, her mother sobbing into her stoic father’s shoulder. I didn’t know she had so many friends—there must be fifty or a hundred people crowded around the cemetery. Danny’s wearing a good suit, his head bowed, his eyes red-rimmed. A part of me is angry that he’s here, that asshole was never good to Rachel when she was alive, but I don’t get to monopolize loss. He’s going to grieve too. He’s got his own demons and his own questions to answer.

I feel like I’m moving in fits and starts. Time slows to a syrupy crawl then jolts forward. One moment, I’m listening to the priest, the next Rachel’s casket is in the ground, then I’m standing stiffly as Simon puts his arm around my shoulders. Then we’re in the back of his car and I’m staring out the window trying to remember how I got here, and wondering where Rachel is, because for a second, I’d forgotten what happened, but of course she’s in the ground now. They buried her casket a half hour ago. I watched it sink down beneath the dirt, and my face is wet with tears that I don’t recall crying, and then we’re in the oasis again.

None of this makes sense. I don’t know how Rachel’s gone. She’d been so alive, so loud and excited, with a thousand different dreams. One day she came in talking about going back to nursing school. The next she wanted to become a paralegal. There was the bartending phase, the beauty school, the traveling salesman, teaching English overseas. She wanted to marry Danny and pump out his babies. She wanted to give them alliterative names: John, Jane, Jackson, Jessica. I’ll never sit outside with her and drink a Diet Coke while she smokes a cigarette and gossips about the other servers ever again. I’ll never laugh until I cry over some absurd story, some impossible situation she got herself in over the weekend, like the time she stole a traffic cone and tried to bring it home on the subway only for a cop to yell at her and make her take it all the way back to the worksite. She had a million stories, and they died with her.

Simon leads me into the house, sits me down on the couch, and brings me a glass of wine. I take long sips and stare at the far wall, trying to come to grips with my friend’s death and finding it impossible. She was too young. She was too alive.

“You know what I keep thinking about?” I don’t look at my husband as I speak. I should hate him for what happened, but I don’t. There’s just a cold numbness where my rage used to be. “If I hadn’t married you, I would’ve been there that night. We always closed together.”

He sits next to me, his knee touching mine. “You can’t think that way.”

“But it’s true. If we hadn’t gotten married, I would’ve been there, and maybe it would’ve been me instead of her.”

He takes my hand and squeezes it. I look at him, wondering how a creature like my husband could possibly care how a tiny, insignificant little speck of dust like me feels. And yet his face is etched in pain. It’s a livid mural of agony.

“Don’t you dare start saying you blame yourself for what happened.” His voice is hard, almost husky. It’s dripping with emotion.

“I could’ve helped. If I’d been there?—”

“None of this is your fault.” He looks angry, and I don’t understand why. I try to pull my hand away, but he doesn’t release me. “This happened because of me.”

“I know that,” I say, speaking softly, because it’s true. On some level, I know this happened because of him. But from what I heard, he tried to save her, he did everything he possibly could to keep her alive, and it still wasn’t enough.

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