He nods. “Bring her. I’ve got our girl,” he tells me before he rushes after them.
“Are you okay?” A paramedic who remained behind approaches Chiara, assessing her.
She nods, and I take a closer look. Other than a bruised lip, she seems physically all right, but her eyes tell a different story.
“Come on,” I mutter, wrapping an arm around her. “We’ll head to the hospital and get you checked out too.”
It’s not until we are out of the basement that she starts to shake. “She stabbed him, and he shot her,” she murmurs, and I glance down at her, realizing this will haunt her for a long time. As we exit the building, her eyes fill with tears again as she whispers, “She was ready to die for me.”
I stop her next to our police car, with my hands on her shoulders, turning her to me and bending down to look into her eyes. “After all that’s happened,that’swhat surprises you?” I ask. “I could have told you that Carolina would die for you the day I picked your underage-drinking ass up from that house party. Now get in. I need to get to my girl,” I command, letting go of her and noticing that I left bloody handprints on her.
Oh well.
I open the car door for her. “And call Xander, will you?”
FIFTY
We areall sitting around Lina’s hospital bed. Her men are beside her, clutching her hands and feet, while Sophia, Chiara, and I are on stools against the wall. Both of them are holding one of my hands too.
I don’t know who is giving strength to whom right now because I try to give as much as I get. But it is hard.
My Mary died just like that. Hurt in a hospital room, surrounded by her loved ones. All of them were there to hold her hands and pray for her, me, front and center. But it did nothing for her. She still left me. Left me alone in this godforsaken world.
In this numbness.
First, there was grief and anger, all-consuming anger. But after those feelings left me, the only thing I was and could be was numb. It felt like an endless void, consuming every inch of happiness left.
Until she found me.
I smile to myself, thinking back to the day nearly five years ago when I sat in my usual space, eyes closed and head leaning against the brick wall, waiting for another night to finally end.
I don’t like the nights.
They are cold.
Each one darker than the last.
She came out of nowhere, sat next to me, and opened a burger package, starting to eat. I hadn’t eaten anything for days, not seeing the point in it anymore, hoping to get too weak to take this life any longer. But the smell of the burger made my stomach growl, and somehow, I got hungry for the first time in a while.
It was almost as if my senses remembered how to feel.
She didn’t even look my way when she pulled out a second burger from her backpack and extended it to me. I looked down at the burger packet in her hand and back at her, hesitating.
“Take it,” she said around a mouthful.
I did, and she went back to eating hers. When I opened the package, I let the smell drift in my nose and nearly drooled.
“Thank you,” I said, but she ignored me.
When we both finished eating, she sat there for a while and took deep breaths, neither of us saying a word. I looked at her more closely and saw that the kid was maybe sixteen or seventeen, and her eyes were rimmed red. She radiated the same despair I was feeling a long while ago.
“Howard,” I said, letting my head fall back to the concrete wall again.
“Carolina,” she replied softly before she stood up and took her backpack. “See you tomorrow.”
And with those three words, she gave me my life back.
Something to look forward to.
