“No more secrets, my boy. No loose ends,” Jimmy says, looking straight at me, the message obvious. I nod, knowing what comes next. I lunge for Shoshanna, smothering her head against my chest, squeezing my arms around her ears, feeling her trembling within my protective grasp.
The Glock goes off.
Jimmy puts a bullet, point blank, between Dr Clean’s eyes. Blood paints the back wall in an elegant spray of bright red as he tumbles to the floor.
She shoves me away. The room bellows with her violent screams when she sees him. My muscles tighten painfully at the sound of it. She rushes towards his slumped corpse, dropping to her knees by his side. All I can do is watch for a moment, as she tries to understand he’s gone.
Tries to save him.
He has the perfect, wholesome appearance of a doll, skin, white, brown eyes, hollow, and lips, blushed. A tiny round hole between his brows leaks small tracks of blood down his lifeless face. The rest, I know, is spilling from a crater in the back of his skull.
I grab her before she is exposed to any more bloodshed. To anymore of my world. And the laughing in my head won’t stop as I pry her from him. “Baby, baby, he’s gone. . . let him go.” She has his blood all over her, the crimson colour on her hands and thighs, and I hate it.
My soul boiling.
“No.” She sobs.
I wrestle her from the ground, drag her arms from him. She kicks and screams and claws at me. I take it all. Need it, even.
“Get her home,” Jimmy order and heat strikes my temples as I flash him a murderous look that in any other situation I would mask. “This is a nice neighbourhood,” he says. “Se?We don’t need to wake anyone.”
I see red.
See it.
Blood.
And I can’t do a thing about it. With that, Jimmy leaves the lounge and the body now bathing in a red pool. I don’t care that Jimmy killed the fucking doctor. Hell, I wanted to do it myself. But. . . her pain. Her cries. . .
My body vibrates with venomous rage.
You’ll kill him, Bronson.
Words break from her, but they are ravished by her cries and groans. I throw her over my shoulder. As though she is stalling, caught in a perpetual state of frenzy, of despair, she keeps fighting me all the way to the RV.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I say, throwing her on the bed, before storming out and locking the door on her, enclosing her screams. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
Bronson
Seventeen years old.
Restingmy elbows on either side of her hips, I walk my newly tattooed fingers from her pubic-line up to her navel, circling the cute little hole. She breathes through her palms, stressing out about stuff that doesn’t really fucking matter. Stuff we can sort out.
Shifting, I rest my head on her belly, pressing my ear against her skin.
I can hear sloshing.
That’s what he’ll hear too.
Or she. . .
Nah. . . it’s definitely a boy. Butchers don’t have daughters. I knew she was going to have my babies the moment we met, and now here she is. . . having my baby.
My baby is having my baby.
I grin, feeling my whole fucking world shift and tilt and change for them, feeling my heart pulse for them, my existence now. . . all aboutthem.
I love you so much, Shoshanna.