Chapter 1
Maeve
Not again. Not again. Not again.They are the only two words running through my mind as I hold my hand against the bullet wound on Lincoln’s shoulder. I’m fumbling with his shirt and his massive weight to see if there’s an exit wound on the other side of his body, but it’s near impossible with how violently my body is shaking. The shock hit me the second the bullet hit him, and I’m barely functioning. I didn’t think Rena would. How could she? I didn’t see it coming. She was supposed to be mad at me—take her crazy out on me.
Don’t take him, too. Please God, don’t take him, too. Sirens cut my train of thought. No exit wound, I realize. I’m wearing a flannel shirt that I shrug out of and tie above the wound currently pulsating blood. I have to straddle his body to pull the sleeves tight enough. More pressure, I think. For tourniquets to be helpful, they have to cut off the circulation. A strangled war cry echoes the room, and it’s not until after I realize it’s my own. Medics, firefighters, and police officers run up the stairs. A medic kneels on the other side of Lincoln and says something, but I can’t understand. He has his fingers against his neck as another medic brings a stretcher to transfer him onto.
Standing, I let my gaze flit around the room. They’re taking Stavros down the stairs—a sheet draped over his body.Ramona, I think. Her face is red and blotchy as she cries on the sofa, her gaze so far away, she doesn’t even look human right now. I can’t keep my focus away from Lincoln for more than a few seconds. I turn back and see them loading him onto the board. “Is he going to be okay?” it’s my voice, but I don’t recognize it.
“Ma’am. Please have a seat,” an officer says, leading me to a chair by the fireplace.
I shake my head and suck in a breath. I can’t sit. My body won’t let me. “Not until I know he’s going to be okay. He has a pulse!” They’re descending the stairs, carrying Lincoln, and it looks unstable, his body shifting unnaturally. “He has a pulse,” I say again, this time for my own benefit.
“Ma’am. We need your help. We’ve arrested one man, but we know he wasn’t here alone. Where is the person who fired the gun? Is anyone else here?”
My hands balled in fists by my side shake even harder. “I-I… don’t know. She ran. Rena. That’s her name.” I say. “Black SUV.” Terror spikes as I think about his last question. “Turner!” I call out, a strangled, harrowing plea. That’s the last word I get out before the adrenaline spikes and fully takes me out of commission. My vision blurs as my body sways, and I pass out.
* * *
“No one ever comes for her,” the girl, Jessica, hisses. “We only took her in because she had nowhere else to go. My mom doesn’t even want her.” She pauses, coughing on an inhale of her stolen cigarette. “We can’t wait to send her away. Mom felt bad when the social worker called, so she said yes.” Jessica is speaking loudly—she wants me to hear.
I’m huddled in a ball on their deck. I have a tattered copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales pressed between my knees, trying to see how hard I have to squeeze it to keep it from tumbling to the deck. She’s not telling her friends that she’s lying. She doesn’t admit that since I’ve been in the house, her stepdad leaves her alone. It’s not like I have some hero complex or anything, but I’m smart enough to rationalize what he does to me is done to her when I’m not here. What he does is bad. I tried to be her friend for the first few days, thinking if we could band together, at least we’d have each other. Jessica doesn’t want allies. Jessica wants to surround herself with people who think she is perfect. Because I know her dirty, marring secret, I didn’t make the cut. In fact, she treats me like less than the dirt on the bottom of her shoe.
“But like, why hasn’t she been adopted? She’s so old,” Jessica’s friend hisses in between drags of the cigarette.
“She’s just too… broken,” Jessica replies.
My head swims for a second or two as I digest her words. It’s not like I haven’t been called worse, no, it’s because she speaks the truth. This girl is just as broken as I am, recognizes we’re similar, but chooses to focus on how we’re different. I’m the homeless girl without anyone who cares. Jessica has a mom that cares, but she refuses to tell her what Bob does to her in the middle of the night. He threatens her. Makes her feel worthless.
The girls stomp up the deck stairs, Jessica last. “Oh, there she is,” she hisses when she spots me balled up in the corner. “Don’t talk to her,” Jessica orders her friends, pressing the cigarette out in Bob’s ashtray he keeps on the railing. Her friends, for all of their effort, still manage to wince. They feel sorry for me. God forbid if that pity was turned on their glorious leader.
I stay silent, mulling over my assessment. “Well, aren’t you gonna get out of our way, dummy?”
I’m blocking the sliding glass door. Standing quickly, I sway. The heavy book falls to the wooden planks below me and I lean from the sudden movement and pass out. It was the first time I’ve ever fainted. They had to take me to the hospital because I hit my head hard. Jessica blamed herself, but I couldn’t pinpoint why I passed out. In the end, I think I just stood up too fast. It wasn’t that Jessica was calling me out and embarrassing me, though that’s what I assumed as a kid. At the hospital, a kind nurse who was trying to hide a shiner with too much makeup, took pity on me when I told her I didn’t want to go back.
That RN never made me tell her why I didn’t want to return—she called CPS without asking questions, and I went back into the home for girls instead of the bedroom next to Bob’s. The girls there are fantastically mean, but not in the same way Jessica was. I have friends there. Ones that I can talk to without fear. Most importantly, there aren’t any Bobs at the home for girls. Just rats, cheats, and thieves. Enemies I know and can defend myself against.
When I come to, I’m in the back of an ambulance, a medic leaning over me. “Ma’am, you’re on the way to the hospital now.” Glass bottles are rattling somewhere in here and it distracts me as I come to, brain hazy, stuck in the past—the last time I fainted.
“Lincoln. Where is Lincoln? Is he okay?”
The medic pulls a face. So much for bedside manner. “I’m sorry. He didn’t make it,” he says, voice low enough to be sympathetic but loud enough that I can hear him over the accelerating engine.
A swift punch to the gut couldn’t have taken my breath away quicker. “What?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” He pauses, not meeting my eyes. “They do have one man in custody and they were tracking down the other person when we left. How are you feeling?”
How am I feeling? How am I feeling? I don’t know. It’s an out-of-body experience, like I’m floating above myself watching my world shatter once again. I slam my eyes shut so tightly I see bursts of colors and lights. Fireworks for those too fearful to enjoy actual fireworks, for the damaged and broken.
I focus on my heart. It’s beating. It’s jagged and hollow, because I’m not sure how to quantify this loss… again, but it’s beating.You can do this, Maeve. You are enough. I replay Rexy’s words from his last email. I want to ask him, what happens when I get caught in the backblast because I didn’t know surrounding myself with Lincoln also meant surrounding myself with Rena?I’m trying to shake back, Rexy. How do I shake back harder than this?
I try to sit up, but can’t. “Stay back. You hit your head. We’re almost there and we’ll get you up and going. Just a few more seconds.”
“I need to see Lincoln. Where is he?” Something I never got a chance to do with Rexy. When you don’t see a lifeless body, it’s difficult to rationalize the permanence of the absence. For me, especially.
The medic tells me he’s probably on his way to the morgue as he lifts the bed I’m on out of the ambulance and onto the pavement where there is a team waiting for me. Me. These people think I need help when Lincoln is gone. There has to be a better use of their time.
“I need to sit up.” They give me reassurance that I’m going to be fine instead. “Where the fuck is Lincoln Wilds? Sit. Me. Up.” My tone leaves little to the imagination.