My shirt is missing. I look down and see it wadded up between my bare feet. It was once white. It’s now black and red with my blood.
A face appears over mine. “Bullet went clean through,” Georgia announces as she squints and pokes at my wound. “That’s the only kind of luck you’ve got, eh?”
I grunt something that’s either agreement or a death rattle. Hard to tell the difference at this point.
She disappears and returns with a first aid kit. She laughs bitterly when she sees me frowning at it. “When you date the kind of men I’ve dated, you learn to patch up wounds without asking questions,” she explains. She threads a needle expertly. “One of my old boyfriends was a bookie who came home bloody more often than not. Another ran numbers for people who didn’t appreciate tardiness.” She meets my eyes. “I’ve been stitching up broken men since before Eliana was born. Hang on; this bit will hurt.”
The needle bites into my flesh and I have to clamp down on the edge of the tub to stay conscious. Georgia works quickly but smoothly. I struggle not to scream.
“And this bit is going to hurt even worse,” she warns when she finishes the stitches and ties them off. She sets aside the needle and thread and reaches for a bottle of Smirnoff on the counter. “Sorry, it’s all I’ve got. Poured the rest down the sink a few weeks back.”
She pours.
I shove the dish towel she hands me between my teeth and bite down so hard I taste blood. The vodka hits the wound and sears through nerve endings I didn’t know I still had. My spine arches involuntarily. The scream stays trapped in my throat, though, muffled by terry cloth and fucking willpower.
Georgia doesn’t flinch. She packs the entry wound with hemostatic gauze, then flips me, none too gently, to do the same with the exit wound. The back side is even worse than the front. I black out and come to half a dozen times.
The bandages are next, wrapped tight around my midsection. Breathing is torture, so I try to do as little of it as possible.
When it’s done, I slump back against the wall, sweating profusely. The tub is filled half an inch thick with my blood.
“You need a real doctor,” she remarks as she settles back. “Someone who actually knows what they’re doing.”
“Not an option.”
She watches me. “I figured you’d say that. Well, would you like coffee instead?”
Laughing hurts so bad that I nearly fucking lose it. When that subsides, I can only nod weakly. “Sure. Why the fuck not?”
Georgia disappears again and returns a few minutes later with two mugs. She hands one over, then lowers herself onto the closed toilet lid across from me. She studies me over the rim of her mug with eyes that are unsettlingly like Eliana’s. Same shape, same way of seeing straight through bullshit. It’s disorienting, like looking at a ghost of the woman I love, albeit aged and worn down by decades of bad decisions and worse men.
“You’re the reason my daughter disappeared, yes?” she asks.
I nod mutely.
Georgia nods back. She’s not surprised in the least. “And the reason she stopped returning my calls?”
“That’s my fault, too.”
I brace myself for what’s inevitably about to come: screaming and accusations, the righteous fury of a mother whose daughter has been dragged into hell by a man who should have known better. I won’t fight back; I deserve every bit of it.
But Georgia doesn’t explode. She just sighs, long, tired, and hollow. “I know your type,” she says. “Charming, dangerous, and utterly convinced you know best.” She takes a sip of coffee, watching me over the rim. “I’ve loved a dozen men just like you, Bastian. They all believed their own bullshit—right up until they didn’t. And you know what? Half of them are dead or in jail, and the other half are surely close behind. So let me ask you something: What makes you any different?”
My mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
Whatdoesmake me different? I’ve told myself the same lies those men told her.This time, it’s different. I’m doing itforher. The violence is a means to an end.
Bullshit. It’s all fucking bullshit.
“I don’t know,” I say at last. “Nothing, I guess.”
Again, she simply nods, like I’m performing my part in this play exactly right. “The night Eliana’s father left,” she says, staring into her coffee like the answers are floating somewhere in the murk, “I was twenty-two, broke, terrified out of my mind, and pregnant with the child of a man who’d already moved onto someone younger.”
She sets her mug down on the edge of the tub and crosses her legs.
“I could have given her up. Some nice rich couple would’ve taken her, probably. People who actually knew what they were doing. It would’ve been the kinder thing. Instead, I kept her. Kept her, raised her… and proceeded to fuck up that child’s life in every conceivable way.”
The laugh that escapes her is hollow as a church bell.
