A Love Most Fatal (Morelli Family #1)

34. Nate

34

NATE

I saw through the ropes binding his hands and feet quickly enough, but he groans when I accidentally brush his injured ankle.

“Fuckers shot me,” he says, and I am really glad it’s not lighter out, because as it is already, I can almost convince myself that the pool and smear of blood is in fact just dirty motor oil. Doesn’t do much to abate my queasiness though. The smell makes it worse. He smells like urine, yes, but the gasoline smell in the air is going straight to my brain and making me woozy.

The rope tied to his middle is the hardest to cut, but I saw at it until it breaks and whatever was pulling it down tugs the remaining rope swiftly over the ledge towards the ground.

There are two tense and quiet seconds before it hits the ground with the loudest metal clang and we both wince.

I can be grateful now for the heavy training I’ve had to do in the last couple of months, because it would have been a huge task to get Rafael off the ground without my added strength. Once he’s up and steady on his one good foot and using me as a crutch, we start limping towards the stairs.

We are most of the way there when what sounds like a bomb goes off outside. It’s disorienting, and shakes the building beneath our feet, but I keep moving. The sooner we get out of here the better. Car alarms are going off, and it’s only a matter of time before sirens join their call.

One arm around Rafael and the other still holding the loaded gun, we start making our way down the flights of stairs towards the entrance.

It’s dark and quiet in the stairwells, but I don’t have another hand to hold a flashlight, so we keep on, mostly blind into the pit of darkness below, until finally, we near the first floor.

“You Nate?” Rafael asks as I help him down the last set of stairs.

“Yes,” I say.

“My brother was Tony,” Rafael says, and my heart lurches. I haven’t thought about Tony in weeks, the man who died trying to protect me. “He said he liked you.”

“I liked him, too,” I say, not a lie.

When I push open the door on the first floor, we are met with dense smoke and smoldering flames. Rafael is spouting out all forms of profanities, muttering about how monumentally screwed we are; I don’t disagree, but still, I push us forward toward an exterior wall. None of the windows are in place, so I figure that if we hold to the wall long enough, it will spit us out outside.

Breathing is increasingly difficult, but I was right, and we do find a large hole in the wall where a floor to ceiling window will one day be placed. Or would have been placed. I can’t say with certainty that this will ever happen now.

Breathing is easier once we’re outside, but not by much until we reach the far gate. It’s hard work lugging Rafael, he hops along on with me. He’s at least five inches shorter than me, and my muscles are burning on the left side of my back from leaning over as I am.

When we’re far enough away that I can see through some of the smoke, I notice flames licking out of the first three floors of the building, climbing their way up to the fourth and fifth. I don’t know where Vanessa is, and I want to find her, or scream for her, but that would mean leaving Rafael to fend for himself, which would mean he would probably die of smoke inhalation.

“Take me to my car,” he says. “I have the keys.”

We limp along, a bit faster now toward the front of the building where we see that the start of the inferno was the Corolla parked there, now a blistering shell.

I do my best to block out his cries at the sight of his car, his “baby” in flames as we keep to the gate and limp towards the exit.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Rafael says.

“Sure buddy, okay watch for the curb, yep big jump, okay.”

It’s the workout of the year moving him along and we are almost there when I hear my name shouted from somewhere to the left of us.

It’s Mary, on the far side of the building, with Leo, pointing ahead of me at something I can’t quite make out. I hold up my gun just in case.

A gust of wind picks up some of the smoke and pushes it in the other direction so now I can see that the thing in front of me is not a thing at all, but a person, a tall man in all black holding a gun in my direction.

This is the moment they’ve been preparing me for, I know this, but as I’m staring at the gun, much closer than I thought it would be, my finger is paralyzed on the trigger.

The split second of thinking is a second too long, and his gun goes off, a bullet whipping past my left side, a horrifying stinging sensation to follow.

It scares the shit out of me, and I almost follow suit in wetting myself, but I just manage to keep it together. I don’t think I was actually shot, just grazed, but it still stings horribly.

I look back up at the man and do what I should have done first: I pull the trigger at the moving target, hitting his arm, then another, this time in his shoulder.

I surprise myself by wishing it had struck his chest instead.

I line up for another and shoot, this one missing. Instead of aiming back at me, the man uses his good arm to shoot towards Leo and Mary, the sound of his gun firing followed immediately by a shout. I shoot three more times as he runs, none landing and then he’s gone, running outside the gates and into a car waiting for him that rips down the street.

