Vendetta

“Both your friends are dead!” he shouted.

Jack started scrabbling backward toward the entrance, pulling himself across the floor with his uninjured hand. “Sophie!” he shouted, but he wasn’t focusing; he couldn’t see me. But I could see him; his pale face was awash with terror and his blood was mixing with Luca’s as he dragged himself through it.

Nic stopped running and raised his gun again. “Stop!” he commanded.

“Nic, don’t!” I yelled. “He’s not armed. Just let him go!”

Nic’s head twitched like there was something buzzing around it. He hesitated. Jack was at the door now; he stuck his good hand through and tried to pull himself up. He was almost there.

And then Nic shot him.

My mother and I screamed. Jack slumped against the doorway, and a blood-red star started to swell across the left side of his shirt.

Nic skidded to a stop beside Luca. He didn’t even look at Jack. He stowed his gun and crouched down beside his brother, checking the pulse in his neck. “We need to get him to the hospital,” he said to my mother. She was visibly shaking, but she was still plugging the wound.

I was too numb to move. I was still staring at my uncle and the new, terrified expression in his eyes. He was still alive, and he was looking at me, his body slumped half in and half out of the warehouse. I scanned the entry wound — it was just below his left shoulder. Not quite his heart, although it could easily have been. By all appearances, from where my mother and Nic were huddled, my uncle seemed very much dead, but I could see the alertness in his expression, and the fear in his eyes. Had Nic shot to kill or to wound Jack? And if he knew what I knew then — that the bullet had missed my uncle’s heart — would he finish the job?

“Sophie,” my mother said, her voice heaving. She and Nic had started to hoist Luca between them. “Can you help us? We need you to plug the wound while we move him.”

Did Jack deserve my forgiveness? No. Did he deserve to die? That wasn’t my decision to make; it wasn’t anyone’s. I didn’t have any time to think. I stood up without saying anything, sticking my hand out to help, and blocking their view of my uncle’s body as I came toward them. Then we moved quickly, all three of us in tandem, toward the back of the warehouse, away from all the blood. I didn’t turn around to see if Jack was still there.

My mother and Nic carried Luca into the remaining SUV, while I stumbled along beside them, clutching my ribs with one hand and plugging his wound with the other. And then we took off, Luca and I lying side by side in the backseat, my hand pressed tight against his torso as our labored breathing mingled in the air between us.

As Nic sped through the darkness, lost in hurried conversation with my mother, I drifted away from the pain inside me, and into the darkness that had been creeping up on me all evening.

For the second time this summer, I awoke in a hospital room. Everything around me was strange and discolored. Cartoonish images danced back and forth in my brain as I lay still, feeling a million miles above the earth. I pulled my hand up around my chest and felt a subtle pinch as my eyes rolled back in my head.

“Sophie?” A tinkling bell infiltrated my bubble.

I rolled my head around and landed on my right cheek, which throbbed dully beneath me, like the pain was just outside of my body, looking in. I tried to groan, but it caught in my throat and wheezed out in pathetic puffs of nothingness.

“Sweetheart?” My vision sharpened until my mother’s face loomed just inches from my own. Her eyes were glassy and her face was drawn. “How are you feeling?”

I tried to speak, but I couldn’t find the words, and I knew even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to push them out. I scrunched up my face and blinked over and over until my mother’s movements became disjointed.

“The doctor has given you morphine. You have two broken ribs and a broken nose. Don’t worry if you feel a little strange.” She reached over to my unobscured hand and squeezed it tightly. The sensation was little more than a slight tickle.

For every moment I lay there, feeling high and low all at once, memories flashed across my addled brain. I remembered the pain of every Calvino-inflicted blow; the argument with Luca at Felice’s mansion; a long, meandering drive to nowhere. I pulled my hands under the blankets and, dimly, I became aware of the hospital gown I was wearing. Beside me, on the bedside locker, my tank top and cutoffs were folded in a pile. The top of a switchblade peaked out from my front pocket. There were more flickers of confusion and then something real, another disjointed memory. It was Luca’s knife. But why did I have it again? I scrunched my eyes shut and tried to reach inside the darkest parts of my mind.

When I opened them, Nic had appeared inside the room, looking like he hadn’t slept in a very long time; his hair was tousled across his forehead and dark circles had spread out under his eyes. He handed a paper cup of coffee to my mother and sat next to her so that their faces appeared side by side. For a second I could have sworn they were nothing more than floating heads, but then the morphine crest subsided enough for me to register some level of reality.

“You’re awake.” He released a small smile.

I moaned breathlessly in response.

Nic leaned in until his dark eyes dominated my limited field of vision. “You are stubborn, Sophie Gracewell,” he chided softly. “I don’t know what I would have done if something happened to you.”

I tried to remember more. The faint memory of shouting filled my brain, but it floated away again. I stared at Nic so hard I felt tears stream from my eyes and slide back into my hair.