by Sarina Bowen
I’m not the one tucking a gun into my jacket. She was too smart to say that out loud, though. “I was loyal to you,” she said instead. “Whatever attitude you think I have is in your head.”
“ARI!” came a shout from outside. Goose bumps broke out across her neck because it was Patrick’s voice. “Man on!” he yelled.
Still kneeling on the floor, Vince froze.
That’s when she heard it—cautious, nearly silent footsteps on the stairs.
Terrified, Ari moved on pure instinct, slipping into the adjacent bathroom, shutting the door and sliding the hardware store latch lock into place.
“Fuck,” she heard Vince curse.
The sound she heard next was the cock of a gun—click-click—just like in the movies. “You got something there for me?” a stranger’s voice asked on the other side of the door.
Ari trembled. Sure, she was alone in the bathroom. But now she was trapped in here.
Without her panic button, of course.
Think, Ari. She edged toward the narrow little window over the toilet. It hadn’t been opened in months, since the summer. Quietly, she lowered the toilet seat and then stepped up onto it, one foot at a time.
“Just take it out, nice and slow,” the stranger’s voice said.
“Let’s make a little deal,” Vince’s voice proposed. She could hear his fear through the wall, and it fueled hers.
The other voice just laughed.
She put shaking fingers to the crosspieces of the window and pressed upward. Slowly, the window opened a little ways and then stopped. Two inches of sunshine was all she’d gained. But the cool air hit her face and she tasted victory. She braced her hands again and pushed. Nothing. So she relaxed for a second and then pushed hard.
A horrible wood-on-wood squeal filled the air as the sash raised another three inches.
“Who’s that?” the strange voice demanded.
Ari inhaled sharply, terror streaking through her chest. She braced her arms again and pushed, but fear made her inefficient. The window didn’t budge. I need to break it, she thought, her mind wheeling. And maybe that would have worked in the first place, but now it never would. The stuck window’s wooden sash divided the escape route right in two.
The sound of footsteps outside the bathroom crawled right up her throat, and then the bathroom door rattled as someone tried to turn the knob. She froze, listening. Outside she heard another squeal, this one metal against metal. What the hell was that? She stuck her face into the six-inch window opening, getting an awkward view of the fire escape that ran past the bathroom and bedroom widows. A face popped into view at the far end of the fire escape, scaring her half to death until she realized it belonged to Patrick. He’d climbed the ladder.
Their eyes locked even as someone began to kick at the bathroom door.
Patrick pointed at the bedroom window, silently asking a question.
NO! she mouthed. The man with the gun was there.
He began to move, crawling across the narrow metal ledge, trying to stay beneath the sightline of the window.
Behind her the kicking got louder, and she heard the first splinter of wood beginning to give out.
Frantic now, Ari shoved at the window again. It moved a tiny fraction of an inch. And then all at once it gave way, slapping upward and out of her hands as Patrick forced it from the other side. Then his hands were reaching through the opening, grabbing her, pulling her through to the other side.
She made a terrifying headfirst dive toward the metal fire escape, which shook as Patrick caught her. There was a crash inside the building, and then loud cursing, and it was coming closer.
“Oh my G . . .” she started to say before Patrick’s hand closed over her mouth. In this, the most jacked situation she could ever remember being in, that rough palm was actually calming. Then it moved to her shoulder, asking her to stay put.
The next two seconds seemed to take a year. Patrick crouched over her as someone moved through the bathroom. She tensed as the moment of their discovery approached. Except Patrick suddenly sprang upwards. There was the sick sound of his fist connecting with a face, and an enraged scream. And then breaking glass a few feet to the side of her head.
Apparently Ari wasn’t the only one who’d thought of leaving the premises via a window.
But nobody came through the broken bedroom window, and Patrick was urging her toward the ladder at the end. “Stay low,” he barked in her ear. He had her by the shoulder and by the waistband of her jeans. “Go.”
She crawled on command toward the other end. When the ladder came into view she turned her body around and scrambled down it. As she moved, a single gunshot rang out, which was followed by a scream. Her feet connected with the asphalt, but she wasn’t ready. She folded onto the pavement, bile in her throat.
Patrick landed on the ground a few seconds later. He scooped her up and parked her against his side, drag-carrying her to the front edge of the building. He peered around the corner while she tried to catch her breath. “That restaurant.” He pointed across the street. “Run. Now.”
She did it, because it was so much easier to follow his instructions than to think about what was happening. She ran, his footsteps right behind her. He threw open the door and they slipped inside, startling a skinny man in a waiter’s apron who was rolling silverware into cloth napkins at a table just inside the door.
“Dial 911,” Patrick ordered the man as he flipped the lock on the restaurant’s front door.
The waiter’s eyes got huge, but he slipped a phone out of his breast pocket and lit it.
Patrick must not have thought he was moving fast enough, because he grabbed the phone out of the guy’s hands. A moment later he spoke rapidly. “Gunfire on Hudson Ave. Number seventy-one. Two or three men inside the house, at least one of them armed. Handgun. Shots fired.”
Two or three men?
