We Will Always Have the Closet (18 page)

Liam pointed at the man trussed up like a turkey on the floor. “What about that guy?” he asked, coming to help his friends.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Sam assured him, his eyes still closed as a wave of nausea climbed up his throat. Liam was now on his other side, supporting him and helping him up. Bookended by the two, Sam headed toward the exit, dragging his uncooperative legs behind him and leaving a trail of blood in his wake. They all got in the car, Liam at the wheel, Petra and Sam in the backseat.

“We were so worried, Petra,” Liam was saying as he drove away. He called the local police as he drove off. Sam was slumped over Petra’s shoulder, unmoving and bleeding onto Liam’s very expensive leather seats. “How are you feeling?”

Nestled against Sam, Petra was very quiet. “Petra?” Sam whispered, suddenly concerned about her silence. He could feel her small body shivering as if in the freezing cold. “You’re safe now, honey. You’re safe.” With his healthy arm, he pulled her to him and kissed her cheek gently. Her skin was wet. “Don’t cry, we’re okay.”

“You’re hurt,” she said, touching his chest, examining his wound with her fingers. Sam flinched as more blood poured out. “We need to stop that bleeding. Liam, take us to the hospital, quick.” Her voice was panicky, almost hysterical. “Quick, Liam, he’s bleeding out.”

Sam grabbed her chin to look her in the eye. “Stop, Petra,” he urged, realizing she was in shock. “I’m okay. It’s not the first time I’ve been shot, you know.” The shaking in her body told him she was sobbing. He held her closer, hoping the heat of his body would somehow calm her down, give her some peace. “I’ll be all right, really. We’re going to be fine,” he continued, whispering words of comfort in her ear even as he realized it had suddenly become very difficult to breathe. Liam occasionally threw a concerned glance in their direction.

“We’ll be at the nearest hospital in a few minutes,” Liam said. His driving, while still incredibly fast, had taken a more cautious, almost protective pace. The curves were tackled in a gentler way, and Sam could tell he was being much more careful when hitting potholes. Soon enough, the massive white building of the hospital appeared around a street corner. Liam didn’t park the car; he went straight to the ER entry to let the two of them out. When Sam tried to leave the car, he couldn’t find the strength to walk or stand on his own. Petra tried to support him, but he was too heavy for her. Liam got out of the car and ran inside to fetch a wheelchair while she tried to slide Sam’s feet out of the car.

Wheeling him in the emergency room lobby, Petra displayed that same weird apathy she had ever since the rescue and the sight of a wounded Sam falling into a bundle of lifeless flesh and bones. A nurse came running to them when the wheelchair carrying a slumped Sam left a trail of blood on the white tiled floor. There was a flurry of activity and firing of questions. All were left unanswered; Sam was too weak to talk and faded in and out of consciousness, his breathing becoming labored and audible.

With a glazed look, Petra stared at her own palms as if looking for answers to what had just happened. Liam reached for her, sliding an arm over her shoulders and squeezing her gently against his side. Tears clung stubbornly to her eyes and her lip quivered.

“Petra, are you all right?” he asked.

She stared up at him, unseeing. Her body seemed to be running on auto-pilot, more aware of her circumstances than her brain was. “Sam was shot,” she mumbled. “My eyes keep telling me that, but my brain can’t accept it. He could have died right there in front of me. What if he did die?” Liam gave her another comforting squeeze, not quite sure of what to say.

Sam, slumped over himself, looked briefly back at her. In his state of fogginess, he was aware of her small body huddled by Liam, distress evident in her body language. “I love you,” he whispered, not certain she could hear him. His head was heavy and his eyes would not stay open. The fight went off him. All went dark and quiet.
Peace finally
, was his last thought before passing out.

Chapter Nine

HOSPITAL GOWNS, DREAMS, AND EXES

Petra

Dreams are funny things—part based on reality, part fiction, written by your subconscious mind, produced by your strongest inner feelings and fears. Some dreams you forget even before your eyes flutter open, others linger with you for a lifetime. Petra wondered whether this dream would be one of the latter. Awake now for hours, she kept playing it in her mind, over and over again. The dream had left her panting for air, heartbroken and in pain, but it had also shown a window of hope into a future she had always yearned for but had stopped believing in. Isn’t it true that you must take the bad with the good? Maybe she wanted to remember this dream forever and be able to feel that lovely warmth that came from believing something wonderful can and will happen someday.

The previous night, after all the commotion of checking Sam into the hospital, being checked herself for possible injuries, waiting anxiously to hear from the doctors as to Sam’s status, and finally being able to take stock of everything that happened and relate it to the police, she had eventually fallen asleep on the recliner in Sam’s private room. Sam had been heavily drugged to ease the pain of the bullet wound and succeeding extraction. He now slept peacefully in his drug-induced oblivion. She wasn’t going to leave him, scared as she was of losing him. So she sat on the recliner, covered herself with a blanket a nurse had brought her, and fell asleep. She dreamt…

It was dark and Petra couldn’t see anything around her. She turned around a few times trying to discern her surroundings, but the thick darkness isolated her from everything else. With surprise, she realized she was wearing the beautiful ball gown she had worn for the art gala, the one with the back that plunged all the way to the end of her spine. The one that had so attracted Sam’s attention that night. She could still feel his hands on her bare skin as if imprinted there for eternity. Where was she right now? Why was she wearing formal wear in the middle of such darkness?

