The blood is everywhere. My hands are stained with it as I apply pressure to the bullet wound and scream at Carter to answer me.
“Look at you.” My father hasn’t stopped talking, hasn’t stopped shaming me for staying at Carter’s side. Hasn’t stopped shaming me for reaching for the gun.
I had to try. With a man on either side of me, both wanting to kill the other, I couldn’t stand by helplessly, doing nothing.
The blood isn’t nearly as hot as the tears that won’t stop. He’s not answering me; he isn’t responding to me no matter how loud I scream. His name tears up my throat as I scream his name. As I do, the pressure lifts just slightly on the wound nearly in the center of his chest and more blood pools around him.
Hold him tight, or else he’ll die.
Words from a man I’ve never met come back to me, and I shove my body down, clutching Carter and putting all of my weight on both of my hands, still compressing the wounds. “Don’t leave me,” I cry as my hair sticks to my wet face and the hot tears mix with his blood as I lay my cheek in the crook of his neck.
I can feel his heart.
It beats as the door to the office creaks open and my father yells at me to get up. To be a Talvery and to prove he made the right choice all those years ago. That I’m truly his daughter. His words mean nothing to me. They hang in the air. All I listen to is the faint beat of Carter’s heart and how slow it is. It’s slowing.
I only turn my head to look at my father when I hear him cock the gun again.
My throat is tight with emotion as I look from the barrel of the gun up to him. The pressure I have on Carter’s gunshot wounds doesn’t waver though.
“I love him,” I plead with my father and as I do, I belatedly notice a gun laying only a foot from where I am, so close I could reach it. What a useless thing to come to me now. If I let go, Carter will die. I know it deep in my soul.
If I were to reach it, to manage to grab it and kill my father to end all of this, what point would there be in living?
I’d rather die like this, doing everything I can to save the one I love, than live knowing I let him die.
My eyes move from the gun to the portrait of his family home and I close my eyes, pressing my cheek to Carter’s chest as I hold him tighter. I can’t feel his chest moving anymore though. I don’t hear him breathing either.
“Choose your family, Aria. Step aside and let me finish him. I forgive you,” my father stresses the last sentence. Slowly, I look to him. His eyes glass over as he grips the gun tighter. “It doesn’t matter what happened before, but now you need to listen to me. You need to act like the woman you were raised to be,” my father tells me and instead of hearing him I only hear Tyler’s words.
I can’t look at my father, or the gun.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. Not to my father, but to the version of me that could have done better. To the hopes of what could have been and then I remember, I remember the small life inside of me and I cry harder. I mourn all of us and what we may have been had fate treated us better.
“Forgive me,” I cry into the crook of Carter’s neck and then I hear that voice again, the one I’ve only heard in my terrors. Hold him tight, or else he’ll die.
“I am,” I whisper to no one.
And with that I hear my father whisper how his own daughter betrayed him and then he tells me goodbye with a gunshot following close behind. The bullet is loud and it makes my shoulders jump, but I stay close to Carter, clinging to him with everything I have.
I know I heard it. I swear I did, but I felt nothing. Nothing at all.
My eyes open slowly, and I’m too afraid to breathe. I know I heard him shoot, but it didn’t hit me. A long moment passes before I hear a body fall. First a thud and then a louder thump. I have to turn around, to face the desk to see my father, laying on his belly on the floor, his eyes staring ahead of him but looking at nothing as blood pools around him, spilling from the hole in his cheek.
A second passes, tick.
I can’t do anything. The scream is silent.
Another second passes, tock.
And that’s when I notice movement from behind the desk.
My eyes travel up the suit pants, to the fitted shirt covered in blood.
Nikolai’s expression isn’t cold, it isn’t angry. He’s heartbroken as he lowers his gun and I watch him swallow.
“Do you want to tell them it was you? Or should we tell them I did it?” he asks me and his last word is strangled. He looks between Carter and myself and I can’t even answer him. I can’t think about anything but how long it’s been since I’ve felt Carter’s heartbeat.
A weak pulse is the only response I get at that thought.
“Help me,” I plead with him.
