Page 5 of Caged Bird

I did.

And I said nothing.

The gunshot was deafening, sending a painful ringing through my ears.

The room around me seemed to slow down.

Eddie slumped to one side with a howl of pain, clutching the wound in his leg and swearing violently at the top of his lungs.

Grass shoved Eddie off him and skittered away, pushing back onto his feet and then taking off through the front door without looking back, gun still clutched in one hand, a brick of stolen coke in the other.

The men who’d come with him stared down at Eddie bleeding on the floor, and then at their leader, disappearing into the night like a coward.

They ran after him without a word.

Eddie’s guys turned to him for guidance, and he swore at them bitterly. “Why are you just fucking standing there! Go get my goddamn drugs!”

Spider, who was the closest thing Eddie had to a second in charge, though he would never give another man any sort of power by labeling him as such, gaped at the blood seeping from between Eddie’s fingers. “You’re bleeding!”

“No shit, Sherlock. It’s a fucking leg wound. And I’m going to be bleeding a whole lot worse if I show up to meet Guerra ten K short. Go!”

Eddie’s crew took off after Grass, more gunshots splintering through the night air and mixing with the crunching of tires spinning on loose gravel.

With them all gone, a silence fell over the room, only punctuated by Eddie’s too-fast breathing and his groan of pain. He peeled his fingers away from the bullet wound to inspect it.

Blood spurted at an alarming rate.

For all Eddie looked like a stupid man, he wasn’t.

And both of us knew that bullet wound had severed something vital in his leg. Something that was going to need a lot more than Band-Aids or even homemade stitches.

“Fawn!” he hollered, like he hadn’t even realized I was still in the room.

I stood slowly, dragging my chains across the room, the rattle as loud in my ears as the gunshot. I stood over the man who’d kidnapped me. Beat me. Raped me. Made my life a living hell for more than five years.

“Help me, you stupid bitch! What are you doing just standing there?”

The blood mesmerized me, covering Eddie’s hands. “That’s too much bleeding for a flesh wound. It hit an artery.”

Eddie glared at me between fighting to keep pressure on the wound. “Help me.”

I couldn’t stop staring. There was so much blood. I hadn’t seen that much since he’d thrown me off the stairs and I’d lain at the bottom of them for days, him thinking I was dead.

But life was cruel. If it had been kinder, I would have died that day. Instead, I’d lived long enough for him to find me and nurse me back to health.

Only for him to spend the next five years making me wish my death could have been that swift.

“Fawn! For fuck’s sake! Help me!”

I didn’t want to. I wanted him to bleed out on the floor in front of me. I hoped it hurt.

Eddie’s eyes narrowed, like he could hear the voices in my head. His voice was suddenly calm. Cruel. Full of truth. “If I die, you die with me, Fawn. You know that. Without me, there’s nobody to go buy you food. And you’re all chained up. You can’t run.”

My gaze flickered involuntarily to the stairs, where Otis hid.

Eddie laughed, the sound deep and full of evil. “You think you can send that boy out to find help for you? You have no fucking idea where you are, and neither does he. You’ve heard the wolves howling at night. If you send him out to be their meal, you’re a crueler person than I am. He’ll die in those woods, alone and scared. And you’ll die here with me, just like you were always supposed to.”

He gripped the hem of my dress and yanked it sharply, forcing me to my knees so we were eye height once more. “You’re mine, Fawn. You’ve always been mine.”

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