Falcon
“Clementine, get down!” I saw the opportunity. She had distracted him, and his grip on her was slipping.
She dropped as I pulled the gun from my belt. Leo looked at me, but before he could aim his gun at me, I pulled the trigger. The shot rang out in the tight space like an explosion. Clementine screamed when she heard it. Leo stumbled back as the shot hit him, dropping his gun and reaching for his shoulder.
I could have shot to kill him. I could have put one right in his brain, but I didn’t want to lose Clementine in the process of trying to save her.
I heard my men grab their guns just as his hit the ground. I put mine back in its spot behind my belt. I didn’t need it anymore. If Leo wanted to fight, we would fight like honest men. My gun had served its purpose.
“Get her out of here,” I shouted out to my guys, not caring who grabbed her as long as they did what I said.
Relief washed over everyone as the standoff finally came to an end.
“You’re going to pay for that,” Leo growled.
“As long as it’s not listening to you talk, no price is too high for that,” I retorted.
“No, I’m going to tear you limb from limb,” he said, charging me.
The man who collided with me was wholly different from the man who usually just ran his mouth. There was a primal energy to him, a weight and a force I’d never seen in Leo. He had nothing left to lose. I had taken the one thing from him that he could have used at leverage against me.
Clementine was mine physically and emotionally. She hadn’t said it in so many words yet, but she had given herself to me. By forgiving me enough to trust me in this situation, I knew she had found it in her heart to devote herself to trying to make this work again between us. Now I just had to survive being attacked by the monster parading as her brother long enough to make it back to her.
“I’ve been waiting for this day for so long,” he said as he pinned me to the ground. His strength and the force he had used when he came at me astounded me.
“What day? When you finally shut the hell up and start fighting me? I’m still waiting on that day, Leo.” I punched his face, landing my fist squarely in his cheekbone. He barely budged.
He grabbed my throat and started squeezing. “I’m not playing anymore, Falcon. This is goodbye.”
“Bullshit,” I said through my closing throat as I reached for the gunshot wound in his shoulder. I closed my eyes as I grabbed him and dug my thumb into the gaping hole.
He yelled and let go of my throat, reaching instead for my arm to pull my hand away.
I grabbed him by his neck and pushed him off of me as I stood up. I could tell one of us wasn’t walking away from this fight, no matter how much I wanted to keep from killing him. I pressed him against one of the concrete columns, putting both hands on his throat. I felt his blood and muscles working under my palms. I could have ended his life right there.
He unleashed a flurry of punches to my gut, but I didn’t feel a thing.
“I’m not going to kill you, Leo,” I said, holding him in place with my hands around his throat. “I just want you to listen to me for a moment. Let someone else talk besides yourself.”
“You’re an idiot, Falcon,” he hissed. “This is why your MC is falling apart. You’re weak.”
“Weak would be killing you. No, I’m going to do far worse than that, Leo. I’m going to let you live so you can watch as we reclaim our position and continue to grow. I’m going to let you watch as I make your little sister mine. And I don’t mean like I’ve already done. Any fool can get a woman to let him between her legs and between her sheets. I’m going to make her all mine, Leo. While I rebuild my MC, I’m going to build a life with Clementine, a future,” I explained to him, growling as I talked.
“You’re a fool, Falcon,” he said.
Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain in my side. I looked down to find Leo’s hand pressed against my stomach.
“You should have killed me,” he said with a smile as I let go of him and stumbled back.
He pulled the knife out of me and came at me with it again. I was ready for him the second time and caught his arm. I was in immense pain and could barely tell what I was doing, but my instincts kicked in.
I couldn’t think about what was happening. All I knew was pain and my fading vision. Still, I grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm suddenly, knocking the blade loose from his grip. I heard it clatter on the ground. Light flashed briefly as the streetlights from outside reflected off the blade through the blood that was on it.
It wasn’t a large knife, but it was big enough that I could feel myself bleeding out.
I wasn’t going to go down without a fight, though. If this was how I was going to go, he was coming with me, I decided.
He came at me again after I shoved him away. I could feel him reaching for the wound and trying to pull my little stunt of pressing on the gaping hole. I grabbed him by his wrist again and twisted his arm, again. Except, this time I came down on his elbow.
“If you want to brawl, Leo, you don’t stand a chance,” I said breathlessly while he stumbled back from me, howling and holding his broken arm. “That’s probably going to hurt for a while,” I let him know.
