Page 114 of Cinder
“She’s dead,” Beast says. “It was a drive-by. The syndicate out of Chicago. Your old man and my old man have gone to take care of it.”
“Fuck you,” I growl, the fear and agitation and pain all colliding inside me. “She’s not dead.”
“She is, buddy.”
“The bullet passed through her and into you,” Mom says. “She died instantly.”
I struggle to swallow but a cold ache has closed around my throat.
“She’s pregnant,” I whisper, my brain scrambling to understand what is happening.
Beside me, my mom shakes her head sadly. “I’m sorry, son.”
What do I do?
I drop my head to my chest.
I don’t know how I feel.
I’m too numb to cry.
My girlfriend.
My baby.
Both gone.
Suddenly, all the numbness inside me goes, and I feel everything. All the pain. All the rage.
I lift my head. “I want to see her.”
Beast helps me into a wheelchair,and my mom takes me downstairs to the morgue where the morgue assistant leads me over to Alice.
Her eyes are closed, and she’s still dressed in the clothes she was wearing at the park. A T-shirt with a sunflower on the front, the white fabric now stained with red. Three other people died in the park today. A Knight and his old lady, along with a club girl who’d just moved into the clubhouse with her older sister.
All of them are lying in the morgue with sheets over them waiting for the medical examiner.
Knowing I was coming, the morgue assistant has pulled the sheet down so I can see Alice for the last time.
My breath leaves me at the finality of it.
“I’ll give you some privacy,” the morgue assistant says, but I barely hear him.
All I can see is her.
All I can think about is how wrong this is.
I take her hand in mine and it’s stone cold.
Seeing her makes it all real. Feeling how cold she is breaks my heart.
They’re both gone.
I think about the beanie with the Knights of St. Boniface emblem stitched into the wool sitting in a drawer in my room at the clubhouse, and the pain that twists in my heart is like nothing I’ve ever known. Overwhelmed, I fight the wave of agony, but can’t hold back my tears. My face crumples and I let the tears fall.
I’m sorry, kid.
You were unexpected but I wanted you.
