PARTII
41
JOHNNY
Ishouldn’t be alive.
But by whatever fucking miracle, I am.
At one point, I truly believed I was dying. And that memory will forever be burned into my mind.
Claire held me in her arms, sobs rippling through her. I couldn’t get the bleeding to stop, and despite the pain and numbness taking turns assaulting me, the only thing I could think about was leaving her behind.
That alone killed me in its own way.
In what I thought was my final moment, I uttered the words I needed her to hear.
That I loved her.
It wasn’t really how I planned her birthday to go, but there was no way I was going to depart from this world without making sure she knew how I felt.
Luckily, our story didn’t end there.
At least for us, it didn’t. To almost everyone on the West Coast, I died in the street that brisk fall evening, in front of Bram’s diner.
Tragically, poetically, and randomly.
I’d be lying if I said a part of that wasn’t true. Because I did die that day. Claire and I both did. A traumatic situation will do that to a person. Break you down and mold you into another version of yourself. A darker one. One that you cannot come back from.
My shooter was never found.
The cops chalked it up to a robbery gone wrong, but there’s no denying it was Franklin’s doing.
From the moment I stepped foot into Franklin’s world, he had been searching for a way to get rid of me. He knew I wasn’t like the others. That I wasn’t corruptible enough to turn into the minion he expected of me. I was obedient, but only to an extent. My goal was always to free Billy from his grasp and then make my own way out.
I was good, he was evil.
And he knew it.
The only way to ensure I would no longer do his business any damage was to take me out completely. He started with Steve and Jared—staging their double homicide—and followed it up with my incident. Franklin cleaned his slate of the mess I made and didn’t think twice about the casualties that piled up in his wake.
Franklin is cruel and ruthless.
Getting away from him was my only chance of survival, especially now that Claire’s involved. I couldn’t risk putting her in any more danger than I already had. If anything, Franklin did me a huge fucking favor by setting the first piece in place.
I had been struggling to figure out how to make a proper exit from his clutches, and aside from it nearly killing me, it was the exact thing I needed to set everything in motion.
I put that life behind me the second the opportunity presented itself.
Josey crosses my mind from time to time. I wish I could have told him the truth. That I didn’t actually meet my demise that day. But if I had, it could have ruined the whole plan. I needed him to believe I was dead if I wanted Franklin to buy the story, too. Josey had been such a brother to me, but I couldn’t take that risk with the odds already stacked against me.
Claire played her part well, convincing everyone around her that she was grieving the loss of her boyfriend. I don’t entirely buy that her performance was fabricated, given how emotional she was throughout the entire thing. I can only imagine how horrible it was to witness everything play out from her point of view. It was as though she bottled her anger and rage toward Franklin and channeled it into what everyone saw on the outside.
Hell, she even smacked Josey, which only made the entire thing that much more realistic.
“Hey,” Claire calls out from the entrance of the bathroom.
My heart skips a beat, reminding me I am very much alive, and she is still an angel gracing me with her presence.