Page 19 of Touch Her and Die
“He’s dead though. That couldn’t be helped.”
They both looked at their third.
“We didn’t know the hit was on you,” one of them said.
I cracked my knuckles, and I gripped the gun so hard in my hand, I half wondered if it would shatter.
“The hit wasn’t on me. It was on my girlfriend.”
They shared a look, and it was possible that even the loss of blood couldn’t have drained the color from their faces that fast.
“Yes. That’s right. Nothing is really sacred in this family. They want me married to a rich princess and Halle is in the way.”
I watched as the guy I’d stabbed pressed his hand harder to the wound. He really needed to get that looked at or he was going to look like the third. Not my problem though. I was no longer in charge. I was quitting.
“So, this is a shitty cleanup job. I’m not fucking going against you,” said the one who still was able to stand.
I rolled my neck back and forth trying to release the tension.
“I am well aware that most of you wouldn’t go against me. If I were you, I would head to a safe house and lie low until I get shit rearranged. You are either loyal to me or my uncle. And right now? I suggest you think very, very hard on that.”
The guy with the gun headed over to the dead guy and lifted him over his shoulders.
“I’ll wait for your word. We won’t go after her again. None of us will. But you know there are others that are out for the money and have no love for you.”
They gathered their shit and sirens started, off in the distance. We all needed to disappear before anything else went fucking wrong. I wouldn’t be taking a note from Halle’s playbook though. None of these guys would be losing a head to end up in my uncle’s fridge. But fuck. Something needed to change.
Change. Funny how only weeks ago I was good with the same old. I was fine with the level of control I had. Nothing inside me desired to run the family, but my uncle was doing nothing but fucking shit up.
What the fuck should I do? My heavy footfalls changed from the crunch of gravel to a silent thud as I ran through the wooded portion of the cemetery where it grew old and forgotten, towards my bike.
Moments ago, my fight or flight had been in overdrive. I’d barely made it here in time. I’d barely gotten to her, and it was only because of my brother. Well, half-brother. He was removed enough that he wasn’t touchable. He was of no threat by birth and no advantage for marriage.
Some days I wished I had his life. A life outside this fucking family that had me running to save the woman I loved.
If only my mother had remarried before me, and I was that other kid. Instead, I got to be stuck with the man that had killed his own brother.
And what a great incentive that had been to fall in fucking line and learn to be valuable. Me. I was good at this. And it was just an advantage that I craved the violence.
I nearly tripped over a half-broken headstone, sunken in and trying to pretend it was merely part of the grass. Probably like its inhabitant, now most likely back with the earth.
Why the hell had she come here? I hated this place.
Odd though, that Halle might have met her end here, and me? Fuck. What was a world without her? And for that matter, what had being a good little soldier amounted to? A shootout in a cemetery. Was this irony?
Uncle had gone too far. The one piece of heaven in my otherwise shitty life was not to be fucked with, and my uncle had done so on three counts now.
Strike one, he kidnapped her.
Strike two, he’d tried to destroy her by marrying me off.
Strike three? Well, he was lucky he was dumb. My uncle had no sense of reality. He’d used men that had more loyalty to me than they did to him. He was a psychopath and couldn’t see beyond his own delusions of grandeur.
Sirens rang out behind me. Complication after complication. This could have been so much more messy. We didn’t own every cop in the city. Yet.
I reached my bike and hopped on, getting down the dirt road before the cops had turned into the cemetery.
There was no reason to look back. Halle would be gone by now. My brother wouldn’t fail me.
