Closing her eyes, Starla said a prayer to the God her parents insisted was real and placed two searching fingertips on his neck, feeling for a pulse.
She almost fainted in relief when she found one. It was weak and fast, but it was there, and maybe her screams had been heard after all, because the sound of running feet and shouting voices was suddenly all around her. Ghost was there, and she’d never been so relieved to see him in her life. Janelle took Starla by the arms and tried to pull her up and away, but she fought. She’d almost forgotten she had the phone to her ear until a voice sounded. “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
Her inane babbling didn’t make any sense to her own ears, but somehow she managed to choke out the address and request an ambulance, running on complete autopilot as she watched Ghost try to find the source of Brian’s wound.
“Here it is. Fuck. Lower left back. It might be his kidney. Tell them to hurry the fuck up, Star, or he won’t make it.” He snatched his own T-shirt off over his head and wadded it up, his face a pale nightmarish image of horror. He’s scared—Ghost is scared, and that’s never good, she thought irrationally. “I’m putting pressure on it,” he said.
Her voice shaking, she conveyed all that information to the dispatcher, who kept her on the phone until the distant sound of sirens reached them. She thanked the dispatcher and hung up, her heart pounding in her eardrums.
Max had done this. Max had tried to kill Brian. This couldn’t be random, couldn’t be a coincidence. Because of her mistake, because of her not listening, because of her being a fucking idiot, her friend, her love—a husband, father, son, and brother—was dying in front of her.
When she found that goddamn motherfucking piece of shit, she would kill him herself. They wouldn’t be able to stop her. She would gladly face a life in prison to get her hands around his throat.
“Oh, Brian,” she said weakly, staring at his beloved face, so pallid now. At least he wasn’t awake to be in pain. She couldn’t think about the pain he’d just gone through pulling himself across the parking lot, the fear, the desperation he must have felt. How he must have been thinking about Candace and Lyric.
And Candace. What to do about Candace? Starla couldn’t imagine making that call.
No. No call. She needed to be told in person, but not by someone wearing a good portion of her husband’s blood. Starla looked up at Janelle, who stood with her head down and her arms crossed, sobbing with huge, gasping breaths. She’d never seen Janelle cry, ever.
“Jan?” As the ambulance rushed into the parking lot followed by two police cars, Starla found the strength to stand and go to her friend. Janelle all but collapsed in her arms, and somehow she held on to her without falling herself. After a moment of pointlessly trying to comfort her, she said, “Someone has to go tell Candace.”
Sniffling, Jan backed away and nodded. “I can do that.”
“Are you sure? If you’re not—”
“No. I can. I don’t—I can’t be here, seeing him like that.”
They were all in some kind of shock, no doubt. Starla wasn’t sure how she hadn’t gone screaming into madness herself. Maybe that would come later. Right now, this was the top priority. Candace. Not her own shock and devastation, but that of the one who stood to lose her entire world tonight.
“We need to get his family too,” she said, realizing she still clutched his bloody cell phone in her hand. Hell. She shouldn’t have removed anything from a crime scene, right? But all the contacts she needed would be right here. Even as she looked down at it, a text message from Candace popped up. She couldn’t help but see it right there on the display, the letters branding themselves into her brain. Good! Lyric has been smiling and laughing all day. We can’t wait to see you. :)
Starla might have lost it then, but Ghost came over to join them, shirtless, bloody, his fingers laced behind his head. His skin was, well, ghostlike against the obscene red and his black ink. The police had secured the scene, and paramedics had shooed him away to take over. “Janelle is going to get Candace,” Starla told him.
Ghost dropped his arms and shook his head. “No. The cops want to talk to us. I’ll call Macy and Sam. They can go get her and Lyric and bring them to the hospital.”