There’s another explosion from inside the building, spurring me to regain my hold on Rafael and keep moving, checking only once to make sure Leo and Mary are making their way, too. They are, but Leo holds Mary in a bridal carry as they approach. She looks alive at least, a scowling grimace on her face, and it’s no time at all before they’ve caught up to us.

“Where is she?” I shout, and Leo nods ahead where sure enough Vanessa is backing up the SUV down the street, screaming at us to hurry up and get in.

Rafael’s face is ashen, and Mary is bleeding fucking everywhere from a wound in her shoulder, but we make it into the car and Vanessa whips down the street before the fire department can get there.

“Mary, I’m so?—”

“Forget it, you did good,” she cuts me off, her voice strained. “Don’t hesitate next time.”

Vanessa and I make eye contact in the rear view, but she turns her focus back on the road.

“Catalog,” Vanessa says.

“Mary was shot in the shoulder, Nate was shot at, did it hit?” Leo asks.

“Grazed my arm. I’m fine. Rafael was shot in the leg and has a broken ankle.”

“Any other injuries?” Vanessa demands, her voice uneven.

“Yeah, they blew up my car,” Rafael whines from where he sits in the trunk. I pull off my hoodie and look at the damage on my arm. It’s bleeding, but not nearly as much as the other two injuries in this car.

“We’ll get you a new Corolla,” Vanessa says. “Hospital first.”

It’s a tense ride there. Leo instructs me on how to apply pressure to Mary’s shoulder as she gets less lucid from blood loss, and I try not to make a shit situation worse by fainting.

Vanessa makes a few calls on the way to the hospital, one to someone telling them we’re going to a hospital and to have beds ready, another to Sean and Willa telling them to go to the site to meet with the cops, a third to her mom telling her everything is okay but she needs to come to the hospital and bring everyone some clean clothes.

When we get to the hospital, Vanessa backs the car into a back entrance where a team with two gurneys wait.

We load Mary and then Rafael up onto them and trail behind as the staff in green scrubs wheel them down empty fluorescent hallways and into examination rooms that we aren’t allowed to follow into. We all follow anyway, and they don’t press.

The staff is obviously familiar with Vanessa, talking to her like they know her and multi-tasking while they listen to her explain both Mary and Rafael’s conditions. One doctor scrawls notes onto her clipboard as Vanessa recites all of her sister’s medications, others swiftly and deftly fuss over Mary and Rafael.

When the team has enough information and a plan, they unlock the wheels and push the beds through another door in the room. I stay back, certain that the growing spot of blood coming from Mary will make me pass out if I keep looking at it.

After a few minutes, Vanessa joins me. Her face is covered in soot and there’s a trail of dried blood from her left ear and a smeared one from a gash on her lip. She’s alive. I’m alive. Everyone is alive. Tonight was a shitshow, but we are alive, and the sun is going to come up in an hour and we will still be okay.

She calls for a nurse to take care of my arm, and I’m ushered into an exam room across the hall where a very kind woman cleans my wound, shoots it with numbing shots, and gives me seven stitches total. She does all of this while chatting amicably, as if we didn’t just come in here with two people in horrible condition.

All the while, Vanessa stands and watches, her every muscle tensed and eyes wide and unfocussed. I can’t read what she’s thinking, but I know it’s nothing good.

Forty-five minutes later, I’m patched up and the nurse brings us water bottles before showing us to a quiet, empty waiting room.

Now, all that’s left for us to do is wait.

A tense and silent moment passes before she lets me fold her in my arms, her face pressing against my chest. I’m not sure if she knows that what happened to her sister is my fault, that the only reason Mary was shot is because I couldn’t get my shit together to pull the trigger when I had a clear shot, that I was as useless as she thought I’d be, too weak to take someone out even though they were right in front of me, gun pointed at me.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur into her hair repeatedly, holding the back of her neck to me.

“You could’ve died,” she says, and I feel her back hitch like she’s crying, holding in a sob.

I squeeze her tighter and smell her hair, which smells predominantly like smoke, but also like the coconut conditioner in her bathroom. I memorize the scent, certain that she’ll never let me hold her again when she knows what I did—what I didn’t do, and how unfit I am to be by her side.

“I’m okay,” I say, and then I say it again, and rub my palm along her back until she stops crying.