The Black Rose Page 3

  Chapter Three

  I didn’t even have enough time to let my eyes adjust to the dark when I heard him rack the chamber. An automatic; how ironic.

  I grabbed the pillow Braydon used and pulled my legs up. I used it to shield myself the best I could, making sure to hold it at a distance. Four, five, six shots went off with a thwart sound. He was using a silencer.

  I knew I didn’t have long before he reloaded his weapon, so I threw the pillow aside, stood and dove off the bed toward him. I had managed to catch him off guard. It made me want to laugh; he must have thought he had killed me because he had put his gun away.

  We struggled for a bit before he managed to knock me off of him. I hated how weak I became. I should have been able to kill him by now but the emotional stress was getting to me. I wanted to yell for help but fear of someone getting hurt stopped me. I had to end this, now.

  I went back after him, catching him with a round house to the throat. He went to his knees. I used my knee cap to bust him in the face, but felt something hard at my side. I didn’t have time to look. I flipped over the bed, praying Braydon had at least left me something to fight with.

  I was lucky. Not only did he leave his gun sitting just under the bed, but his sunglasses too. I slipped them on, grabbed the gun and crawled my way over to the wall. I’m glad I knew this room as well as I did mine back home. The sunglasses were making me blind completely.

  I felt the wall as I stood up and found the light switch. I turned with the gun in hand pointed at the last place the attacker was, and flipped the lights on. It was enough to momentarily blind him.

  It was the only thing that saved my life. He had his gun drawn and pointed in my direction. I had just a split second to aim and fire.

  I watched as the bullet impacted with his skull and his body fell back to the floor. It felt like everything in a one mile radius went quiet. There were no crickets chirping, no sounds of the television downstairs, no talking. I didn’t even hear a vehicle nearby.

  The silence was deafening.

  The pain in my side became worse as my adrenaline wore off. When I looked down I could see blood soaking my shirt and leaving a trail as gravity made it travel toward the floor. It had become painful to even try to breathe. I used my hand and put pressure on it causing black spots to appear in my vision.

  I leaned back against the wall and slowly slid down. Standing was too much for me. The weakness I had felt earlier came crashing back and I didn’t think I could even hold my head up.

  My shoulders slumped and my head lolled a bit as I heard running up the stairs. I guess the gunshot had stunned them and they had finally got the courage up to make their way upstairs.

  “Oh God, Rissa no!”

  “Did she?” Gabe asked.

  “She’s breathing at least, Gabe, help me!” Braydon sounded as if he were almost crying. Why he would cry for me? I wasn’t sure but I didn’t want him to. There were other things he needed to do first.

  I raised my head and looked at him. “Check the other rooms.”

  “Uh guys, look.” Sage must have found him.

  Braydon stood and his eyes went wide as he took in the sight of the body across the room. I reached out, still holding his gun and he looked down at me. He reached down taking his sunglasses off of me and smiled.

  “Take it and check the other rooms.”

  He nodded to me, took the gun, and crept out of the room. Twenty minutes went by without a sound. No one spoke, no one even moved as we waited for him to come back.

  “Clear!” he yelled from somewhere not too far off.

  Gabe made his way over to me and that’s when the silence stopped.

  “Braydon! Braydon, she’s bleeding. Help me!”

  Everyone seemed to freak out. I was doing everything I could to tell them to stop but they weren’t listening. I took a deep breath and hoped I didn’t pass out as I screamed for them to shut-up. Everyone stopped everything and just looked at me.

  “Gabe, get my medical kit. Sage, grab the pillows- both of them. Zavier, get my phone. Lorik, get Dean on the land-line and try to tell him what’s going on, calmly please. Braydon, you’re going to have to carry me downstairs, I’m too weak to stand up. And before you say anything, it’s not that bad. Yeah there seems like a lot of blood but it’s nothing serious. I’m tired and weak from everything else.”

  I was amazed that everyone followed my orders without question. We all stayed together as we made our way down stairs. Braydon put me on the couch and moved aside so Gabe could get over to me. He lifted the side of my shirt up and cringed at what he saw.

  “Rissa, this need stitches.” Gabe whispered.

  “I know. I need you to do it.”

  He shook his head and sat back on his heels. “I can’t.”

  Zavier leaned over the couch handing me my phone. I dialed the only number I could think of.

  “Kyle, I need your help,” I told Dr. Winthrop.

  “Marissa, so nice to hear from you, what seems to be the problem?”

  “I’m staying at a friend’s house and Braydon and I went downstairs to get something to eat. I went to make sure the front door was locked and tripped over the stupid coffee table. It’s one of those glass ones. Anyway, I went through it. A piece of glass sort of stabbed me in the side. It’s going to need stitches.”

  “Can you meet me at the emergency room?”

  “Uh, no. Um, okay listen, Dad passed away a few days ago and my uh, my guardian isn’t here. You know I’ll pay you. Please Kyle?”

  He was silent as he processed what I had told him.

