Crow’s Row (50 page)

Tiny held onto Victor for a few seconds, to see if Cameron was going to change his mind. When he didn’t, Tiny let Victor go. Victor’s knees buckled under him as he fell back to the ground, and he rushed out of the warehouse. Spider meaningfully glanced at me and Cameron, and then he walked out with Tiny at his side.

“Why are you letting him go?” I wondered accusingly as I turned to Cameron. What I saw in Cameron scared me more than anything Shield could have ever done to me … tears had welled up in Cameron’s eyes.

“Cameron …” I had lost my breath.

He grabbed me in a hug and whispered, “Emmy, you need to run. Now.”

I pushed him away. “What? No. I’m not going anywhere without you.”

He was in agony. Pain had carved deep fissures in his forehead.

“Tell me what’s going on. Right now,” I demanded and bit my lip, trying not to cry, trying to fight the dread that was swarming in.

“Please,” he begged, “you need to go. Don’t look back. I love you.”

I took a step toward him, my arms reaching out. He stepped back and turned his face away from me.

“Cameron, don’t. You’re scaring me.” I wasn’t just scared; I was petrified. “Tell me what’s going on. Please.” I lunged into his arms before he could react and latched my arms around his neck. I heard him sigh, and he held me for a few seconds. Footsteps came from behind us. He unhooked my arms and pushed me away. I followed his frightened gaze. Spider and Tiny were standing a few feet away.

Spider had his gun pointed at us.

“What’s going on?” I asked, my voice shaking with the rest of my body.

Spider was staring coldly at Cameron. “You said your goodbyes, now we finish this.”

Cameron turned to Tiny. “Get her out of here.”

Tiny nodded and started walking toward me.

I pleaded to Spider. “Please don’t do this, Spider. We’ll leave. You can have it all, and you’ll never have to see us again. You don’t need to do this. Please …”

Spider kept his eyes on Cameron. Tiny came to grab me from behind and started to drag me away.

I screamed through my tears at Cameron. “Cameron, do something! Don’t let them do this. Please.”

Cameron glanced at me with eyes of pain, and then he took a breath, his jaw tightened and he looked away. His face became expertly unaffected as he stared back at Spider’s gun, waiting. I was in a nightmare. I needed to wake up. But the throbbing in my chest was too real for this to be a dream.

By the time Tiny had dragged me to the door while I kicked and screamed, the first shot rang out. I watched in horror as Cameron fell to the ground. Tiny had jumped too and momentarily let go of me.

I ran back to Cameron and crouched to the ground, putting myself between him and Spider’s gun. I looked down. The shoulder of Cameron’s shirt was already soaked through with blood. His eyes found me, but they were dulled. Life was sapping from him and dragging me with it.

“Get out of here, Emmy,” he said too calmly, like he didn’t feel the gushing wound in his shoulder.

“I won’t let him do this to you. I’m not leaving you. Why are you letting them do this?”

“I have no other choice,” he said. “It has to end this way.”

“I won’t say good-bye to you,” I resolved. “You can fight. Why aren’t you fighting?” I was furious that he was giving up so easily. “Don’t let him win, Cameron.”

I could feel him vanishing. I put my hand over his wound and turned his face, forcing him to acknowledge me. Tears were burning my cheeks.

“I love you,” I told him in a desperate whisper. My eyes homed in on his, but Cameron had squeezed his eyes shut. It, love, was no longer enough.

Cameron pulled my hands away and yelled, “Get her out of here!”

Tiny had come back and, this time, picked me up off the ground, threw me over his shoulder, and carried me out.

The last time I saw Cameron, he was staring at the ceiling and a tear had rolled out of the corner of his eye.

I was still screaming and crying uncontrollably when Tiny finally set me down. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and held onto me with one arm while I continued to fight him off.

“There’s nothing you can do, Emmy,” Carly’s shaking voice said. She had been standing next to us outside.

Three more gunshots successively fired from inside the warehouse and then all was quiet.

Carly put her hands to her face. I lost myself and fell to my knees.

 Chapter Twenty-Nine:
 The One Who Holds the Gun

In that moment, when the last gunshot rang, I felt Cameron leave me. I snapped, like a wishbone. Cameron was the lucky part that was broken off; left behind was the unlucky part, just hollowed marrow, sucked dry. There was so much pain around me. It was as if someone were stabbing me and slashing my skin open. I wanted to be dead. In a way, I already was—without Cameron, there was nothing left.

My face was damp. My hair was sticking to my cheeks. I was still screaming, wailing. But inside I felt and heard nothing. My voice was not mine. In my head, everything had gone silent and black, a dark hole that I would never crawl out of. The old Emily had gone down with Cameron; what emerged from the hole was some sinister thing.

When I looked up, when the Shadow-of-Emily looked up, I saw Carly. She was staring at me, her waterlogged eyes terrified. She had reason to be scared—I was going to kill her, and the rest of them. Hate and vengeance had spread through my veins, my heart, my brain, my skin, like a cancer.

I lunged for Carly. Tiny was holding me back, with difficulty. Carly stood still in a stupor. I was the caged animal waiting for any opportunity, and she was the prey that stood by the bars, entranced.

“How could you do this?” The voice that escaped my mouth was hard and violent. “How could you betray him like that?”

Carly was pale. She was shaking through her tears. “This wasn’t my decision. I didn’t want this to happen. Not like this.”

“Spider worships you. One word from you and he would have changed his mind,” I yelled.

She started sobbing, and I hated her more for it. She had no right to cry for Cameron. She had caused his death. I wanted her to suffer.

“Is that what you did to my brother? You had him killed when he found someone else? Someone who was prettier and nicer than you? He fell in love with Frances, and you and Spider couldn’t control him anymore, so you had him put down like a sick dog.”

