Nearly Gone (25 page)

“You’re wrong,” TJ said, jerking me hard to make a point. “It’s not just about the money. It’s about making you pay! My life meant something!”
“So does Anh’s,” I cried. “So does Reece’s. So does mine! You don’t get to decide whose life is expendable!”
“Did you forget? I’m not the killer?
You
are.” TJ swung his arms around me and locked my wrists in a painful grip. With cautious precision, he forced the gun into my hand, pressing my bare fingers into place. I struggled and kicked his shins as he leveled my arm at Reece. He was too close, too big, and too strong. If he pulled the trigger, everything I’d done to save Reece would be for nothing. I could taste his resolve settling back into place.
“Eventually they’ll solve the puzzle,” TJ said, his voice barely straining as he took control of the gun. “The indirect proof. They’ll put it all together. They’ll find Anh and Whelan. Your prints on the gun. They’ll find your suicide note.”
My vision blurred with hot tears. I stared down the barrel at Reece’s body, wondering how long the drugs worked. When he would wake. Would he open his eyes only to see me pull the trigger?
“Now I’ll take from you what your father took from me. Everything.” He leaned in close, sighting over my shoulder, straight to Reece’s chest. I locked my knees and pushed back against him, straining to raise my arms. My muscles burned and shook, but his aim was dead on. His finger tightened over mine. I turned my head away from Reece, and shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see him die.
I held my breath.
“Missing something?” A deep voice cut through the darkness. “I know I am.”
TJ startled, loosening my finger on the trigger.
“Step away from the girl, drop the gun, and put your hands where I can see them.”
My breath rushed out, relief flooding through me. Emily watched, tear-streaked and wide-eyed from a few yards away.
Lonny stood behind her.
He pushed Emily forward under the white mausoleum lights, revealing the tip of the knife at her throat.
TJ tensed, hesitated, his grip uncertain. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Looks like I’m late to the party, Boswell. I came as soon as I got your message.” Lonny’s smile was wicked and terrifyingly eager. He teased a trickle of blood down Emily’s throat. She whimpered. TJ didn’t move.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time, Wiles. I said step away from Leigh and drop the gun.”
Lonny’s smile twisted and Emily cried out.
TJ’s hands shook as he released me. My knees gave out, my limbs sagging limply.
He stepped over Reece, steady and sure-footed without his brace. He raised his hand slowly in surrender, the gun still gripped in it. It was over. He couldn’t run. He’d have to kill all three of us and that wasn’t in his plan. He already had two extra bodies to deal with. His head turned to the rolls of money, uncertain. He bent, eyes fixed cautiously on Lonny while he reached for the cash.
“No.” Lonny’s sharp command froze TJ where he stood. “Boswell made you a pretty sweet deal, but I have a problem with that. See, I’m still missing something. You owe me, and I’m not feeling so generous.” His knuckles whitened around the knife.
TJ drew himself up slowly. “What do you want?”
Lonny yanked Emily’s hair back and she sobbed, tears spilling down her face.
A stab of regret unsettled me. I’d called Lonny because he was my last resort. But he hadn’t come for me. Lonny was here because my wolf had killed his girlfriend. Lonny was here for revenge.
“You couldn’t kill your own girl, but it was easy killing mine, wasn’t it?” His voice rumbled deep in his throat. “Was it easier, watching Kylie bleed out in the street after you’d killed the rest of them?” The gun shifted in TJ’s hand, his fingers curling and uncurling over the grip.
“Yeah, I get that. See, we’re alike that way. I know how it is. How that first one takes you over an edge. Makes you numb to the rest and then it’s all, hell, what’s one more?” Lonny bared his teeth and jerked Emily’s head back hard, blood trickling down her neck. “Now put. The gun. Down.”
TJ lowered his arms and Lonny relaxed by a fraction. But I knew something Lonny didn’t. TJ didn’t care about Emily anymore. She’d become expendable to him the minute he’d seen the photo of her and Vince.
I braced myself. A cold hand slipped under the hem of my jeans and gripped my ankle. A minty calm that wasn’t mine poured through me, cooling the instinct to duck or run. Confidence flowed through me and whispered “Trust me.”
TJ turned, lightning quick, and leveled the gun at my head. Even twenty feet away, it felt like a solid cold pressure against my skull, but I didn’t flinch. I stared down the barrel as he said, “You’re right. It does make it easier.”
TJ pulled the trigger.
Lonny shouted.
Something rushed at me, stealing my breath.
Pain ripped through my skull.
And my world faded to black.

It’s strange, the things you remember, but more so the things you forget. I didn’t remember the arrival of the police or the ambulances in the cemetery. I didn’t remember the handcuffs clicking shut over TJ’s and Emily’s wrists.