I fell to one knee. The pain, coupled with the loss of blood, was making me woozy. I was getting weaker by the moment, and I knew if I didn’t finish him off soon, I wasn’t going to get the chance.
He was taking his time to regroup, as well, which gave me a moment to catch my breath so I could get back on both feet.
Darkness pulsed and throbbed at the edge of my vision, but the pain was putting everything into stark contrast. Everything I could still see was as bright as day. Something primal in me was awake. The hunter instinct, the predator within me, was wide awake and ready to fight to protect what was mine, namely my life and my old lady.
I barely felt my hand grab my gun and pull it from my jeans. I sort of felt is comforting weight at the end of my numb arm. It was keeping me grounded, keeping my consciousness from floating off into the night.
I was in trouble. I should have just killed him, but I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had given Clementine up in the name of simple, basic revenge. Now, I wasn’t going to get to live with her for having saved her.
Still, I couldn’t bring myself to kill him.
I pulled the trigger, and the shot went wild, missing him completely.
“Don’t do it, Falcon,” he said. “If you kill me, that decision will haunt you for the rest of your life, and my sister will never forgive you.”
His voice was enough reason to justify murdering him. Luckily, the pain kept him from getting into my head.
“You’ll lose her forever if you do it, Falcon,” he said.
I pulled the trigger again anyway, but I was aiming for his leg instead of his head this time. I landed the shot, and he crumbled to one side, yelling in pain as he fell to the floor. Everything sounded fuzzy as my hearing faded away to just white noise.
“Shouldn’t you be dead by now?” he asked. At least that was what I heard through the buzzing and ringing in my head.
I couldn’t walk anymore. I might have already been dead by the point. I really wasn’t sure how I was still able to get up and move around. I wasn’t sure how I had managed to squeeze off two more shots from the gun.
The only thing I was sure of at that point was that my vision was growing darker and blurrier.
“Falcon?” I heard him ask. “Falcon!”
I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t gone, but I wasn’t really there either.
“Don’t do this to me, Falcon. Finish the job!” he shouted at me. “Finish the job!” His voice reached me loud and clear through the noise of pain and darkness that filled my head.
I closed my eyes and breathed against the hard floor. It was so cold against my angry, hot skin. Leo didn’t matter anymore. He would live, and someone else would get pissed off enough to kill him.
Clementine would remember me for saving her life instead of for using her to get to her brother. She would resent him for all the awful things he’d said and done over the years. He would probably never regain her adoring admiration, and that was a much better punishment than death for him.
As for me, death wasn’t a punishment. It was a relief. I breathed slowly, easily against the floor. If it were coming, it could have at least hurried up. There was no priest to ask for a last confession. There were no relatives to hear my last goodbye. The MC had gone outside with Clementine, so at least no one had to witness that one moment of foolish weakness that did me in.
Still, somehow, I was holding on. Maybe it was the fact that I was finally getting to relax for the first time in at least half a decade. Maybe it was the smile spreading across my face as I laughed at myself for being stuck in my head and leaving the scene around me.
I could still hear Leo whimpering as he realized that he was going to have to actually face the music for what he’d done, and he was going to have to face it alone. There wasn’t some punk biker for him to put everything off on this time.
I sighed. Death wasn’t coming, but I could hear sirens as someone else was coming. The police were on their way. The sirens were getting steadily closer, but it was also entirely likely that they were going somewhere else.
“Wake up, Falcon,” Leo whispered. “Get your gun and kill me before they get here, man. Come on. You owe me that, don’t you? After everything I’ve done, I think I’ve earned an execution style murder, man. Come on!”
His desperation was pathetic and amusing. I wondered if I would finally get to rest if I put forth the effort to kill him, but in the end, I decided it really wasn’t worth the effort. Death would have stolen my relaxation, and the floor was actually pretty comfortable, mainly because I couldn’t actually feel it anymore.
“You’re on your own,” I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t make the words happen. Instead I listened while he continued to beg, realizing that as long as he kept talking, he was keeping me conscious and giving me the chance to make it out of that damn bloodbath.
Oh, the irony! He was going to save my life by begging me to end his.
I wanted to open my eyes to look at him. I wanted to see how pathetic he looked, but I couldn’t force my eyelids open.
No, I figured it was best just to lie there until I slipped away into sleep. He finally stopped talking and whining, probably having blacked out from the pain. The silence was intense. It closed around me, and I could feel my breath slowing, deepening, as I started to drift off. I let sleep finally take me. My body needed to rest, even if my soul wasn’t going anywhere.