“No, I’m not inside the house. I’m at the restaurant across the street.” He dropped his gaze to look at Ari.
She was seated on a wooden chair that she didn’t remember pulling out from the table, her chest heaving. She was so disoriented. As if her mind had become jet-lagged by the last ten minutes. Looking up into Patrick’s cool blue eyes helped a little. She found her center as he stared back, reminding her that they were both still here, and both okay.
Okayish. She couldn’t stop shaking.
Patrick let out a huge breath and dropped the phone onto the waiter’s table. Then he knelt down in front of her and took her wrists in his hands. “Baby, you’re bleeding.”
She looked down to discover that he was right. Her hands had many vicious scratches across the palms and the undersides of her fingers.
“That’s from the broken glass,” he said quietly. “Are you hurt anywhere else? Anywhere at all?”
She shook her head. But the adrenaline which had gotten her through the last few minutes was starting to sour in her stomach.
“Breathe, sweetheart,” he said. “It will pass. It always does.” He set her injured hands palms up on her knee and reached around to rub the small of her back. “Shh,” he said, even though she was still silent. “I know you’re in shock, but it will be okay.”
Would it, though? She’d heard a gunshot inside her house. Someone had screamed. She knew who it was, too. But she just couldn’t think about that right now. She shoved that thought away.
Sirens sounded outside. She heard loud voices demanding access across the street, identifying themselves as the police. But surely nobody would answer her door.
Then she was lifted into the air. Patrick carried her further back in the restaurant, depositing her on a banquette. “Let them handle it,” Patrick whispered. “They’ll be asking you questions soon enough.”
That turned out to be true, although she couldn’t say for sure how much time passed. There were more sirens
outside, one of which would prove to be an ambulance. Police knocked on the door of the restaurant and were admitted by the waiter, who began snapping pictures at some point, his phone pointed through the plateglass windows.
It was all a swirl of confusion, really. She put her head on Patrick’s shoulder as he whispered to her and gently picked at little shards of broken glass in the heels of her hands.
“What can you tell me?” a cop finally demanded of her.
She took a drink from the glass of ice water that someone had provided. “I was home alone,” she said, trying to keep the detective’s face in focus. She was suddenly so tired. “He demanded to come in and get something that was his . . .”
Ari told the story slowly, limping through the details. A paramedic worked on her hand at the same time, bandaging the cuts and using tweezers on the bits of glass. The cop began probing her history with Vince, and Ari sighed. She’d spoken of almost nothing else lately. And she was so, so tired.
“That’s enough,” Patrick insisted. “You need Detective Miller. He has all this history already, and she isn’t ready to repeat it right now.”
“I’ll call him.” The cop flipped his notebook closed. “Just don’t go anywhere.”
They didn’t.
Patrick didn’t leave her side until Rebecca turned up, showering her with hugs and making concerned noises. “Nathan is on his way to Brooklyn,” she said.
“Geez,” Ari breathed. It was only starting to sink in that she and Patrick had escaped from gunfire. “Is there going to be ugly publicity?”
Becca just shook her head. “Let Georgia worry about it, okay? Sweetie, I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
Her friend let out a breath. “Vince was shot in the chest, and he didn’t make it.”
“Vince . . .” Did she even hear that correctly? “He died?”
“Yeah, he did.” Rebecca rubbed her arm. “I’m so sorry. I know you spent a long time with him.”
“Wow,” she said stupidly. She could still picture Vince as the laughing, dancing guy who owned a club because he liked to party. That Vince hadn’t shown up at home in years, but it didn’t make his death any less surprising. Somehow he’d taken such a terrible turn, and she hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice exactly when. He’d stopped dancing and started dealing with people who had murder weapons.
“What a waste,” she said aloud.
Becca murmured comforting sounds while Ari tried to get her head around this news. Vince had woken up today—somewhere—not knowing that it was his last. He’d had a double espresso, probably. His favorite.
Now he was just gone.
Ari burst into tears.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry,” Becca said, hugging her.
Ari sobbed. But it wasn’t grief in the simplest sense. That was simply the moment her consciousness picked to put all the pieces together. It was terrifying. You could love someone and they could change until they were unrecognizable. You could sleep over a handgun in the floorboards and not know it. You could be trapped in your bathroom while someone tried to break in. And you could escape from the mayhem while your ex-lover died within earshot.
It was all too much. She hugged Becca tightly and cried like there was no tomorrow.
TWENTY-EIGHT
It would be hours before O’Doul could finally shut the door to his apartment on the last visitor. Friends, cops and members of the Bruisers organization had buzzed around all evening, asking questions. The police had an investigation to carry out, and Nate’s team was preparing to handle the mess in Ari’s house. And as soon as the police had finished their investigation, Nate’s people would hire a company to clean away any evidence of struggle or death. They’d secure the place, fixing broken windows and doors.
Now that everyone was finally gone, it was up to him to do what he could for Ari. She still hadn’t said much. After ushering out the last visitor, he locked the door and made up a bowl of soup for her. Someone—probably Becca—had had the presence of mind to order takeout and leave it there for the two of them.
