Run (22 page)

“Do it!” he barked.

Aya gripped the trigger with her finger.

“If you want me dead, go ahead and pull the trigger now, Aya, while you have a chance.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“If you didn’t believe me, then why did you pick it up? You know you want to do it. Go ahead, Aya, shoot.”

She shook her head as a sob escaped her lips, he represented everything she hated and after all he’d put her through, it would have been so easy to end it all right here but something held her back.

“Do it, Aya,” he taunted, taking a step forward.

Aya took a step backward, crying so hard her entire body shook.

He stomped across the room and before Aya realized what happened, he grabbed her hands and pulled the gun against his chest.

“You want to fucking kill me so do it, Aya!”

He gripped her hand tighter.

Aya tried to pull away but he wouldn’t release her.

“Shoot!” He roared, tightening his grip on her hands.

Bang!

The deafening boom reverberated throughout the room as a puff of white smoke, emitted from the weapon. The acrid scent of smoke burned her nostrils. Dare dropped to his knees, his eyes wide, his hand to his chest.

“Dare…” she whispered in disbelief. Aya had been so sure the weapon wasn’t deadly. Why else would he have given it to her, unless he had some kind of death wish?

Aya dropped the gun to the ground, scared at what she’d just done. She watched in horror as Dare’s hand fell away from his chest. It was covered in blood. He fell to the floor.

She rushed to his side. “Dare, what should I do? I didn’t think…” She didn’t know what to do, but instinctively, she pressed her hands against his chest to cut off the blood flow.

“Mr. Garrison!” she screamed in a panic. “House! Contact Mr. Garrison! Please!” Dare, I’m so sorry.”

He seemed to be fighting for consciousness as he rolled his head in her direction. “Aya…”

“Don’t speak, please.”

“Got to.” He coughed. “Your uncle…not…”

She gasped. “Why didn’t you tell me that?” Aya shook her head.  “Never mind just please stop talking, you’re making this worse.”

“Let me…finish. Uncle…not dead.” He coughed again, this time a splash of bright red blood spurted from his lips.

Mr. Garrison walked into the room. “What happened here?” He glared at Aya. “I’m contacting the enforcers as soon as I get medical attention for Mr. O’Shaughnessy.”

“No. Was…an accident,” Dare spoke more forcefully than he should have.

“Stop talking, please.” Aya pressed harder on his chest. There was so much blood. When she’d said she wanted him dead, she’d meant it in that actual moment. But when the time actually came to do the deed, she’d lost the heart to follow through. She definitely wouldn’t have, had he not forced her hand.

Mr. Garrison gave instructions to the house to contact emergency services and Dare’s personal physician. He left the room briefly and returned with a kit. “Please move out of the way, Miss Smith,” the estate manager ordered.

Aya allowed herself to be nudged away.

“Call Foster.” Dare weakly instructed Mr. Garrison.

“Aya,” he whispered.

She shook her head. “Don’t talk.”

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Just then, Mr. Garrison took a long black pen with a sharp point and stabbed it into Dare’s chest.

Dare’s eyelid fluttered before shutting.

Aya was almost too scared to ask, but she had to. “Is he…is he dead?”

“No. This is a medipen, it contains a medicine that prevents the body from going into shock, and it also slows the blood flow so a person won’t bleed out before they can be treated properly. The medical team will be here shortly. Perhaps, you should clean yourself up.” He looked at her with pursed lips.

“I can’t leave him like this.”

“As you wish.”

All this week, Mr. Garrison couldn’t do enough for her. Now, it seemed he was judge and jury and clearly he had found her guilty. And Aya agreed with him. She never should have allowed him to goad her. The price for that was Dare’s life.

Aya had never been in a proper hospital before. The insurance that her uncle had had was the most basic coverage that only covered visits to the overcrowded and understaffed government clinics. Now, she didn’t think it was a bad thing. Everything in this place was so sterile and lifeless. It gave her the chills. The hospital staff moved with precision and purpose, everyone seeming like they had someplace important to be.

Her stomach twisted in knots as she waited nervously for any news on Dare. The medical team was at the house within minutes of Mr. Garrison’s call. They’d worked on Dare’s listless body before carting him off. Enforcers had followed soon afterwards for questions. When Aya would have confessed everything that had happened, Mr. Garrison had cut her off and explained everything had all been an accident as Mr. O’Shaughnessy would verify when he was lucid.

The enforcers seemed to accept this explanation and had even left their names to contact them if there was any further information. Foster had come not too long afterwards. He seemed frazzled to learn what happened to his friend.