What I did remember was a voice. A frantic and desperate voice, calling my name over and over. A voice I could almost touch with the tip of a finger before the darkness swallowed me whole.

I awoke in an itchy hospital bed. The room was dark, curtains drawn over the window. Electronic monitors beeped near my head. The only clock in the room said it was four. Day or night, I didn’t know.

My eyes adjusted, and I saw Mom asleep in a chair at the foot of my bed.
A nurse padded into the room.
“Oh, good. You’re awake,” she whispered. She wrapped her fingers around my wrist and watched the second hand drift over the clock. Her touch was soothing, like warm herbal tea, and she smelled like baby powder. “How are you feeling?” She checked the monitors and took some notes on a clipboard.

“My head hurts.” I prodded a tender line of prickly threads in my hair.
“You’ve got quite a few stitches back there.” The nurse poured water into a foam cup and held the straw while I struggled to sit up. The effort left me nauseated and dizzy. “I’m giving you something intravenously for pain. You probably feel a little fuzzy.”
I set my head back against the pillow. The last thing I remembered was TJ’s gun. I recalled with sickening clarity the hideous expression on his face when he pulled the trigger. And the peculiar calm before everything exploded.
“Reece!” I sat up too fast. A blinding pain paralyzed me and I breathed slowly through my mouth to keep from being sick. The nurse rushed to settle me.
“Your friends are fine,” she coddled, smoothing my panic and straightening my blankets.
“But Reece?”
“They’re all fine. You just sleep now.” She rested her warm baby powder hand on mine. The pulse monitor slowed, my heart beating steadily. All fine . . . But how?
“Should I wake her?” The nurse inclined her head toward my mother. “She’s been here all day. She refused to leave you. I brought her a nicotine patch and a mild sedative to settle her nerves. She finally fell asleep about an hour ago.”
I looked at my mother more closely. She wore secondhand sweatpants, her hair in a sloppy ponytail, and my favorite hoodie draped across her like a blanket. Her naked lids were outlined in dark circles and painted with worry. She could have been anyone’s mom—a normal, tired, worried-sick mom—but she was mine.
As if she could feel me watching, she stirred and her eyes blinked open.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” said the nurse, and she quietly padded back out.
My mother sat up and looked at me with an anguished expression. She inched forward in her seat, hesitant and awkward, as if she wanted to touch me, but she wasn’t sure how. “When the police came to the house and told me what happened, I thought I’d lost you.” She swallowed and took a shaky breath. “It was my fault. I should have told you everything from the beginning. I was just so afraid you’d go looking for him. That you’d leave.” She was crying now. Big, heaving sobs that left streaks down her face. “Losing David was terrible, but I managed. But losing you? I could never imagine surviving a loss like that. I told myself I’d never be able to let you go. But it was wrong. I was wrong. You’re so smart and so grown-up. I should have trusted you to make your own choices.” Her hands shook as she pressed them to her lips, fighting back tears.
I reached for her, held my hand out in the space between us. She looked at it, and then to me. And then she placed her hand in mine. I shut my eyes and felt all the love that had always been there, that I had never let myself feel before. All those things I’d thought my father had taken with him when he left. Everything I needed was here, inside her. “I’m sorry,” I said, letting my own tears fall, “if I made you feel like you weren’t enough.”
She leaned in and placed a delicate kiss on my forehead and a hand over my heart. Her pride—her adoration—was a burst of sweet citrus inside me. “You are, and will always be, your very own person, Nearly. Everything you’ll ever need is right in here.” She straightened and wiped her eyes. They were red and wet, but creased with smile lines. “I’m going to the cafeteria to find us some junk food. The fat to calorie ratios in this place are seriously disappointing.”
We laughed the same laugh. And it felt good.
The door swished shut behind my mom, and then swished open again. The baby powder nurse poked her head in and smiled.
“There’s a rather handsome dark-haired gentleman waiting to see you. I told him he couldn’t come in until you were feeling up for it. If you want me to ask him to wait . . .”
“No!” I said, louder than I’d intended. “It’s fine. He can come in.” The nurse helped me elevate the bed and then padded out the door to find my visitor. I wished I had a toothbrush, and I struggled with the IV tubes while I worked my weak fingers through the snarls in my hair, exhausted by the small effort.
The door finally cracked open, and light spilled in from the hall. Every nerve in my body crackled, until Oleksa peeked his head in and surveyed the room. I sunk back into my pillows. He lifted a swollen and bruised brow, as if asking permission to come in. Gena followed, her fingers laced through his, wearing matching badges on lanyards around their necks.