He brought her a tray on the sofa. She thanked him at a whisper and then began to eat the soup. But the look in her eyes was glassy. He had the impression that the slightest breeze could knock her over. As soon as she’d finished the bowl, he took the tray away. When he returned, she sat hugging her knees to her chest, curled in on herself.
He stopped himself from asking, are you okay? There was no point. Of course she wasn’t okay. She was grieving the man with whom she’d spent her twenties. And she was traumatized by the way it had all gone down.
If he weren’t so busy taking care of her, he might be traumatized, too.
Sitting down close to her now, he pulled her into his lap, which was more for his benefit than hers. All afternoon his gut kept clenching at the memory of two men entering Ari’s front door—one with a gun drawn. Nothing had ever scared him so much as those assholes disappearing into her house, shutting the door behind them.
Panicked, he’d sprinted toward the door. As he reached it, he heard the sound of the deadbolt clicking into place.
Dread had clawed at his insides as he snuck around the outside of the building, looking for another way in. The whole thing had been like a nightmare brought to life. All he could do was call out a warning at the top of his lungs and hope they didn’t point the gun out the window and shoot him for it.
“Why were you there?” she asked suddenly, as if she’d been listening to his thoughts. “How did you know something was wrong?”
He cleared his throat. “When Nate’s people gave you that panic button, they also programmed your phone to pick up anything suspicious from Vince. I was just leaving the rink when I got a call from security saying you’d had two phone conversations with him, and an email with a threatening subject. They could see that I was only a block and a half away, and they asked me to check on you.”
“Oh. Wow.”
He gave her a squeeze. Their gazes connected for the first time in an hour. And he felt the same thing he always felt when she looked at him—hope. Only this time, the hope wasn’t for sex, or even that she’d somehow agree that they should be a couple. The hope was that she’d be okay.
“I should never have let him in,” she said, her voice flat. “He might still be alive if I didn’t open that door.”
“That was not your fault. It was never going to end well for him. I heard the police say the Pryzyk brothers had been hunting for Vince and that gun. He stole it from them for some kind of leverage, I think. That wasn’t ever gonna end well.”
“I’m sorry you got dragged into it. Wish I could make it up to you.”
He wrapped her into a hug and sighed against her shoulder. “Christ, Ari,” he whispered. “You don’t have to do anything but keep breathing, okay?”
She put her arms around him, too. He’d never felt anything better. “You got me out of there. I can’t even believe . . .” He heard her swallow hard, the sentence sticking in her throat.
“Shhh.” He hadn’t meant to scare her all over again. “You would have been okay either way.”
She shivered in his arms. “It’s finally done, right? It’s over. That guy got away, though.”
Unfortunately one of them had. Just one Pryzyk had been apprehended under the Manhattan Bridge while trying to dispose of the gun that had killed Vince, and the other one was still on the loose.
But nobody believed Ari was still in danger.
“It’s over, sweetheart,” he said. “You’ve got nowhere to go but up.” He held the woman he loved a little more tightly. Christ. He’d never used that word on anybody, even in his head. On any other day he’d probably have found it terrifying. But today he’d known really terror. Admitting to himself he loved Ari was suddenly as easy as breathing.
She pressed her face into his neck, and he cl
osed his eyes. He brought himself fully into the moment and focused on the way her soft lips felt against his skin. With his whole body, he measured all the places of their connection. The weight of her curves in his lap, and against his chest. The texture of her soft sweater against his forearms. He rubbed her back and took it all in.
He’d always been terrible at meditating in yoga class, but that’s because he hadn’t been meditating on this.
“I’m cold,” she said, curling closer.
Poor baby. “You haven’t eaten much today, and your body is off-kilter. Shock is tricky. We could tuck you into bed under a pile of blankets. Or you could have a bath.” He smoothed down her hair with one hand.
“That sounds nice.”
He kissed her forehead, then deposited her on the sofa. “I’ll run it for you. Be right back.”
The giant tub in his killer bathroom could fix her right up. It always helped him after an especially brutal game. He started the tap—it was a big slot in the tiled wall, so that there’d be no pointing faucet to get in the bathers’ way. Then he found some big fluffy towels in his linen closet and turned the heat up, so she wouldn’t be cold when she got out.
But when he returned to tell Ari that all was ready, he realized the bandages on her hands could be an issue. “You’ll have to keep your hands out of the water.”
She stood up. “Good point. But I still want to soak right now. I just want to wash it all away.”
“I know, baby. Go ahead. I’ll bring you a mug of tea, too?”
Ari gave him a weak smile. “I have no idea what I’d do without you today.”
He kissed her cheek and nudged her toward the bathroom. The truth was that there were a lot of people standing by to help. Her mom and her great-uncle in Florida had already bought plane tickets to fly up tomorrow to stay with her. And Becca and Georgia would have happily taken her in.
The reason Ari was here with him was because he needed it, and she’d allowed it. If she’d gone to stay in the guest room at Leo’s he’d probably be camped out on the floor right now, just watching over her.