Mockingbird (A Stepbrother Romance) (21 page)

"Where is it?" my father demands.

"There," Carol nods at the table in the middle.

There's a crate in the center. It's…
little
. I seriously thought it would be bigger than that.

"This is how it's going to work. You two, get in the vault. Apollo is going to set the painting on the floor and get in there with you."

Carol's eyes go wide.

"Wait, no! You
can't!"

He snaps the gun away from my head to aim at her. "Yes, you can."

"No, please! If they don't know the painting is missing, no one will check in the vault for days, we'll suffocate-"

"That would be terrible," he says, and shoots her.

The
bang
next to my head is more than a gunshot, it's a physical force. I stumble sideways. Diana lets out an almost inhuman cry of fear and aguish. Carol falls against the wall and slides to the floor, leaving a smear of blood down the concrete as she goes.

"Mom!" Diana wails, "
Mom!"

"You son of a
bitch,"
I roar, turning. I swing both hands. I"m too close. He got too close to me. His arm is out straight and I catch his elbow. It goes off again, and Diana dives to the floor. We go down in a heap, grappling. I claw at his hand, trying to get the gun away. Something drives into my side, and agony spreads through my body like liquid fire.

I jerk back and swing at him. We turn and twist. I smash my fist down on his hand, and his fingers fly open. The gun skids away. We roll. My side is hot, sticky. I touch my shirt and my hand comes away red. He's got a punch blade in his hand, a little knife with a t-handle so the point sticks out between his fingers.

He
stabbed me
.

We roll. He tries to get on top of me. I catch his wrist, keep him from driving the point into my temple.

He grabs something on the table and I narrowly avoid the edge of a sword taking off half my face. He's got a
sword.

Of course. We're in a museum.

He knows all my moves. He's always been able to beat me at everything. I look past him, over his shoulder, see Diana holding her mother, desperately clutching the wound in her side.

There's one move I never used on him.

I knee him in the groin.

He howls in agony. It's enough. I shove him off me, roll, and as I put my hands down to get up, my fingers close around supple, well-worn leather.

We would end up doing this in a place with swords lying everywhere.

I yank the museum piece free of the scabbard. It's not the type I'm used to sparring with or training for, but the commonly held believe that European swords are clumsier or heavier than Japanese weapons is a myth. This is actually lighter than my practice blade, with a wicked, nearly four foot blade that tapers to a wicked point. The blade ripples a little when it catches the light, from the smith's hammering. It's the real deal.

My father goes after his gun.

"
En garde,
motherfucker!" I bellow, and I almost have him.

His defensive swipe, barely deserving to be called a parry, is weak. He strikes my blade aside and rolls to his feet, tosses the punch blade and lunges at me.

This isn't a game. We've never practiced with even blunted metal swords, much less live steel. This is it. This is the real deal. I have to keep him off the sword. I have to beat him. That might mean I have to kill him. Diana's mom is going to bleed out.

He's been training me for this the whole time and never even knew it.

Blades clash, flat on flat, as I try to hack an opening into his defense. If I tire I lose my advantage, but I feel worse every second, like every beat is draining blood from my head. I'm bleeding bad from my side, where that blade sawed into my flesh, just above my bottom rib. My father presses his advantage, striking at the side he knows is weakest. He's not holding back, he's not teaching me, he's trying to kill me. Every swing almost makes it. He goes high when I think he's going to go low, he feints, he defies my attempts to read his muscle movements and looks to predict where he will strike. All at once the advantage is gone.

Then I hear Diana wailing, as she clutches her mother. Carol is ashen, her face slack.

I throw myself at my father as I never have before, molten fury exploding in my chest, surging down my limbs as renewed energy. Swing strike, parry. He's moving back. He hurt his leg on the table, it's making some of his strokes and parries slow, off of the forms. I let him swing at me and my parry turns into a riposte, melding defense with attack.

