Page 110 of Make Them Bleed
“Devin,” I hear myself say, because there’s a world where you say a man’s name and he remembers he’s not a piece on a board. He blinks at me. He sways. The granite island catches him with a thud of hip and thigh, and then he slumps.
We move. Quickly.
I’m at his side in three steps, two fingers to his carotid, the skin hot, the thready flutter there and then not. He’s breathing in those wet, shallow pulls people make when their bodies are figuring out if staying is worth it.
“Juno,” I say, and I have to say her name twice to get her eyes back to me. “Look at me. You’re okay. You hear me? You’re okay.”
Her mouth opens and closes once. “I didn’t— I didn’t go— I?—”
“You defended yourself,” I say, as steady as I can make it. “He attacked you. You said stop.”
“I—” She swallows and the room goes sharp again.
I grab Devin’s phone, holding it close to his face to unlock. I hit 9-1-1. The operator answers with weary calm.
“There’s been an accident,” I say for the second time in seven days, and the universe can subpoena me for being a liar but not for this sentence. “Man stabbed. 301 Franklin Avenue, Unit 4C. He needs an ambulance now.” I don’t give a name. I don’t give mine. I end the call with a throat that feels like I swallowed knives.
“Knight,” I rasp into our comm. “EMS incoming. Get ready for lights. We have to move.”
“Copy,” he says, and there’s an edge there that saysagain?and makes me want to break my own jaw so the world doesn’t have to help.
“Render,” I say. “Camera in the hall?”
“Blind spot still holds,” he says, a second’s lag while he checks the angle. “Neighbors? One on four is watching TV with captions. Two is out. Six is a dog. You have ninety seconds.”
“Ozzy,” I say, and I’m not sure what I’m asking him to do beyond be alive with me.
“I’m at the back stair,” he says softly. “If anyone asks, I’m a DoorDash. I brought soy sauce.”
“Gage,” I say, and the name feels like a prayer. “We called. It’ll be logged.”
“I can put a pin in the system for an anonymous caller at that tower last night,” he says, calm with fangs. “It won’t erase, but it’ll make it less weird you always stumble across emergencies.”
“Arrow,” Juno says. The voice is scraping the edges of panic now. I am at her before I finish turning toward the sound.
Her hands are shaking like a vibration you can’t trace with your eyes. She looks at me and there’s a question in her face I’ve dreaded my whole life:Am I the monster?
“No,” I say out loud, in case the quiet thing in both our chests decides to answer first. “You are not.”
“We need to go,” Knight says in our ears. “Now.”
“I can’t move,” Juno whispers, throat tight.
I place her hand in mine like I’m returning property. “We called. They’re coming. We need to not be here when they do.”
For a second she doesn’t move. Then she does, like an animal hearing a flood from down the mountain. I lead her to the door and my body does exactly what it did the last time: catalogs everything it isn’t going to touch and everything it will have to answer for later and all the ways this will rearrange who we are.
The hallway is so bright. The elevator is too slow. We take the stairs and the air down there tastes like dust and the sweat of men who try to outrun their sins. Ozzy appears at the landing like a raccoon who learned to open trash bins with a charm offensive.
He looks at Juno’s face and something in him cracks, then hardens into a line that reads asI will push the world back with my hands if I have to.“This way,” he says, and we move.
Knight’s car is at the curb with the engine running. He doesn’t say a word, which is how he sayswe’ll grieve later.Render slides into the passenger seat without seeming to come from anywhere. The first siren smears the far end of the block, and the dog in 4B opens its mouth to complain about the disruption.
We’re three turns away before anyone breathes loud enough for the car to hear it. Juno stares at her hands like she could read minutes off them. I reach and she lets me. We sit with that, the way people sit with bad news they can’t yet say out loud.
“I can’t believe what I did,” she says finally, broken, furious in the way only the honest get to be.
“It was an accident, Juno,” I say, hoarse. “And if they try to pin this for something different, I’ll take the fall.”
