“No!” I fell to my knees, my head tucked into her lap as I gave in to the overwhelming need to shut my eyes.
In those last moments, I wondered if this was the end of us or the beginning. Would I see her on the other side or would I gaze at her from a distance as she made her way into heaven? We were always from different worlds, and I knew in the end, we’d still be separated. Good versus evil. Darkness and light. Heaven and hell.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Devlin
It was an abstract painting. A psychopath’s twisted masterpiece splattered carelessly on the wall. It was a red-stained mural that was the centerpiece to my mind’s eye. It was the nightmare I relived all too often.
Red.
I fucking hated red.
The smell of it—taste of it.
You might say red doesn’t have these depictions, but every time I saw that color, my senses went into overload. To me, it was a trigger. It signified blood. Metallic and bitter against my lips as I held my mother for the last time.
He’d left her, bleeding out on the floor like someone he’d never loved. Someone who at one point had risked her family’s wrath to be with him. Her betrayal erased all those years, all the love.
She’d done it to save her family. She’d done it because the man she’d fallen in love with turned into a money hungry killer. She’d grown up in a family with mafia affiliations, so when she met Damien, she thought she could handle him—tame him, but his wildness stopped being attractive when his manic behavior took over.
She’d given information to her dad about a hit that was going down, and it had nearly gotten Damien killed. She’d done it in hopes of ridding us of the life we’d been living. She knew Damien had begun to train me to shoot a gun. She knew it was only a matter of time until he dragged me into the business. Her move had been bold, and in the end, she’d paid the ultimate price. And for what? To save me? The way I saw it, I’d never been worth the sacrifice. I was the man she feared I’d become, and I didn’t see a path that could’ve led me off Damien’s pre-planned course.
The click of a gun.
The deafening blast.
The resulting trauma all lived with me. The terror in my mother’s eyes, then the total mutilation of her beauty and annihilation of life.
I fell to my knees and held her—cradled her. I wasn’t concerned about the blood or the totality of holding death in my arms and how that would haunt me for years to come. I was just an eight-year-old boy trying to cling to his mother as Damien pulled at me, finally succeeding to drag me away from her and out of the room. There was never any memorial or resting place I could go to visit her. Damien had his henchmen dispose of her like she was just another casualty of his business.
~*~*~
I peeled my eyes open to the blinding light and a silhouette of Juliana. This was what it was like to die? I hadn’t expected to see her again. If I had even a small belief in God, then I knew we’d be going to different worlds in the end.
“Are you an angel?”
She smiled, smoothing my hair back with her hand. “No, I’m not an angel.”
A pounding pain in my head commenced. The blur in my eyes cleared, and I realized the beeping sound was a hospital monitor. I tried to sit up, but a pain shot from my shoulder and resonated through every cell.
“Fuck…”
Juliana rested her hand on my chest and frowned at me. “You can’t get up.”
I stared at her trying to make sense of why she was here. Why she was perfectly fine. I’d watched her die. “You were shot.”
She furrowed her brows and shook her head slowly. “No, you were shot.”
“I remember everything. Damien shot you, and you died.”
The beeping sound of the monitor sped up.
“Dev, calm down. I swear to you I’m fine. Damien kept me in another room. When Tyler showed up, he released me, and we found you passed out with your head on a chair.”
“No. That’s insane. You were in that chair. You were bleeding, and my mom was there.”
“Okay, Devlin, I’m going to go get a nurse. Maybe she can give you something to relax.”
“I don’t want to relax,” I growled in frustration. I didn’t know why I was making a big deal about what she was telling me. It was great that she was alive, but I was also worried this wasn’t real either, and I’d snap out of my episode to still find Juliana gone.
“What do you want?”
I motioned her forward with my fingers. “I want you to tell me this is real. I need you to fucking promise me this is real.”
Tyler entered the room with his know-it-all smirk on his face. “It’s real, asshole. And the next time I have to save your ass, I’m going to charge.”