Page 12 of The Rest of the Story
And maybe I still could.
Owen gave me a hug, and then left me to stare at the pavement and kick rocks as I wrestled with my emotions. I thought of Shea and how he looked in the mornings, when he was waking up and starting his days with me as the first thing he saw. How he could find me through any crowd, always with a smile saved just for me, and how his heart moved mine like a magnet, drawing me in, stronger and stronger and stronger, until we fused together forever.
I thought of Brody, of all the words he’d said to Hailey that morning. Not hearing wasn’t the same as not feeling. What he’d said, about how and why he’d wanted to die, was etched into my bones.
Then I turned and walked inside, strode across the lobby, and took the elevator to the seventh floor.
Shea’s room was on the fifth.
Coates was on the seventh.
A little perusal of the nurses’ station, a look-see through some paperwork, and a wander of the halls during the afternoon had clued me in on where Coates was shackled. The hospital had posted a security guard outside his room, and there aren’t many of those hanging around hospital hallways day and night. I wasn’t Rambo on my recon mission. Finding him was easy.
Waiting for the guard to go for a cup of coffee and flirt with one of the nurses was even easier.
I slipped into Coates’ hospital room unseen and stood at the foot of his bed.
He looked like shit. Like a skeleton that had pulled on old skin, but the skin was a little bit dead. He was gray, except where he was cut and bruised and scabbed, and his hair was shaved, with uneven patches and too-short nicks gouged into his scalp. He was so thin he looked like he was starving. He’d scraped off half his face and lost an eye going through that windshield. What was left was an eldritch horror show, Frankenstein stitches roaming all over his mangled flesh.
But his hands. His hands were still long and strong, and I imagined them closing around Brody’s throat, tightening, choking Brody, Brody scratching at his wrists, clawing at those fingers, trying to free himself—
Coates stared me down, his one remaining eye dark and flat and empty. They say psychopaths have no souls, that there’s something wrong with their eyes when you get a look beyond their masks. I believed it. I believed every word. There was nothing there, nothing at all, when I looked into Coates.
“You,” he croaked. If he looked like a corpse, he sounded like one, too. “You think you can waltz into my team, in my city, and take what belongs to me?” His lips pulled back, something primal, something that, to him, was probably a grin. “Showed you, didn’t I?”
Sometime after Kathy had thrown him out of the rink and out of the organization, Isaac Coates had lost the guardrails that held him to his life. With nothing to dominate and nothing to control, he’d gone free floating through his psychopathy, chasing drugs and stimulants and beating sex workers bloody to make him feel alive. The law caught up with him in Sioux Falls, and he’d ended up behind bars, forced to face with what had become of his life. When he looked up, thirty brutally-sober days later, he’d found a city that had forgotten him, a team riding high on success that he’d never tasted, and me, holding his former captaincy and leading the team that had been his punching bag for years.
What was a psychopath to do?
Blame someone else for losing it all, of course, then seek revenge on the person they held most responsible: me. I’d taken what he loved—not the team, or the players individually, but his power, his control, and his domination—and so he was going to take away what I loved: our bond, our team, our strength. The city’s love for us. And Shea, my Shea. He’d tried to kill Shea.
My mind ran white-hot, and deep inside me, pounding in my darkest blood, I imagined it: ripping out his IV and strangling him with it, shoving a pillow over his face and holding it down, wrapping my hands around his throat the same way he’d done to Brody andsqueezing. When it was over, I’d drag half of his corpse to Shea and the other half to Brody, leave his carcass at their feet and tell them the monster was gone, that all of the evil was banished from their world. I could feel it, see it, even, so vividly: his dark eye slackening, his frail body giving out, shuddering on a last, broken breath. Bones snapping—
And then, it all vanished, so suddenly, so completely. I stumbled, grabbed the foot of his hospital bed, steadied myself as I dragged in a breath through clenched teeth.
My father would have killed me if he’d won our fight in the hallway. He would have killed me, and then he would have killed my mother, I knew that. I knew it hard, and I’d lived with that truth like it was a cold spot in my soul, staining all the years of my life.
Coates was a pitiful, pathetic sack of shit. He hurt people, badly, people I loved and cherished. He’d broken lives, and he’d enjoyed doing it. It would be so easy to end Coates, remove him from the world,takefrom him like he took from so many others, but—
But I didn’t kill my father when I was fifteen, even though I could have, and I didn’t kill Coates that morning on the ice, even though, maybe, I should have.
That wasn’t me.
“Enjoy prison,” I said. “I’m going to make sure you’re there for the rest of your fucking life. And then, I’m going to make sure that everyone forgets your name forever.”
I turned my back on him and headed for the door. I was walking away. The people I loved needed more of me than what I could do inside this room.
It’s a big thing to recognize inside yourself that there are lines you will not cross, and that even if someone can push you hard up to the edge, you won’t go over.
Coates sputtered, and he tried to come at me for that last bit. He was cuffed to the bed, and in the shape he was in, he couldn’t fight a balled-up Kleenex. He was gasping, cursing my name, croaking as he told me to go to hell. Down the hall, one of the nurses looked like she was taking her sweet time to answer his bedside alarm.
When I got back to Shea’s room, he and Brody were huddled together and watching YouTube videos of hockey clips on Brody’s phone, both of them giggling, both of their eyes bright. Shea had the puffy, swollen look he got after he’d been crying, but his cheeks were dry, and he gave me a beautiful, diamond-bright smile. Owen and Hazel and John and Amelia all looked like they could breathe for the first time in two days.
I wrapped Shea up as I perched on the side of his bed, then reached for Brody and ruffled his hair. “What are we watching?”
“Best hockey fails compilation vids,” Brody answered. “Bro, they’re ridiculous. This one guy drops his gloves and totally eats a banana peel, goes right onto his ass before he even throws a punch.” He rewound, pressed Play. Grinned that goofy Brody grin, the one that stole our hearts. “Check it out, Dad.”
I dropped a kiss to Shea’s hair and nuzzled his forehead. He found my hand, threaded our fingers together, and leaned into my side.
