A broken, incredulous laugh escapes me. “Look, I know I fucked up by letting you go to jail, and maybe I even fucked up by choosing Lennox, but that was my mistake to make. This… This is yours. You just showed up and destroyed my entire life in a matter of hours. I can’t get married. My dress is ruined. My body is ruined. My engagement is ruined. So I guess you got what you wanted. You ruined every single thing I have, Maddox. I wish you’d kept going in there. I wish you’d held onto my neck just a little longer. Because I’d rather be dead than here.”
A tear rolls down my cheek, and Maddox just stares at me like I’m a stranger, like I’m as different now as he is. Maybe I am.
“You’d rather be dead than with me?”
“What does it matter?” I ask, dropping my head back and closing my eyes like he did earlier. “Lennox will kill me anyway. He’ll kill us both.”
“He’ll try to kill me,” Maddox says. “Not you.”
“You think he’s going to marry me now?” I ask with a bitter laugh. “The best case scenario is that he’ll kick me out and be so disgusted he won’t want anything to do with me. I’ll sleep in the break room at work a while, and if they don’t catch me, I’ll save up enough to get a shitty car to sleep in and maybe someday, have enough for an apartment. And that’s thebestthat could happen.”
“Did you not hear what I said to you in there?” he asks, nodding to the phone booth.
I just shake my head. “How can we go back from this, Maddox? There’s no way back.”
“There’s a way forward.”
He stands and takes my hand, pulling me up. He doesn’t let go as we walk back to the tattoo parlor, where his car is parked.
“Stay here,” he says. “I have a little business to take care of inside.”
He walks away without a word, knowing I’m beaten, that I won’t run. I stand next to the car a minute, and then I walk toward the shop as if in a trance. Thunder rumbles low overhead, rolling across the sky with my footsteps on the pavement. It seems fitting that it’s going to rain on my wedding day. It can’t ruin it more than Maddox already has. He didn’t just come to collect. He brought something to give back—destruction and disaster, tears and pain. His love is a prison, a curse. Even if I manage to hold on until it’s over, until he’s done with me, I’ll never truly recover.
I know I don’t want to see what he’s doing, but I can’t stop myself. When I get to the glass door, Maddox is holding a gun to the back of the guy’s head while he writes something on a piece of paper. Maddox says something, and the guy kneels, his hands behind his head. He’s crying and shaking.
He’s paying.
Paying for crossing a gangster. For trying to help me escape.
I reach for the door handle, a cry lodging in my throat.
I jump when the shot rings out, a loud pop inside the shop. The man falls forward.
I clamp a hand over my mouth, swallowing the scream, terror racing from my heart and along my limbs.
Maddox tucks his gun into the back of his pants, folds the paper, and slips it into his wallet. He tugs on the t-shirt he had me hold over myself, ignoring the bloody spots, and picks up the phone on the desk. After making a call, he talks for a few minutes and then hangs up. He steps over the body like it’s nothing and walks out the door.
I’m frozen to the spot, a tree that may never be uprooted again.
“I told you to wait in the car,” he says, his voice completely flat and devoid of emotion as he passes me. He climbs into the car and starts the engine. I stare at the body lying face down on the floor, blood spreading slowly around it. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t run, he’d have left him alive.
I don’t move until Maddox drives up right beside me. He hops out of the car, picks me up, and tucks me into the passenger seat, buckling me in before returning to the driver’s side.
We drive away without a word.
“Why’d you do that?” I ask at last, surprised that my voice comes out as empty as his.
“He saw your pussy,” he says. “I don’t want a man alive who’s seen you like I have.”
“They’ll find him,” I say. “You’ll be arrested.”
“No, I won’t,” he says. “I called a cleanup crew. He signed the shop over to me before he died. It’s mine now, and no one will ever know what happened there. Just us.”
“Us,” I echo, watching clouds roil in the sky overhead. I wonder how many times he’s done this. How he lives with himself. I guess I know the answer to that.
“You’re pretty chill, considering,” he says. “I went loco the first time I saw a man die.”
“When was that?”