Carly’s face turned to despair. “Emmy, please don’t—”

“Don’t call me that! You have no right!” I spat.

Spider had calmly made his way back to us. He glanced at Carly who was sobbing uncontrollably and angrily turned to me. “Carly had nothing to do with this. None of this is
her
fault.”

The man who had been holding the gun had conveniently decided that I was to blame for Cameron’s death. A fury of adrenaline raged through my body, and I lunged forward, evading Tiny’s grasp. My fist connected with Spider’s face, and he stumbled back from the blow. I managed to throw another punch, though with less force, before Tiny grabbed me by the shoulders and lifted me from the ground. I kicked my legs, and one of them caught, clipping Spider’s shoulder. He swore. Carly stood by his side, between us, in a panic.

“Put her in the car!” he ordered Tiny.

While I continued to fight off Tiny, Spider turned to Carly, pinching his bleeding nose and making stretch circles with his injured shoulder. “Go back inside. Make sure the mess is completely cleaned up.” They glanced at each other for a half-second, and Carly made her way back into the warehouse. In the meantime, Tiny had called for reinforcements, and three men forced me into the back of a black car. I was made to sit in the middle, with my seatbelt tightly strapped to my waist as extra backup, while Tiny and another guard flanked me. Spider sat up front in the passenger side, and the third guard jumped into the driver’s seat.

“I want to see Cameron,” I demanded whipping the never ending tears.

“You’re in no position to be making any requests,” Spider said nasally, his head leaned back on the seat and a bloody Kleenex stuffed up his nose.

He was right. I was squeezed into the seat between two very large, armed men who were nervously watching my every move. I had no energy left to fight them off—the adrenaline had boiled out of me.

We peeled away from the warehouse. We were somewhere in an industrial zone outside Callister. There were gravel pits and rusty abandoned bulldozers, half-submerged. The car was dangerously speeding on a sandy road with the shocks threatening to sever every time we hit fissures in the uneven road. So much sand was being kicked up from the speed that we were enclosed in a fog of our own dust. I turned back toward the warehouse, where I imagined Cameron’s body still lying on the cold, cement floor; I could see nothing but a cloud of brown dirt. My throat was collapsing into itself, like a trash compactor, squeezing the air out from each end. I could barely breathe—but then again, breathing was by that point overrated, just another luxury that I didn’t want.

“Where are you taking me?” I managed to croak out.

No response.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked again with more force.

“Shut up,” Spider said with irritation. He had removed the tissue from his nostril, and his nose started gushing blood again.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Can’t you keep your mouth shut for two seconds?”

“I don’t care if you kill me,” I blurted.

Spider swore. “If you don’t shut up I will kill you, with my bare hands, in this car. Keep quiet.”

I started sobbing. I wanted it to be over.

He sighed. “I won’t kill you, all right?”

“Why not?” I asked him, looking for a different answer.

“Because I can’t kill people like you without other people like you noticing,” he said angrily.

Spider’s words had hit me like a gunshot through the heart. Cameron died while I cruelly had to outlive him, for no other reason than the circumstances I had been born into, which had put me in a different world than him. Yet Spider, who belonged in no one’s world, was still sitting there, alive and mostly unharmed. There was something despairingly unjust about that. Hate boiled in my veins.

“You must be happy now that Cameron’s out of your way,” I surmised.

Spider fleetingly glared to the rear before turning his eyes to the road ahead of him, without offering response. Everyone in the car was stifled.

I had a captive audience, so I continued, “Looks like there’s conveniently no one else left alive but you to take over the reins. First my brother, now Cameron. How many people do you have to kill before you figure out that you’re not smart enough to lead anything or anyone?”

Spider’s jawbone protruded as he clenched his teeth together. Even if he coolly tried to ignore me, I knew that he was listening to my every word. I was on a path to self-destruction—if he wasn’t planning on killing me, I would make him change his mind or make him regret his decision to let me live.

“What you did won’t change a thing. You’ll never be anything like Cameron or my brother. You’re just another power-hungry street thug with more gunpowder than brains.” My voice was acidic.

Spider’s lips were stretched thin. “You’ve got a pretty big mouth for a little girl stuck in a car with four guys who aren’t afraid of using their guns.”

“I’m not afraid of you.” There was nothing else that Spider could ever do to me that would change this. “I won’t let you control me like you did Cameron.”

Spider huffed crossly. “Control Cameron? No one controls Cameron except for you. You’re a parasite. If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened. Things started going wrong from the day you got here. You took Cameron’s focus away—and the business started suffering because of it. If we didn’t do this, you would have gotten all of us killed.”

“We?” I asked incredulously. “I only saw one person holding the gun.”

Spider turned and pointed his finger at me. “You didn’t see a thing. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut and stay the hell away from us. Or I swear to God, I will hunt you down and squeeze the life out of you myself—rich girl or not. I’ll take your whole prissy family down too if I have to. None of this ever happened. Forget we ever existed.”

I wasn’t scared. There was a hole in Spider’s plan, and I was happy to bring this to his attention. “What am I supposed to do when Victor comes knocking at my door? Pretend I’ve never seen him before?”

“I don’t care what you do,” he spat back coldly. “Besides, Shield won’t come back. You’re no longer useful to him now that Cameron …” He didn’t finish his sentence.

I looked at him carefully. I had noticed something change in his face as he had said this. He was hiding something.

“You and Victor were in on this the whole time,” I said.

When Spider uneasily shifted in his seat and turned his face as far away from me as possible, I knew I was on the right track. I thought back at that day, in the church, when Spider had finally convinced Cameron to leave me behind. This had provided Victor with the perfect opportunity to take me.