I squat down and slowly reach out a hand. He immediately steps forward.
“You’re not so bad, huh?” I mumble as I give him a tentative scratch between the ears.
Bruiser’s face turns to one of contentment, his tail wagging wildly.
“Gees, you’re not as scary as you make yourselves look,” I whisper. “I kind of get Caden’s insistence on not feeding Sarge now.”
Bruiser tilts his head, and I get the feeling he understands. It makes me smile at him.
This moment of quiet acceptance between animal and human is shattered across the room as the front doors burst open and raucous chaos fills the space.
Fiz is carrying an unconscious Caden in his arms like a child. My body jerks upright. Bruiser runs up to Sarge and Bob, who run inside barking like rabid beasts.
“Get Maggie!” Fiz yells at me.
Everything absorbs into my brain at once. The unhinged terror on Fiz’s usually smug, pretty face. The blood that’s coating his clothes. The limp body of Caden, who’s also smothered in blood, his head lolling back over his best friend’s arm. Sarge is going nuts, jumping in circles around Fiz’s legs as he marches Caden over to the dining table, which is making the other two dogs go nuts too.
The combination of barking and the roaring of my blood is rattling my brain.
“Are you fucking deaf?!” Fiz screams at me. “Get fucking Maggie, now!”
“She’s – she’s not here,” I stutter.
“Then get Alfie!” Fiz places Caden on the table as gently as possible, but his body just flops down, his head landing with a thump that reverberates through me.
“He’s not here either.”
Fiz whips his eyes up at me. I see his features clearly for the first time. His eyes are red raw, like he’s been crying. Smears of blood cover his dark skin. “Then you help me!” Fiz turns back to his friend and starts ripping his clothes off.
Don’t,the darkness says,let him die.
I don’t move.
Fiz rips Caden’s shirt apart, the fabric falling limply over his shoulders. There’s a towel that had been placed under it, whatever colour it was, it’s now dark red and dripping.
Fiz looks back at me again. “Get your fucking ass over here, I need you!”
“No.”
This makes him freeze. A darkness sweeping over him that I’ve only ever seen on Caden.
He marches over to me, a raging bull to a flag. He grabs me by the throat and says, deathly quiet, “You are going to help me save his life or I will make sure the rest of yours is a living fucking hell.”
“It already is.” I hiss. “Let the cunt die.”
A heartbeat later, I’m looking down the barrel of a gun. “I will do it, Elodie,” he says with deadly calm. “Fuck a marriage, fuck a contract. If you let my best friend die today I will fucking end you.”
It’s funny. How much you want to face death until you’re actually staring death in the face. It’s not just the promise of dying that makes me move towards Caden. It’s the flicker in Fiz’s black eyes that displays more than just the usual soulless, callous asshole. Fear. Genuine fear. For the seconds he stands pointing a gun at me, staring down the barrel and into my eyes, he looks human for the first time. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love, and even though this prick does not deserve anything good in his life, no one deserves to bear the weight of grief. It’s worse than any torture I’ve ever known.
I take a steadying breath and move over to Caden to assess the damage. Blood’s already dripping off the sides of the table.
“What happened to him?” I gingerly lift the sopping towel from his abdomen and immediately see what happened.
“Stab wound,” Fiz says beside me.
“How long’s he been bleeding like this?”
“Only a couple minutes, the idiot pulled the knife out in the car himself.”