It was a feint. The point of his sword goes into my thigh and through and out the other side. My arms fall slack to my sides in shock. It fucking
hurts
. He draws it out and I fall to my knees, then onto my side, clutching the wound. Holy shit.

I'm going to die. He raises the sword over his head, about to crudely bury it in my skull, like he would if he was chopping wood.

Bang
.

In a movie, a red dot would appear on his chest and he'd look down in confusion. In real life, there's a puckered dark red flower on his chest and the sword goes flying out of his hands as blood paints the wall behind him in a
splat,
audibly distinct from
 
the gunshot and even his groan.

Diana pulls the trigger again and again and again and empties the gun almost before it hits the ground. When my father hits the wall, he's already dead. His chest looks like a piece of meat that someone took a tenderizing mallet to. He doesn't say anything. He just falls down all in an awkward boneless heap and Diana drops the gun and starts shrieking.

I'm looking at my leg. I'm bleeding.

A lot.

That doesn't seem important, though.

I'm sleepy. Really sleepy.

Diana is screaming at me.

She won't let me go to sleep.

Chapter 14: Diana

The time is just gone.

It comes to me in flashes, like I'm reliving it while I live it. I can feel the kick of the gun in my hand, the checkered grips digging into my skin as I pull the trigger over and over and over until the top locks back and it's empty. I can see Apollo's father slumped against the wall. He doesn't look peaceful or have a frozen sneer or a faraway look. He looks confused, if anything. His face is just slack. I can feel the same hand pressed to my mother's side, holding in her blood with a handkerchief I found somewhere. She looks so pale, like all the color is leaking out of her through her wound.

Apollo is lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood. I'm screaming at him to move, to get up, until my throat is raw. Bob Anderson runs into the room.

Then I'm in an ambulance between two gurneys. There's plastic tubes and wires everywhere. I hear my mother's ribs crack as the EMT gives her CPR. Apollo isn't moving.

It's like five minutes has passed, but hours have gone missing. I'm sitting on a bench outside an operating room. It's built into the wall, in front of a window, facing the door. It's not like a TV operating room door, the swingy kind with the round porthole windows. It's unusually wide but it's just a door. Charity has her arms around my shoulders, and I can't stop crying into her. At least not for the first few hours. Then I just sit there, shell-shocked, staring at nothing.

Please. Please. Please.

It takes fourteen hours before the doctor comes out. He's not covered in blood but he does have a doctor's mask hanging around his neck like a weird bleached necktie. His hands are very clean.

"Diana?"
 

"Yeah," I croak.

"Your mother is going to make it."

I nod. My chin trembles and Charity's grip tightens.

"The bullet went through her side, but it broke one of her ribs and collapsed her left lung. She's going to be out for a few days. It will be a long recovery, but she should be back to a hundred percent eventually."

I nod again.

"We'll page you when she's been moved to her room, okay? There's no need to sit out here for hours. It's going to be a while before we move her. She's stable. She's safe."

He stands there for a minute like he's trying to figure out something to add, something comforting to say. You'd think after enough practice it would come naturally. It probably doesn't.

Time to go.

The last time I saw Apollo he was unconscious. His surgery was simpler, he was moved to the intensive care ward faster. A puncture wound to his right side and a stab wound through his leg. It was a miracle that the blade didn't hit any major arteries, or he'd have bled out before the ambulance arrived no matter what I did. I can still feel myself freezing as he laid there and I thought Mom was dying in my arms. When people say they freeze up it's like the mean they go still. I felt frozen, like all the blood drained out of me, too, and ice replaced it and I just couldn't move.

It takes work to steel myself to see him again. The last I was up here was lying in the hospital bed with all the machines beeping around him and blood in plastic bags leaking back into his body to replace what he'd lost. He looked so
small
. When we met one of the first things I noticed was how he towered over me. I stop in the corridor and take a deep breath, and slowly remove Charity's hand from my arm. No words are exchanged. She leans on the wall and looks down at the floor, her expression dark.

I walk into the room, over to the bed, and my blood freezes again. Then I start screaming.

