March 28th, 2016
My heart thrummed painfully as I pulled Ivy closer to my chest and put my lips to her hair.
She was silent, and the expression on her face couldn’t be described as anything other than lost. Jagged red lines broke the smooth white surface of her eyes, and an angry blush swallowed up the normally perfect skin of her cheeks. Her body was in the throes of a meltdown.
But that wasn’t a surprise. Half of her soul—Camilla’s half—had been severed and battered and was, right then, struggling to hold on through a set of trauma doors and unyielding concrete walls.
As identical twins, Camilla and Ivy were bound together by ties that were supernatural and inexplicably complicated.
They’d been born of the same egg, housed in the same mother, and lived a cherished life together. But now, they’d been forced to fend for themselves. Camilla fought for her life, and Ivy was left to stand by and do nothing.
I knew the torture of helplessness. I’d known it with Grace, and now, I knew it all over again as I watched Ivy lock herself inside and completely shut down emotionally because she couldn’t aid in the physical fight for her sister.
“Levi,” the chief greeted, his voice softened by grief. He gave me an affectionate squeeze of the shoulder with one hand and continued to hold his wife closer with the other.
They’d just arrived, the first of the crowd of support I knew would gather at Ivy’s and my sides. Margo had been sobbing on the way over here—I could tell by the mottle of her face and throat and the moisture in her eyes—but she’d pulled it together before entering the building for the sake of Ivy and for the sake of the town.
We were well-versed in disaster. Our strength, it seemed, was in our ability to stand beside one another despite it.
I noticed the dried blood that coated my hands as I smoothed them down the rigid lines of Ivy’s arms and pulled her even closer.
She was in shock; had been since the moment I’d abruptly woken her from a sleep aid-enhanced slumber and told her the news that had brought us here.
Cool blood still lay on the floor of the house we’d left, and police still swarmed over the bodies of Boyce Williams and Dane Marx, collecting evidence.
But the blood could wait. It would wait until we had word on Camilla, and Ivy had anything and everything she needed.
From this moment on, I was a man at her disposal. I’d be her punching bag when she needed and her shoulder to cry on when she allowed. For her, I vowed to be anything and everything. Always.
Moments after it had all gone down, mere seconds after I’d fired a bullet straight between Boyce Williams’s eyes, I’d been unwilling and unable to admit to Camilla’s end. Not there, next to the man she’d been willing to face head on in an effort to protect her sister. Not in the house where she’d spent those moments in terror, waiting for me to save her.
Not while her sister slept unwittingly in the next room.
And now, all I could do was pray.
Pray for Camilla. Pray for Ivy. Pray for a fucking miracle.
The door to the trauma unit opened swiftly, and a doctor came through, still pulling her mask from her face. Her surgical scrubs were covered in blood, and the look on her face would be burned into my mind for the rest of eternity.
“Camilla Stone’s family?” she asked, bone-weary and broken.
I knew the words before she spoke them. I’d lived them before. But Ivy, sweet fucking Ivy, still had a relationship with hope.
She hadn’t seen Camilla before the ambulance took her.
“Yes.” Ivy’s voice was scratchy and dry from the screams and wails and subsequent nonuse. Her agony had been physical as I’d told her the news. Potent. Piercing. “That’s me. I’m her sister,” she said. “And our parents are in LA, but they’re trying to catch a red-eye flight out here.”
My throat thick with saliva, I did my best to steady myself, hooking my arms around Ivy’s body.
I knew when the words came—words that would change everything she’d ever known—she’d need the support.
Direct and professional, the doctor stepped forward to Ivy and made eye contact, but she worried the mask in her hand with her fingers. “I’m Dr. Ines,” she introduced herself, and Ivy nodded and swallowed, unable to say anything else.
“Your sister came in with a severe laceration to her throat and had lost a significant amount of blood volume. We rushed her to the operating room, started a transfusion, but we lost her on the table. We defibrillated for twenty minutes, but I’m…I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.”
High-pitched and soul-destroying, the wail Ivy let out was the likes of which I would never recover from. It keened and moaned, and utter devastation rattled at its core.
She was a half of a whole now, and she’d never find the missing piece.
“Oh, Ivy,” I murmured, pulling her close and spilling into the abyss of guilt.
The bottomless pit of blackness that taunted I could have done something more—that I could have stopped it if I’d taken it all more seriously from the beginning.
Hell, I hadn’t even told Ivy the heroic decision Camilla had made to protect her.
But it wasn’t out of secrecy; it was because I knew, in this moment, Ivy wouldn’t be able to handle the truth of her sister’s sacrifice.
God, I’d give anything to change this, to remedy the pain Ivy would never release, but I was powerless.
Helpless to alter the past and unable to protect the future.
All I could do was live this with her, be present for her, and pray for God’s grace.
We couldn’t take any more hits.
We couldn’t take any more surprises.
Though, as the ones left behind—no matter what came—we had no choice but to survive.
And I’d spend the rest of my life making sure we did it together.