It was Foster who convinced her to clean herself, promising to take her to the hospital when she did. After washing and throwing on something to wear, she left the house with Foster, though Mr. Garrison had objected to her leaving.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessy said…”

“I think Mr. O’Shaughnessy would allow you to break the rules in this instance,” Foster had insisted.

Aya was thankful to have his presence with her right now because she was sure she’d lose her mind. The guilt was eating her up inside and she didn’t know how to assuage it. She thought that by destroying Dare all her problems would be solved, but they created the more. Like, when did she actually start to care about Dare beyond the bedroom? Had he brainwashed her in some way?

A hand fell on her knee, bringing Aya out of her thoughts. “You haven’t said a word since we got here.”

Aya shrugged. “I didn’t realize you were looking for conversation.”

“I wasn’t but while we’re waiting you could tell me what happened.”

“Don’t you already know? You requested to review the house footage while I was showering. You were rewinding it over and over again, when I came downstairs.”

“Yes, but there was no context. There must be a glitch in the system because the audio only cut on when he was screaming at you to do it. So how about backing up to the beginning.”

She shook her head. “It’s a long story actually, but everything finally came to a head today. I got angry and I thought I could go through with it and…” she broke off on a sob. “And when I finally had the chance to do it, I couldn’t.”

“Whoa. Back up. I’m missing a whole lot of this story. Let’s start from the beginning. We have a long wait ahead of us, so I’ve got nothing but time. Tell me what happened, Aya.”

“Apparently, it began for Dare before I even realized it. That incident in the boutique. Do you remember?”

“Of course. You were quite feisty. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Apparently, he noticed me as I was being dragged out of the boutique by the enforcers.”

Foster frowned. “He did? I didn’t see him around.”

“His vehicle was in traffic at the time. But where it began for me was when he entered my uncle’s bar. He came in and he was extremely arrogant and pretty rude to my uncle.”

Foster chuckled. “Yes, that sounds like Dare.”

“And then…” Aya proceeded to tell him everything, leaving nothing out. She told him about their sudden misfortune, her uncle confronting Dare which led to his arrest. She then spoke of her desperation to find work to earn money that would not only pay the bills to keep the bar running but also bail her uncle out. Her stomach turned as she described how it had felt to go from brothel to brothel and how they became seedier and seedier as she was rejected from each one. Aya shuddered as she described what it was like to participate in The Run.

Foster had the good grace to flinch when she got to that part. “I didn’t realize,” he whispered.

Aya shrugged. “Your kind never does. You take your pleasures wherever you please and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt in the process.”

“Aya, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me. You should do that to all the women you’ve hunted in that disgusting Run. To you, it was just a game. But to the women who volunteered, and I use that term loosely, they had the choice to either bear the humiliation of what that game put them through or in most cases watch their families starve. Some of those women put up with men like that rat face bastard, who will abuse them until they wish they were dead, like my friend, Macy. She was the kindest person I’ve met in this entire ordeal and he has her and I get sick to my stomach thinking what he might be doing to her—if she’s still alive.”

Foster turned bright red. “I’m nothing like West.”

“If that helps you sleep at night, keep telling yourself that. Anyway, do you want to hear the rest of the story or have you lost the nerve?”

He nodded, tight-lipped.

Aya described what it had been like living as Dare’s prisoner, hating him but wanting him at the same time. She told him how he’d even kept her apart from the staff and how lonely and isolated she’d felt. And then how utterly dead she’d felt inside after the night he’d dragged her out of the Sapphire Ball, even the calm before the storm when Dare began to treat her differently which brought her to today.

“And when he mentioned what happened to my uncle, I snapped. I attacked him and I had murder in my heart. I ran to the weapons room, because I really wanted to hurt him. I’m sure most of it you saw on the playback, but when he put the revolver in my hand, I lost my nerve. I couldn’t do it. After all he’d done to me, I didn’t want to. It caused me actual pain to even contemplate pulling that trigger. And, he kept goading me. It was like he wanted me to do it—like he wanted to die. When the gun went off, it was an accident. He was holding my hands so tightly I inadvertently squeezed the trigger too hard. And that’s it.” Aya, who didn’t think she had anymore tears to cry, started to sob loudly.

Foster wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. “I’m sorry Aya, I hadn’t realized... I’ve never known Dare to be this way around any woman before. I mean initially, he probably wanted to get back at you for rejecting him, but I think somewhere along the way, it became more. He started to develop feelings for you.”

Aya sniffed and raised her head. She was absolutely incredulous by Foster’s assumption. “I think you’ve got it all wrong. Dare O’Shaughnessy is incapable of feeling.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. He’s a pretty hard man to get to know but I probably know him better than most. Remember the morning after the ball, when you overheard us arguing?”