A nurse comes running in and grabs me and before the first word is out of her mouth I grab her back and shake her.

"
Where is he?"

She looks at the bed, at me, at the bed.

"I…"

She shakes loose and runs out of the room. I follow right on her heels as she runs behind the nurse's station to the computer.

"He… we didn't move him, I…"

All the color is draining from her face. I run back into the room. I touch
 
the bed, feeling the impression where his body lay before I went down to wait for Mom to come out. The sheets are still warm. The IV lines are dangling unhooked from the pole. The muted TV is tuned to
Maury
. He was just here. Back out into the hallway, running so fast I skid on the slick tiles. She runs to me, her face a mask of shock.

"What-"

"It doesn't matter, he's still here somewhere. Find him."

"What? How-"

"
Look,"
I scream, and run away from her. Over my shoulder I see her mouth snap closed and she runs off. Down the hall, she grabs a security guard, yelling at him.

I run. I run through wards, I run through doors that read EMPLOYEES ONLY, I run past security guards that turn on their heels to follow me. I smash through the doors into a stairwell and run down two at a time, so fast that later I'll wonder how I didn't break my neck. Think, Diana. Find him.

On the first floor I stop, look around.

Doctors. Doctors everywhere and…

…one of them is limping, leaning on the wall. Favoring his right leg.

I run up. Grab his arm.

Apollo turns.

"What the
fuck
are you doing?" I hiss. "Get back in bed. Now."

"I can't, Diana."
 

I start to say something but it dies in my throat, just rattles away to nothing.

He grabs my arms. His hands are cold. Oh my God, he's still bleeding. Apollo you idiot, what are you doing?

"Listen to me," he rasps, his voice breathy and weak. "I have to go."

"What? Why?"

"If I stay they'll start asking questions. Then they'll arrest me. I can't let that happen."

I wriggle loose from his grip and he leans on the wall. He's so pale. When I get him back in the bed and safe I'm going to kill him.

"So this is about you?"

"No, it's about
you.
Your safety," he gasps. "Had to think it was real. Weren't supposed to find me. Needed you to think… I was dead…"

He winces when he sees the look on my face as my expression crumples, my lips tremble, and hot tears cut lines down my cheeks. "You're just going to leave me? After all this? You bastard."

"No," he shakes his head. "Never. Danger. You, your mom. Have to think I'm dead. Wait a while. Have things to fix. Things to put right. Have to. Trust me. I'll be back."

"Apollo-"

"Diana," he says, a renewed strength filling his voice even as his body shakes. "I have to do this. I will come back. Please. I love you."

I grab the collar of his scrubs and kiss him, hard. He kisses me back, slipping his arms around me, leaning on me, breathing against me. He's so weak. I could just drag him back upstairs.

"Go back," he murmurs, his forehead pressed to mine. His soft rasping voice is the only thing in the world. "Go back and tell them you couldn't find me. Make it look real."

That won't be too hard.

"Come back to me."

"I will."

"Promise."

"I promise," he says, and kisses me again.

I let him go.

I can't watch. He has to be okay. He has to make it. I run back up the stairs. I'm heading for the ICU but I stop, run through some other places first, let the guards catch me. The words are lies but the emotions are real, I don't have to make myself cry until I can't breathe and Charity has to stop them from dragging me off and sedating me or something. She takes me back to Mom's room. They've moved her now. I can't tell either of them.

Eventually there are no more tears left to shed. I stare at the wall.

Charity falls asleep. Chunks of time bite themselves out of my memory. The next five days are a blur. On the sixth day Mom wakes up, on the seventh she's eating Jell-O and orders me to go home and sleep in a real bed. Charity spends that night with me, and a few more off and on until we bring my mother home.

She makes me fill out my responses to my acceptance letters.

She never says one word about Apollo.

In July I receive my confirmation package, invitation to orientation, tour dates, the works. I'm going to college.

About a week after that, I realize that it's been way too long since I had a period.

Chapter 15: Apollo

I fly coach to Zurich.