Her heart beating furiously in her chest, Petra took a small step forward, feeling her way through the oppressive blackness. One foot carefully put in front of the other, her heart hysterically beating, her hands trembling, she kept moving forward…or maybe backward, she couldn’t tell. Suddenly, the ground seemed to open below her and her feet found only emptiness where a solid floor should have been. She felt herself fall through space through the gloom. Strangely, she was falling upright, as if the laws of gravity did not apply in this place, the folds of her dress flapping around her like a parachute. She waved her arms and her legs trying to stop, but to no avail; she kept falling into the obscurity of the blackness. She braced herself to meet solid ground, but instead she fell into water, cold and silent as a tomb.

Kicking her legs, Petra tried to float to the surface, but she felt herself being dragged deeper and deeper. The darkness gave way to an eerie brightness, and even as she fell, her lungs beginning to hurt from the lack of air, she wondered at what her eyes were seeing. The light revealed a big room decorated with exquisite pieces of furniture and artwork. Incongruously, nothing else other than herself floated. Instead, the room and its contents seemed solidly anchored in place. In spite of her desperate need to breathe, she couldn’t help but admire the beauty of her surroundings as she fell even deeper into the room, never quite reaching the bottom. In the fog of her mind, she realized she was in Jonas’ house or a very faithful replica. She recognized the gorgeous French antique chair in the corner, the luscious silk curtains that billowed in the water, the elegant crystal chandelier hanging just above her head. She was trapped in the gilded cage that Jonas had built for her after they got married, the one he had lured her into with its tantalizing artistic beauty and charismatic charm.

Pumping her legs even harder, Petra frantically pushed herself through the heavy water, reaching for the surface, but the room seemed to expand in height every time she inched upward and she made no progress. Her lungs burned, her chest crushed under the weight of the water, Petra gave up and accepted the dubious peace of this watery grave as she sank to the bottom.

Just as she had lost all hope, a great ray of light beamed down from the surface, and a being of such beauty, such majesty, descended down toward her. She averted her eyes for fear of being blinded by the sight. It was an angel, she knew. An angel here to save her and carry her into safety, away from the effects of her pretty watery jail. The angelic being took her in his arms and with his powerful wings carried her out from her misery and pain. In her ear, the angel whispered, and his voice was strangely familiar, warm, and masculine. “Hot pepper,” he said, “you are not alone anymore.”

The sound of the cart being rolled in by the nurse woke her up from her strange dream. A little disoriented, Petra watched as the nurse checked Sam’s vitals, jotted them down in his chart. Then, realizing that Petra was there, the nurse offered her a friendly smile.

“You must be hungry,” she said, examining Petra closely. “I’ll go get you something to eat.” Petra protested but the nurse wouldn’t take no for an answer and went in search of some kind of sustenance.

Petra sank deeper into her recliner, curling her legs underneath her and pulling the blanket closer to her chin. She stole a glance toward Sam, who slept in the hospital bed, his face relaxed into an expression of blissful peace, and Petra found herself feeling envious. She almost wished they had drugged her as well. It might have prevented her from thinking about all that had transpired in the past twelve hours. It would also prevent her from having disturbing dreams that made her stomach burn and her heart tighten.

She had trusted her ex-husband, a man who had cheated on her numerous times, who had rubbed his illicit affairs right in her face, and who had never shown any interest or affection for her as a woman, as his wife. In spite of all that, she had trusted him. She wanted to believe that he had some redeeming qualities, that underneath all of that murk, there was a decent man, a fraction of what she had believed he was when she married him. How naïve and stupid of her. His soul was dark. He had now moved on from petty sin to mortal sins, the kind that landed you in jail for a long time; the kind that dragged innocent bystanders down in the quicksand of his doing. She was still finding it hard to accept that he had someone kidnap her. Not so sure now that he would have stopped at just kidnapping, Petra shivered under her blanket.

Sam was lying in that bed with a bullet hole in his chest. He easily could have been killed trying to rescue her from the hands of those criminals. When she closed her eyes, all she could see was Sam lying on the floor, bleeding, not moving, the color on his face fading into a ghostly white, his beautiful green eyes closed. She thought he had died, that she had lost him forever in a single heartbeat. Rage and pain taking over, Petra, who had never once touched a gun, had not hesitated to shoot. Despair must have made her aim well, for the thug soon laid in his own pool of blood. She had killed a man. How was she going to deal with that knowledge? Her emotions were so raw and so mixed up. She swung between feeling elated that she had been able to hit the target so expertly to feeling guilty and wallowing in remorse for having taken the life of another human being. How do people whose jobs often lead them into similar situations deal with these feelings? Was she always going to feel so ambivalent about it?

