Page 2 of Whips and Chains
The Toby who had just sacrificed himself so I could live.
“What did you do?” Tears blurred my vision, but I could do nothing to wipe them. I needed my hands for the desperate bid to save my best friend’s life.
Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, and he tried to speak, but no sound came out. Just gurgles while he choked on his own blood.
I sobbed harder. His life was slipping away in the blood draining from a gash too deep for me to stem.
Anger suddenly coursed through me, powered by adrenaline. I shook my head at him. “You are not dying here tonight, Toby Horton. You hear me? I won’t allow it! You’re going to hold on until help comes and then you’ll get all fixed up and we’ll be back on that couch watching doctors fall in love until we’re old and gray.”
My shouts echoed around the empty warehouse.
But no matter how hard I pressed at his neck, no matter how much I willed him to hold on, I could see the inevitable.
This wound was going to kill him long before anyone would find us. There was no help for me to get. Our phones were useless, and the warehouse doors were locked until one of us died.
A blazing anger for the psychopath watching us roared inside me. But I pushed it away, knowing that pain and fear and resentment would have to wait.
Because my best friend was dying right in front of me. And all I could do now was comfort him.
Tears rolled down my cheeks. “Did I ever tell you the first moment I realized you were the best friend I was ever going to know?” I tried to smile at him reassuringly.
He stared up at me, eyes wide with fear, hands fluttering and jerking as he struggled uselessly. “It was the day you brought me one of your jackets. We were maybe sixteen, and I’d outgrown the one I’d had, and my foster parents had refused to buy me another. They kept insisting they weren’t going to buy me more clothes if I just kept getting fatter and I would have to lose weight instead. So I’d been going to school in layered long-sleeve shirts through most of the winter. I don’t think anyone else noticed. Or maybe they had and assumed the fat girl was always hot and didn’t need anything warm.”
I removed one hand from the gash on his neck because I knew it wasn’t really doing any good. Instead, I brushed his hair off his sweaty forehead, ignoring the stripe of blood it left across his brow. “But not you. You noticed and without being asked, you helped. You brought me a jacket that was warm and so clean it smelled like heaven. You told me it was old, from the back of your closet and you never wore it anymore, so it was no big deal. But I found a receipt in the bottom of the bag you gave it to me in, and realized you’d bought it for me. It wasn’t expensive, but that shitty job you’d had at the bakery had paid so badly, it was probably months’ worth of your wages.”
One of my tears landed on his cheek. “You’d been saving up for a car. Remember the one you always talked about? That old black thing Mr. Chen down the road said you could buy from him because you spent so much time staring at it every day when we walked to school? You wanted it so bad. But you always put me first, even back then.”
And he’d done it again tonight, in the most selfless act I could have ever imagined.
He was a better person than I could have ever hoped to be. He might have been the friend who gave me shit about my favorite color being pink or my cheap taste in wine, but he was also the friend who would lay his life down on the line for me.
Literally.
Tears streamed down my face, half a lifetime of memories all featuring him flashing through my brain in a blinding display of friendship I’d been so lucky to have. I pulled his head up onto my lap, cradling him as his breaths stuttered, slowing, his end drawing near.
His lips moved, his voice barely audible.
I shook my head. “Don’t try to talk.”
But Toby, stubborn as always, ignored me and tried again.
I bent my head, bringing my ear closer to his lips so I could hear the barely whispered words.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I whispered back.
His lips moved again. I strained to listen, but I couldn’t catch his words.
The light in his eyes drained away, and his body fell limp.
It took a long moment for me to comprehend that he was gone.
A howl of pain lit up inside me, but when I opened my mouth, it wasn’t a sob or tears or even screams that came out.
It was red-hot, blinding anger.
I pushed to my feet, spinning around in a circle, glaring at the shadowy ceiling where I knew there were cameras watching every movement I made. “You happy now?” I shouted to the madman who’d set this whole thing in motion. “Are you fucking satisfied, you sick piece of shit?”