  He finally agreed and took down the directions to the house. I instructed Gabe on cleaning the wound, and numbing it after he managed to get the bleeding to stop. From what Gabe told me, I could expect at least twelve stitches. And I could only pray, Kyle would continue to buy the story I told him.

  I heard him pulling into the driveway just as I told the boys to get the coffee table out of the living room. It wouldn’t have helped me lie if it had sat there. Braydon showed Kyle in and over to where I was laying.

  He looked as though I had gotten him out of bed. His hair was sticking up at the sides causing the top of his head to look even balder and the wrinkles on his face to make him seem older. His eyes were blood shot. He smelled of the hospital and coffee. It didn’t surprise me, the hours this man worked, it was no wonder he came in his pajamas.

  “Everything else is done, I just need you to stitch it,” I told him as he poke around and looked at it closer. I knew that look. I had been around him long enough to know almost everything about the man.

  I had talked Kyle into letting me shadow him when I was thirteen so I could decide if that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. I grinned internally. He never knew that he was teaching me to handle things like this on my own. I had learned how to do many things. And it wasn’t until a few months ago that I quit going in and working with him.

  “Marissa? Are you sure this is from glass?”

  “Yeah, Gabe cleaned it out for you.”

  “Ah, Gabriel. You must be the one Marissa spoke so much about. I had expected the two of you to apprentice under me before Marissa quit,” Kyle went silent. He thought he knew the reason I had quit, but Gabe didn’t.

  Gabe looked at me confused. I had never mentioned to him that I had made arrangements for him to join me. Nor had I told him that I had gone from shadowing Kyle to actually working with patients on a volunteer basis and always under Kyle’s supervision. I was good at talking people in to things.

  I smiled at him and told him to watch how Kyle stitched me up. I wanted to hit him as he got down on his knees beside the chair Kyle was in and made the comment that he thought it’d make Kyle feel more like it was me watching. But I couldn’t, the smile on Gabe’s face made me return the gesture.

  “Maybe later the two of you will come to my office and work?” Kyle asked as he glanced over at Gabe. Gabe looked at me and I could see the hope in his eyes.
Gabe loved doing anything medical. I couldn’t break his heart so I smiled and nodded my head.

  After taping gauze over the wound, he asked about my back and I hesitated. No one had seen my back but Dad, Kyle, and Braydon. I knew the makeup had worn off by now. I didn’t know how Gabe would react. I didn’t have to worry though because Braydon took that moment to ask Gabe a question that got him in the kitchen.

  I was thankful that Zavier had grabbed some shorts when we left the room because I had to stand up and pull the back of my shirt up for Kyle to check it out. When I felt his hand leave my back, I turned to look at him. He was frowning.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  “Are you still adamant that it was a car wreck? Marissa the things that happen to you, the scars you have, are you sure you’re not being abused?”

  I looked at him and smiled real big. I sit down and faced him, taking his hand in mine. A trick I had learned from him.

  “I promise you, no one I know is doing anything to hurt me.”

  He seemed pacified but I knew it was only until my next visit. I figured if I could change the subject that maybe he wouldn’t think to put it down on his little notepad. My problem was trying to figure out what to change the subject too.

  “I still haven’t started my period,” I blurted out right as Gabe walked back into the room.

  I couldn’t believe I said that. Of course Kyle went right along with it and didn’t seem to care that Gabe was in the room.

  “When was your last menstruation again?”

  I tried to hide my horrified expression as I looked at Gabe. I didn’t know if it worked but he played it off as if it were nothing and he were a doctor trying to help determine the cause.

  “Almost a year ago,” I whispered.

  “Stress. I made sure everything was okay internally before you left the hospital.”

  I nodded to him.

  “You must reduce your stress levels, Marissa. It’s not healthy for your body to be under so much stress. You are too young to be having these problems. How has your stomach been?”

  “Not good. I have enough medicine though so you don’t have to worry about that.”

  No, my stomach was a mess. My head was a mess but as long as I didn’t have to think of everything that was happening I could function. If I sit down and thought about my dad being gone, I would go insane. But I knew that would only last for so long. Eventually I would break.

  I blinked back the tears trying to escape. I swallowed hard, cleared my throat and thanked Kyle for coming. I asked Sage to bring me the checkbook on the counter and was about to write him a check when he said he would mail me the bill. He never wrote anything down. It would be my luck he finally invested in a recorder and had recorded the exam.

  I watched as he got up and left. I had Braydon walk him back to his car while I paced back and forth in the living room trying to figure out how someone could have gotten in with all the guys here. I knew they were in the living room so that meant they had to have come in from upstairs. I release my breath, closed my eyes and hung my head.

  I knew how they had gotten in. They had used the tree that I had begged Dean not to have cut down. I had climbed it myself many times. I would climb the tree; shimmy out onto the big branch and jump the small distance to the roof. Even as short as I was it was nothing for me to cross the roof and lower myself to my balcony. Which also meant this guy somehow managed to get passed Dean’s security system.

  I heard another vehicle and looked out the window to see Dean’s big black SUV pulling into the drive way. Dean always took things like this serious. I was also sure that he took it as an insult since this was his house and someone had managed to get in.