The lanyard rose and fell with Oleksa’s chest and my eyes flew open wide, remembering the bullet that ripped through it. How was he still breathing? TJ had shot him in the back right in front of me. I couldn’t have imagined it.
“You’re alive?”
“Kevlar.” He tapped a fist over his chest and winked. “I’m bulletproof.” The warmth was completely foreign on the cold face I’d been terrified of for weeks. As was the mysterious disappearance of his heavy Ukrainian accent. Hints of it lingered in his clipped consonants, but his dialect was as relaxed as his smile.
“Leigh Boswell,” Gena said, “I’d like you to meet Detective Oleksander Petrenko.”
“Call me Alex,” Oleksa said casually, as if we were meeting for the first time.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “We’ve met. I think it was the night
Detective
Petrenko beat up my boyfriend.”
An uncomfortable silence shrouded the room as we all interpreted the part I hadn’t said aloud. The part I hadn’t even admitted to myself until now. I was in love with Reece. Even though it terrified me. I needed him in painful, complicated ways that felt completely illogical and yet one hundred percent right. He was the reason I didn’t get on that train— the one person I couldn’t leave behind.
Oleksa cleared his throat and lowered his eyes, giving the blood in my cheeks time to settle. “Whelan had that one coming,” he said a little defensively.
“As far as I’m concerned, that assault charge is on you, sweetheart.” Gena smirked at him. “You threw the first punch. What did you expect him to do?”
“Reece almost got you killed that night. If Ryan Whelan hadn’t been there, it would have been you in that grave.”
Gena rolled her eyes as if she’d heard the story a thousand times. “That was a long time ago, baby. You’re just pissed off because he broke your nose.”
Oleksa pinched the small knot at the bridge of his nose and took a long slow breath.
“I knew it.” I struggled to sit up. “You’re the lady cop. The one Ryan saved.”
Gena’s glossy smile was bittersweet. “Ryan was a good kid,” she said softly.
I looked at their clasped hands, Lonny’s story slowly coming back to me through the fog.
He was only supposed to serve six for the drug charges, but rumor has it that the lady cop’s boyfriend came after him during the trial, and Reece got an extra three months for assaulting an officer.
“And you’re the cop Reece assaulted? And the one who carried me out of the rave.” It was Oleksa who’d told the cops I was unconscious in the moments leading up to Kylie’s murder, persuading the judge not to grant the warrant.
“Like I said, he had it coming.” Oleksa’s face grew serious. “Whelan is dangerous. What happened last night doesn’t change anything.”
“What exactly did happen last night?” I touched the back of my head. “I remember TJ pulling the trigger, and then . . .” The hand on my ankle, the figure that leaped toward me, could only have been one person. “The nurse said Reece is okay?”
“Reece is fine.” Gena gave me a reassuring smile. “He was conscious enough to shove you out of the path of the bullet. He knocked you into the mausoleum steps and you hit your head pretty hard. You bled all over and scared him to death. He thought he’d killed you.”
“He wasn’t hurt?”
“He’ll have a pretty sexy scar in his right shoulder.” She winked. “But the exit wound was clean. No permanent damage. He’s already been discharged.”
Gena and Oleksa were quiet while I let that sink in. Reece had taken a bullet . . . for me. Gena had been right about him, though you wouldn’t know it from the look on Oleksa’s face. I hoped Reece’s sacrifice was enough to clear his record, and that the bullet he’d taken was enough to chase away the last of his demons.
Speaking of demons . . .
“And Lonny? He’s not in trouble, is he?” For all his ulterior motives, Lonny had been there when I needed him. I shuddered to think what might have happened if he’d shown up a minute later.
“Emily wanted to press charges against him for assault, but we handled it.” Gena snickered and cocked a hip. “And she had the nerve to ask for her five thousand dollars of bail money back, but she posted it under your name. There’s no way she can prove the money was hers without incriminating herself more than she already has.”
Oleksa chimed in. “We’re calling Lonny’s actions a citizen’s arrest. Emily and TJ are both in custody. No charges have been filed against Lonny, for now.”
“And it might help smooth over a few bumps on his record if he can stay out of trouble,” Gena added.
“Seriously unlikely,” Oleksa muttered.
Gena pointed to the chair where my mother had been sleeping. My backpack rested against it, a long-stemmed black rose balanced on top.
“Lonny came by to see you earlier, but you were still sleeping. He said you left your bag at the cemetery. He told me to tell you ‘it’s all there’—whatever that means—and that he’ll collect on the favor when you’re feeling better.” Gena lifted an eyebrow. She was good at passing silent messages. This one seemed to say: “Don’t go there, girlfriend.”
I suppressed a smile. I’d be lying if I said Lonny didn’t scare me anymore, but I’d come to realize that he wasn’t so blackand-white either.
