“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Iris lies on the floor, wearing one of my shirts. It’s shoved up past the top of her thighs. Blood blossoms across her torso, dousing the shirt from belly to shoulder.
“Iris?” I touch her arm, gentle and hesitant and desperate. “Baby?”
I search for signs of life. I don’t breathe while my heart waits to know if it’s irreparably broken.
When her eyes slowly open, it’s daybreak. It’s dawn. This moment puts everything in perspective because despite all the things I have, if Iris is gone, I’ve got nothing.
“August!” She tries to sit up, and I scoot my body under her so her head can rest on my knee. “Sarai. Where is she?”
My heart seizes when I don’t see Sarai. Did he do something to her? But then a sound from the back of the house filters into my consciousness, insistent, but faint.
“I hear her in the back. She’s calling you.”
Iris releases a long breath out and nods. “I locked her room. She must still be in there,” she rasps, her voice hoarse. She squints, focusing on the prone man a few feet away. “Is he dead?”
Her lips tremble. She’s shaking in my arms. Her cheekbone is swollen, and blood streaks down her face. Black marks stripe her throat.
God, I hope he’s dead.
“I . . . baby, I don’t know,” I say. “I need to call nine-one-one. There’s so much blood.”
“Not my blood.” She grimaces and lifts her hand, painstakingly slow, to touch her shoulder. “Some of it is. He shot me in the shoulder.”
Motherfucker.
I squeeze my forehead and claw my hair to keep myself focused on her and not tearing his arms out of their sockets. The desire to kill him is an ache in my bones. It makes my heart contract.
“He’s shot, though,” she says weakly. “We fought, and I shot him.” Pride sparks in her eyes, dulled to brown.
“You did good, Iris.” I run a shaky palm over her hair, and my fingers come away red and sticky with blood. “Jesus, baby. Are you sure you’re—”
“Is he dead?” she cuts in, her grip on my arm tight. Her eyes are wide, urgent. “I need to know, August. He won’t ever leave me alone. Do you hear? He’ll kill me. And Sarai will—”
I press my finger to her lips, staunching the panic rising in her voice. “I’ll check.”
“Now.” Tears leak from the corners of her eyes and skid over her swollen cheekbone. “Check now.”
Smudgy marks from his fingers stain her jaw. My stomach turns at what he’s done to her. At the thought that this isn’t the first time. She lived with him. She slept beside him. For months. Alone.
Fuck.
I gently shift her and scoot across the blood-covered floor to the vermin pickling in his own reckoning. Rage overpowers me the closer I get. I want to stomp on his face and press my boot to his throat. His hand is tucked under his shirt, and when I tug the shirt back, he’s covering a hole in his belly streaming blood.
“West.” His eyes flutter open. His voice is thin, withering, agonized. He grimaces, tipping his head back. Life leaks from his eyes as surely as it’s leaking from his wound. “I guess you win.”
I look back to Iris, who has pulled herself to a sitting position and leans against the wall. Even now, with him clinging to the last threads of his life, she’s wary and guarded, watching him like, shot and bleeding out, he still might strike.
She lifts her hand, revealing a small ring in her palm.
“Lo told you your days were numbered,” she says, her voice wobbling.
With eyes narrowed, she cups her hand to her mouth and blows over it.
“Fuck you, Iris,” he says, voice rough and angry.
With one hand covering the bullet hole in her shoulder, Iris drags herself across the floor until she’s beside me. A scarlet line of blood trails her.
