Fierce(74)

I don’t know how I feel about it. I don’t feel like I need to cry. All I am is shocked and horrified. That’s it.

But seeing Evie like this reminds me that she had a much stronger bond with Scarlet than I previously thought. It seems as though she really lost a friend. And I feel sorry for not knowing, for not being there in her place to find out about this so she wouldn’t have had to witness it on her own.

God. How she must have felt seeing Scarlet in that state. By herself. With nobody to lean on.

“This isn’t good …” Hunter mumbles, picking up the syringe from the floor carefully so as not to touch the needle.

I’m still calming Evie down, so it’s hard to look at what he’s doing.

“Fuck …” he says.

“What?” I say.

“Drugs.” He holds up the syringe for me to see, but I’m too far away to see what it means. I don’t have to; I believe him if he says it’s so.

“She OD’ed?”

He lets out a huge breath. “Yes and no.”

“Which is it? It can’t be both,” I say.

His jaw tightens, and he purses his lips. Hunter just stares at me, then flicks his eyes at Evie, and then back at me. He doesn’t even need to speak to let me know what he’s thinking. He wants to tell me something, but he doesn’t want her to hear.

“Evie …” I mutter.

She looks up, her eyes swollen and red. I don’t want to hurt her. She shouldn’t have to watch this. She shouldn’t have been here at all. It’s all my fault. If I’d been a good friend, she would be sleeping in her own bed in our room, and she never would have witnessed this.

“You should go back to our room.”

“B-but …”

I squeeze her shoulder. “It’s better if you’re somewhere you feel safe. Make yourself a cup of tea and crawl under the blanket.”

She just gazes at me, her lips pouty. She sniffs.

I smile at her to make her feel at ease. “It’s okay. Hunter and I will take care of it.”

“W-we can’t leave her like t-this,” she stammers, and she briefly glances at Hunter.

“We’ve got it covered,” I say.

“You should rest,” Hunter says.

After a few seconds of staring her down, she gives in. Nodding, she turns around and walks to our room, still holding onto the wall. This has devastated her.

Dammit.

Hunter covers Scarlet’s body with a blanket, careful not to leave any traces of him touching the evidence, except the syringe, which he places on the cabinet beside her bed.

I check to see if Evie’s gone into the room before turning around. Holding my arms, I brace myself for the news he’s about to share.

“That wasn’t just an OD,” he says.

I just wait for the next blow to come.

“She couldn’t have gotten this drug from us. We never, never, sell this.”

“What is it?”

“Heroin.”

Holy shit. Heroin? That drug that turns people’s lives completely upside down, scarring them for life?

“Maybe one of your guys made a mistake,” I say.

“They’re not my guys and they didn’t make a mistake,” he hisses.

“But she wouldn’t do that, would she?”

“No. She only used the drugs as a means to escape. It was a one- or two-time thing. Nothing big. She wasn’t an addict, and trust me, I know it when I see one; she wasn’t one of them.”

My breath is getting more ragged by the second. “Was she experimenting or something?”

“I don’t know …” he says.

“Maybe it was an accident. Maybe she took too much,” I whisper.

“No, absolutely not. She’d never take too much. She told me she had too much to live for, I remember her telling me at the party when I asked her if everything was okay. I needed to check if she wasn’t taking them to … you know …”

Suicide. He doesn’t want to say the word, but I know exactly what he’s thinking.

“She knew the risks perfectly well,” he continues. “She wouldn’t do that.”

I sigh, leaning against the doorframe. I still can’t believe she’s really dead. It’s so unreal.

“Something’s wrong. This isn’t even our product.” He points at the syringe. “We only deal in powders and pills.”

He checks her body, probably to see if he can find anything else, a mark of the needle or something, I don’t know. I have no clue why he’s doing it. As if it’s going to change anything about the situation. Scarlet is dead. It was drugs. They’re dealers.

The cops will inevitably get involved. And Hunter might go to jail.