Her heart filled suddenly with hot, unadulterated hate for Jonas. How could he have done this to her—the one person besides Liam who had loved and trusted him?

“Do you need help with anything, miss?” the nurse asked as she came in the room with a tray of food. Petra looked up, surprised by her presence and bewildered by the question. The nurse nodded at Petra’s hands, gripping the blanket so tight her knuckles had turned a sour white. “You look like you’re in pain. Do you want me to fetch a doctor?”

“No, I’m okay,” Petra lied. The kind nurse pried the blanket gently out of Petra’s fingers. “I just had a bad dream.”

“I brought you some food,” the woman said, setting the small tray of food on the table by the recliner. “It’s not gourmet, but it’s healthy, and you need something in your stomach, trust me.”

Petra looked at the food with no interest. The nurse had brought her a bowl of chicken soup and a couple rolls with butter and jam. A large mug of steaming tea completed the small meal. “Drink the tea at least, honey,” the nurse said. “It’s chamomile, it will help you steady your nerves.”

Taking the hot mug from the nurse, Petra thought that if a cup of chamomile tea could indeed calm her nerves it would be a miracle, but she was willing to try anything at this point. She sipped gingerly from the hot mug while the nurse busied herself checking on Sam again.

“Is he going to be all right?” Petra asked in a small voice. The doctors had already told her that, but her dread was so strong she kept wondering whether she had dreamed it.

“He’s going to be just fine,” the nurse replied, tucking the sheets tighter around Sam’s big body. “The bullet hit an upper rib and got lodged in his scapula. It didn’t hit any vital organs. He will be sore for a while, but judging by the other scars in his body, he’s used to it.” The nurse smiled at her. “Are you dating?”

Somehow,
dating
didn’t seem to be the appropriate word for what she and Sam had. It was so much bigger and intense than dating. You dated strangers to get to know them. Sam was part of her now, a better part of herself. Without him she felt naked and incomplete, as if she was missing a leg or a vital organ. The sun came up and went down because Sam was in her life. He
was
her life. And she had almost lost him because of Jonas.

“Are the police still in the hospital?” she asked suddenly, wanting to lash out at Jonas, wanting to lash out at someone, anyone. She had spoken to the officers already, but she had been of very little help, still immersed in the strange stupor that took control of her after the kidnapping. “I want to talk to them again.”

The nurse looked at her, a little surprised. “I think they may still be around somewhere. Do you want me to find out?”

What she wanted was to be alone with Jonas and beat him senseless. She had never in her life lifted a hand in anger toward anyone, but now, the need to show him how much she hated him, how much she resented him for everything he had done was so strong she could almost taste it. “Do you know if they apprehended Jonas Linden yet?” she asked. “The man who hired the guys who shot Sam?”

The woman, a forty-something small female, approached her and whispered, “I heard that they’re waiting for a full confession from the guy who survived.”

Petra almost jumped out of her seat. “I’m going for a walk,” she announced, sliding her feet into her shoes and grabbing her phone from the table. “If Sam wakes up, would you give me a call?”

Soon, she was hailing a taxi and giving the driver directions to Linden’s house. He was by now surely aware that his scheme had gone awry, but did he realize that the police were holding information against him as well? She wondered whether he was packing to leave the country or just relaxing in his house, drinking that old, expensive cognac and seducing some empty-headed twit. Was he sweating bullets or cool as a cucumber? Blinded by anger and driven by an overwhelming urge to finally stand up to her ex-husband, Petra ignored the obvious danger she was putting herself into and dove head first into her misguided quest.

At the break of dawn, the taxi made it to Jonas’ high-end neighborhood and parked right in front of his house. She could see the lights on in several of the windows and she knew he was home. For a second, she wondered if what she was about to do was dangerous, but the moment was fleeting and faded away almost as soon as it appeared. She told the taxi driver to keep the meter going and climbed the steps to the front door.

Jonas answered the door looking sleek and elegant as usual and she hated him even more for it. Just as she had thought, he had a glass of cognac in one hand and an expression of annoyance on his face. However, when his eyes fell on her, his face took on a more dramatic tone. “You?” he exclaimed in a mixture of surprise and disbelief. “What are you doing here?”

Her hands were itching to close into fists and let loose on his handsome face, his perfect shoulders, his expensive designer clothes, but she controlled herself. “I need to talk to you,” she said, her voice level but her hands trembling. She didn’t wait for his permission but pushed herself past him and into the house. Shocked to meekness, Jonas followed her into the formal living room, a few steps from the front door.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this very early morning visit?” His voice was dripping with sarcasm. At closer examination, Petra realized that he had dark circles around his eyes and that his hands shook a bit. He must not have slept at all last night.
Good
, she thought.

“I came to tell you that I survived,” she said, staring him straight in the eyes. She didn’t want to miss a second of his reaction. “And so did Sam.”

Licking his lips, Linden set the glass down on a coffee table. “What do you mean? Survived what?” he asked unconvincingly, avoiding her eyes.