Why hadn’t she thought of that? Candace’s best friends in the world would surely be a better option. Even better than Candace’s family, who would probably throw a party if Brian Ross bought it facedown in a parking lot. Bastards, the lot of them.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s better.” She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to hear what was going on down there on the ground fifteen feet away from her. Her heart was a trip-hammer in her chest, skipping beats, and someone might have to do CPR on her if the unthinkable happened and they lost him. But she had to look. The paramedics were in the process of moving Brian to a gurney, one of them fitting him with an oxygen mask.
At least he wasn’t on the ground anymore. It was important somehow. “Oh God,” she muttered, fearing that breakdown fast approaching.
“Let’s keep it together,” Ghost said, his voice as thin as the night air. “I have to go call Macy. The cops want to talk to us.” It didn’t escape her that he was repeating himself. His thoughts were as fractured as her own.
“I want to go with him,” Starla said. If these were Brian’s last minutes on earth, she didn’t want to see them. But she deserved to see them. She would see them, and she would carry that nightmare with her for the rest of her life as punishment for what she had done. Her fault, it was all her fault.
The paramedics loaded the gurney into the ambulance. She stared blindly until Brian was no longer in sight. A police officer climbed in with them. In case he wakes up, she thought. In case he wakes up and names his attacker before…before he dies.
“We all do, Star, but we can’t.” More police cars were arriving. In a town as sleepy as this one usually was, this was a big night for the local law enforcement, Starla thought bitterly. And, true to Ghost’s word, it wasn’t long before the employees of Dermamania were separated to be questioned. Hell, the boss had been bleeding out in the parking lot from a stab wound while two of his coworkers were covered in blood—the night was going to be much longer than Starla had anticipated.
Chapter Sixteen
Jared woke to his doorbell ringing. And ringing. And ringing. As if someone was outside the front door leaning on the damn thing in the middle of the night.
“What the hell,” he muttered, thrusting back his covers. Someone was about to get their ass kicked. Morning barely stained the sky outside. But as immediately as anger had come, dread replaced it. Ashley and Mia were with their mom, and if something had happened…
Clumsily pulling on pajama bottoms, he stumbled and staggered out of the room heading for the front door, slamming his toe with a stream of curses in the process. But when he took a peek out the side window, all pain was forgotten. His eyes saw what was there, but his brain couldn’t process it.
Starla. Bathed in the buttery glow of his porch light, she was covered in something dark. It streaked her arms and hands and crusted in her blonde hair. In the light’s sickly pallor, it could’ve been mud, but somehow he knew it wasn’t.
Blood. He threw the door open and didn’t even have time to ask what the hell had happened to her before she practically collapsed into his arms as if a puppeteer had cut her strings.
Her limpness terrified him. What had that son of a bitch done to her?
“What happened?” he demanded as she sobbed into his naked chest, her fingernails biting in the flesh of his back. “Are you hurt?”
“It’s Brian. It’s Brian.”
Without another word, he scooped her up and kicked the door closed. Horror for her gnawed at his gut, but he tried to keep a clear head. She needed to get cleaned up, get all this blood off her. So much of it… If it all came out of one person, he wondered how that person could still be alive. He didn’t want to ask yet. He didn’t know if he was ready for the answer.
Jared didn’t know Brian, only knew of him, but he’d seemed like an okay guy. At least Macy had said so.
Starla was featherlight and trembling in his arms. What the hell should he do with her? Leaving her alone didn’t seem the best option, but neither did leaving her like this. He took her into his bathroom and set her on her feet, making sure she could support her own weight before he let go.
In this lighting, she was even more of a fright. Hair a mess and streaked with brownish red where she’d been pushing it back with bloody fingers. She’d apparently changed clothes, wearing a clean but very unStarla-like white T-shirt, but her skin was still streaked a vicious, disturbing dark crimson. He cranked the shower on. “You need to clean up. I’ll get you something else to wear.”
Sniveling, she nodded. “I didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t go home, I just couldn’t. And…and…”
“Starla.” He drew a deep breath. “Is he alive?”
Fresh tears streaming down her cheeks, she nodded. “He’s alive. He just came out of surgery. They won’t say he’s out of the woods yet, but he’s hanging on.”