Page 118 of Quiet Beautiful Things

“Blake Montana?” I glance up to see Mitchell Graves, a guy I went to high school with. He does a visual sweep of the room and asks, “What the hell happened here?”

“Get an ambulance!” I shout. “She’s severely injured.”

With guns still drawn, a third officer uses his radio to dispatch an ambulance.

I lay Ellie on the couch and check her pulse again.

One of the officers puts a few fingers to Grant’s neck then shakes his head.

“Blake,” Mitchell says. “I’m sorry, but I need you to step away from her.”

“You’ll have to fucking shoot me, Mitch. I’m not leaving her.”

“That’s m-my husband,” the woman says. “I’m Tara Lucas. Ellie helped me escape.”

“Escape what ma’am?” Mitch asks.

“Escape him.” She points to the lifeless bastard on the floor. “He hurt me. He hurt me for years. Decades. And I’m not the only one.” She nods to Ellie. “He’s her birth father. He hurt her mother as well. He did this to Ellie. I tried to stop him. I couldn’tstop him.” She rambles on as I cradle Ellie in my arms, willing her to wake up. “I did it. I fired the gun. It was me.” She holds out her wrists. “You can arrest me. It’s okay. He can’t hurt me anymore.”

The officers holster their guns just as EMS arrives.

Patrick Kelsey, one of the paramedics, goes to the body on the ground first. “Not fucking him,” I bark, more acid rising from my belly at the very thought of Grant Lucas being deserving of any medical attention. “Help Ellie.”

He checks Grant’s pulse anyway, wasting precious seconds in my opinion, then he and his partner ask me to move aside. “Jesus, Blake. What the fuck happened here?”

I can’t answer, because I don’t know.

“He poured an entire pot of boiling coffee on her hands,” Tara says.

I turn and vomit at her words.

They put an oxygen mask on Ellie’s face, a collar around her neck, and load her onto a backboard. Patrick puts rolled towels under both her hands, elevating them above her heart before wrapping them in gauze.

“Will she be okay?” I crawl over and touch her hair before they lift her onto the gurney. “Please tell me she’ll be okay. Why isn’t she conscious?”

“The burns are bad, Blake. She probably passed out from the pain. She’s got a gash on her head that could be from a fall. We’ll know more after we get her to the hospital.”

“I’m going with you.”

Mitch’s strong hand clasps my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Blake. This is a homicide. We can’t let you leave until we have full statements.”

Patrick eyes my leg. “You’re injured. Let me check it out.”

“He shot me, but it’s fine. It’s Ellie I’m worried about.”

“Sit down, Montana. I’m evaluating you while the others get her loaded in the rig.” He leans down and looks right into my eyes. “Blake, I need to check your leg. Listen, I believe she’s going to be okay. There’s damage, but she can recover. There’s protocol we have to follow.” He nods at the officers. “If you try to leave, they’ll restrain you. The sooner you cooperate the sooner you can go to her.”

It takes everything I have not to plow him over and run to Ellie as her limp body is rolled into the hallway.

“Fuck!” I yell, then stomp into the kitchen, sitting on a chair as I stare at the coffee dripping off the table.He burned her fucking hands. If he weren’t already dead, I’d kill him.

“Back up folks,” I hear Mitch say in the other room. “It’s over. Go back to your apartments.”

Patrick cuts my jeans from knee to thigh. I brace myself to see a bullet hole, hoping I don’t need to have surgery that will keep me from Ellie.

“It’s a flesh wound,” he says, rolling a swab of iodine over it then securing a bandage. “You were lucky. Had it been a few inches over, it may have hit an artery. You’d be as dead as that asshole in the other room.”

Mitch interviews Tara in the second bedroom, presumably to get her away from the dead body. I can’t hear them. He does it quietly, as does Henry, the officer who’s grilling me. I suppose they want to make sure our stories match up.

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