“And Jeremy? He’s okay?”
Gena and Oleksa exchanged a quick glance and my heart squeezed.
Oleksa dipped into the pocket of his cargo pants and tossed a plastic pouch onto my lap. “Jeremy’s in the room next door. He asked me to bring you these.”
I didn’t register the Twinkies. Gena was first to speak. “A crisis counselor is with him now.”
“Crisis counselor?” I asked through dry lips. “Why does he need a crisis counselor?”
Gena opened her mouth, then shut it again. Oleksa gave her hand a quick squeeze, answering for her. “During our investigation, Lonny informed us that Jeremy bought a fairly large bag of ketamine. Obviously, he never intended to hurt anyone else, but . . . ” Oleksa faltered. “We’re concerned he may have intended to harm himself.”
I dropped my head back against the pillow. Shut my eyes. Listened to the beep of the monitors as the IV feed shot me with another dose, grateful for the woozy blur that smoothed away the worst of the pain. Of all the answered questions, this one tore the largest hole in my heart.
Gena and Oleksa turned to go.
“Get some rest,” he said. “Someone from Nicholson’s office will be coming soon to take your statement.”
• • •
Something warm pressed into my hand. My lids fluttered open at the brush of lips over my forehead. Not soft, like my mother’s. Scratchy whiskers tickled my skin. My eyes adjusted to the dim light. Reece’s face hovered over me, his tired eyes shadowed under a chaotic mess of hair.
I inhaled deeply, not caring that he wasn’t showered or shaved. The smell of his jacket was warm and reassuring. I crushed it between my fingers and it creaked as he settled next to me on the bed.
“Sorry it took me so long to get here. I can’t ride my bike, so I’m stuck taking the bus.” He shrugged his right shoulder. His jacket hung limp under the empty sleeve. “I would have called, but you keep losing this at very inconvenient times.” He tapped my hand where it curled around his phone.
“I’m just glad you’re okay.” I shut my eyes, the gunshot still echoing in my head.
“It’ll heal. I got released this morning, but you were sleeping. I’ve been at the station all day getting my ass chewed by the lieutenant.” He brushed the hair back from my face. “I nearly missed you. They’re getting ready to send you home. I came as soon as I could.”
“Why?” I asked.
“What do you mean, why? Because I wanted to see you.” Reece’s shoulders sagged. “And I wanted to give you these.” He opened his jacket. His right arm was bound tight to his chest and wrapped in a blue sling. His hand spilled over with purple thistles. “I thought you might like them.”
I smiled behind the bouquet. “That’s not what I meant. Not, why did you come.” I liked to think I knew why he was there. “Why did you get your ass chewed?”
“Oh, that,” he said, dismissing it with a wave of his good arm. “I’m in a little hot water for interfering with a homicide case that I shouldn’t have been involved in. But I wouldn’t have done anything differently, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Wait, I don’t understand. You’re in trouble for protecting me?” I sat up, the monitors jumping in response to my heart rate. “That’s ridiculous! They told you to follow me, and I wasn’t guilty—”
“Calm down, it’s okay.” He glanced at the monitors and pressed me back to the mattress with a firm hand to my shoulder. Then drew it down to trace a finger over the naked skin where his pendant used to be. His touch was tender and sweet. “Do you remember when you asked me why I was following you?”
I nodded, his finger tracing slow patterns over my heart.
“I never followed you because I had to, or because I thought you did anything wrong. I did it because I care about you.”
He shifted, reaching behind his head to unclasp his pendant. When his hand found mine, the silky metal chain, warm from his body, spilled into it. He threaded our fingers together. He felt different. Peaceful.
I leaned forward and let him fasten the thistle around my neck.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you . . .” His eyes flicked nervously to mine. “. . . About the ads.”
“What about them?” I asked, ready to tell him the truth.
“Before this all started  .  .  . before TJ started writing the ads . . . what were you looking for? In the personals, I mean.” I’d never heard Reece stammer before, never heard him sound unsure of himself. A twinge of jealousy leeched through our joined hands. He wasn’t asking me about my father. My cheeks warmed.
“I’m not sure really,” I said, thinking back to the way Friday mornings felt before TJ’s first ad. “But I think maybe I’ve found it.”
He leaned in slowly, tilting his head to brush his lips against mine. Every rule, every shred of hesitation I’d felt before, dissolved away. I wanted him, every part of him, and we could mess with outcome later.
Reece grinned and pulled back too quickly. “Oh yeah? And what about the no touching thing?”
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him in. “It was a shitty rule anyway.”
His mouth moved to my chin and kissed a slow trail down. “What are you going to do now?” I asked.