She frowned and nodded.

“Do you remember how much you heard?”

Furrowing her brow, she tried to recall that morning. Her mind was still fuzzy from all that happened in the past few hours. “Not much. Just, that you guys were talking about Dare’s father. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Surely you’ve heard of Aeden O’Shaughnessy. Before Dare, Aeden was pretty well known in the country as a huge industrialist. He was the one who revived The Run after the government made it defunct.”

“I vaguely remember the name but I think he died while I was still very young. I know I’ve seen his name on some buildings in town.”

“Yes, that was Dare’s father. If you think Dare is a difficult man, he has nothing on Aeden.”

“Did you know him well?”

“One does not get to know Aeden O’Shaughnessy. He and my father were business associates and often socialized so by default Dare and I had become friends. I wasn’t invited over to Dare’s house often, but when I was, his father, for lack of a better word, was cold. The way he communicated with Dare was like one would to a stranger, not like father and son. There were times, when I felt that Aeden hated Dare. He’d often call him names, right in front of me, so one could only wonder what went on when they were in private.”

“Oh, that sounds awful.”

“Trust me, it wasn’t comfortable being around them when Aeden was criticizing Dare for the slightest transgression. One of Aeden’s favorite things was to call his son weak. I can’t imagine what that would do to a person’s mind over time.”

Certain things Dare had said to her suddenly made sense. The obsession he seemed to have with being strong was put into perspective. “By any chance, did his father have strong opinions on the lower class?”

Foster let out a humorless laugh. “Strong opinion would be putting it mildly. He despised them. I know you have an idea that all members of the upper class are a bunch of uncaring bastards but most of us, are just kind of thoughtless. What can I say? We couldn’t help being born into our circumstances any more than you could. Sure there are assholes out there like Maxine Walters and Peter West, but most of us aren’t that bad. But Aeden O’Shaughnessy, he took his hate for the lower class to the next level. A lot of people speculate it was because it might have had something to do with his wife, who mysteriously vanished. They say she might have run off with someone in lower class, but we never saw him. Did you know it was Dare’s father who made the phrase Dreg so popular? He was so powerful, people emulated him.”

“Wow. I can see why Dare might have turned out the way he did.”

“Not to mention, what it must have done to him when Aeden ended his life so abruptly. As far as most of us knew, Aeden was healthy. But the way he died, made people speculate if there wasn’t some mental illness involved.”

Aya shrugged. “That’s a bit of a leap. People commit suicide all the time if they can afford the suicide pill. It makes death quick and painless. Even without the pill, people end their lives, especially when they’re in dire straits.”

“But that’s it, he could have taken a suicide pill if he’d wanted to but he slit his own throat. Right in front of Dare from what I understand. And that’s when the stories began to spread. All of a sudden, people began to remember strange behaviors and all the things they’d been scared to voice while he was alive but now it was out in the open. I can’t know for sure if this is accurate but my theory is that Dare’s been trying to live that stigma down ever since. It’s why he’s been driven to make an even bigger name for himself than his father and he has but it’s never made him happy. Maybe, he’s finally found a reason to be happy but it’s been so long since he’s laughed and smiled that he’s actually forgotten how to be happy.”

Aya understood what Foster was getting at but she didn’t want to accept it, wasn’t ready to. “No. Not me. He’s treated me horribly.”

“But you said this past week, he’s relented. Maybe, he’s been trying to change for your sake.”

“I doubt it.” Aya pulled away from Foster’s embrace wiping away a remnant of a tear. “You’re a good friend to Dare, and even though I doubt he’d appreciate you sharing as much as you did with me, I do. But it doesn’t negate everything he’s put me through. How can I care about someone who systematically and irrevocably destroyed my life?”

“Aya, you don’t strike me as a weak person. I’ve known lesser people who would have crumbled completely by now, but you’ve remained strong. Your uncle, from my understanding, is still alive and will be getting treatment. And having to go through The Run was a terrible experience for you, I get that. But in the end, all you lost were material things. I imagine someone with your spirit could rebuild or make another living and be successful at it. What I’m getting at is, you have the fortitude to win in life no matter what your circumstance.”

“That’s if Dare ever releases me.”

“Maybe, he will eventually. If he pulls out of this,” Foster said solemnly.

Here she was going on about her own problems and Foster was probably beyond worried about his friend. She tapped his shoulder to comfort him “I’m sorry, Foster. I know you’re probably wondering what’s happening with your friend.”