Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Alec looks to me once more. I nod, letting him know I have it. The situation. I have it. He stands and marches over to Liam.
“You know this place?” Alec asks. Liam nods. “Lead me. Fokken now, bru.”
There’s an economy of language at work that I have seldom heard coming out of Alec’s mouth, if ever. It is the kind of precise, no-nonsense tone that a drill sergeant might use. It is Alec stripped of all the coverings he wears and boiled down to his essence. It is honest. It is pure. It is true.
Liam starts off, Alec on his six, and Danny rises to his feet and stumbles after them.
“What are you doing, bru?” Alec asks him.
“I’m coming with you.”
“No, man—”
“Guy tried to get Christine to kill me and shot me in the fucking eye, dude. I’m coming.”
Alec takes half a breath, but then decides not to argue and continues following Liam up onto the stage and into the… wings, I guess.
Danny looks at me with his blood-covered face, one eye completely shrouded and useless and the other squinting just enough that I can still see Danny behind it. He doesn’t say anything and we look at each other for less than a second, but it’s long enough for me to nod and let him know I’m okay.
He stumbles forward and lurches after Alec and Liam as they disappear from the room, leaving me alone with Eliza and the collapsed carnage of the recently living.
My hands are wet. My jacket is soaked through with Eliza’s blood. She coughs. It looks painful.
“Christine…” she groans out, less audible than she was a moment ago.
I bend over to try to hear her better, finding my hand automatically going to her head to stroke her golden-blonde hair. It’s a fulfillment of the impulse I had when we were sitting behind her in the van in Belfast. What seemed like a weird instinct that I didn’t follow through with at the time feels like exactly the right thing to do now. It feels like the only thing to do now.
I run my hand across her head as I lean over, smearing her own blood into her hair, and notice the color. The deep, dark, black-redness being painted into the golden, yellow-blonde reminds me of the sun. Beauty and destruction at once.
I lean closer still so she can hear me whisper and I can hear her shallow pants.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I tell her, softly.
“Yes, I should,” she manages, quieter still.
“Eliza…”
“Take care of them,” she cuts me off.
“Who?”
“Both of them.”
I think she might be delirious. I can’t grasp what she’s saying. Alec and Danny? What is she—?
“Andra and yours,” she whispers, almost void of breath. “Andra and yours,” she repeats, reaching her hand out to place on my stomach. “Break the cycle, yeah? Give them better. Let them… be happy.”
She clutches at my shirt and tenses her body, arching her back in pain.
When shock wears off, pain starts.
“Please, Christine, please. Please. I’m… sorry…” she mumbles, barely there now.
“It’s okay. No, look, it’s… We all… It’s okay. Don’t… Eliza? Eliza? … Eliza?”
No response.
Her unfocused eyes stare at nothing as Eliza Watson dies in my arms.
I don’t cry. I don’t yell or rail or even really breathe. I just stare at her, remembering the time we first met, sitting outside that club in London, talking about how one would go about stealing the Crown Jewels.
The Crown Jewels.
Diamonds.
The diamond.
The diamond that started this.
The diamond that I took.
I started this.
And I have to end it.
I stand, slowly, gently letting Eliza’s head rest on the floor as I rise to my feet. I pick up my jacket, now soaked through with her blood, and slide it back on.
I stare at her there for a second, once again allowing memories to run through my mind but stopping them before they get to be unhelpful and paralyzing.
I walk over to one of the other dead bodies in the room. One of the dead young men who had the misfortune of being here today.
I pick up his abandoned AK.
I check the clip.
I slap it back into place.
I sling it over my shoulder.
I glance one last time at Eliza, lifeless on the cold castle floor.
And I head off in the direction Alec and Danny went.
To finish this.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I can’t see shit.
One eye is covered by a veil of blood and the other is very probably gone for good. And I’m starting to question if my premonition of the future was a true look into the unknown or if it was just some kind of fantasy. Wishful thinking.
And then another, more terrifying thought occurs to me: In my vision, dream, or whatever you want to call it, I only saw a future with me and Christine. Alec wasn’t there. What I imagined didn’t appear to have him in it. At least not that I recall.