Pacifier

🍀Sam💔

We sat side by side in a dull grey room. Clinical, sanitary smell invasive to our senses. Hospitals always felt like an assault on your senses.

The air between us was stiff and sad and the longer we waited the more unsettled I became.

I'd never liked hospitals but this was different. Today I had a rational reason to be restless, anxious. Constantly glancing around the room for a warning sign. Though I knew better than most that if there were any Reids left alive, stalking Billy's killers, they wouldn't give us a warning sign before they shot us dead. They wouldn't care that we were in the middle of a hospital, they wouldn't care whether there were police on site. They wouldn't care that one of their victims was a teenage girl grieving beside me.

They'd only care that she sat beside me, that she was a bottleman, that two bottlemen lay in intensive care, unconcious but stable for now.

Id wanted to leave the moment we arrived, the moment we saw Johnny and Camille taken in by the emergency crew and rushed off to rooms we weren't allowed into. Desperate attempts to save them being made behind closed doors.

But I'd known I couldn't ask Della to leave. I'd tried all the same but she'd shaken her head, fingers gripping the bottom of her plastic chair as if she thought I was going to try and drag her away.

But I wasn't. I couldn't do that to her now.

All that fire, all the static I'd seen in her at Reds, when she'd turned her gun on it and meant it, was gone from her now. She was deflated and flat. Subdued. Trying her best to keep tears from her eyes because she was scared - desperately so - and trying not to show it.

Still I couldn't keep my mind from dwelling on the scene we'd left behind. The one we'd burnt to the ground at Reds.

It had all been wrong. Something in Vans plan had gone drastically wrong.

It shouldn't have been Johnny and Camille lying in a pool of their own blood.
It shouldn't have been anybody lying in a pool of blood.

It was supposed to have been organised. Clinically so. It should have been Van waiting at Reds, the other lads should have already left, alive and well having taken every other man but Billy out. He should have been at the mercy of the bottlemen and I should have been able to inform him that Conways life was in his hands. That if he didn't give up all that Van was asking of him - though I didn't know what Van wanted from Billy Reid anymore than anyone else - Conway would die and take with him the endless cash and contacts he threw at Billy like a dog walker throws a stick.

Van had said we would end it there and then and that when it was over he could take Della back, they'd be safe to leave the slum half of the city and move up.

I'd get my money and it would all just be another job done.

But this was more than a job to me now, and everything at Reds had been wrong.

I looked down at Della who was looking down at her lap. She had that shadowy, doomed look to her expression, to her stature. Everything about her radiated a sorrow, a fear, a stubbornness not to break. And though i wanted to reach out to her, though I wanted to put my arm around her and pull her into my side, something in the curve of her spine told me not to. She was sitting very still, eyes hooded, lashes long. Almost as if she were praying. Though I knew her better than to think she'd do that.

Still, I couldn't bring myself to disturb her when she was sitting like that, so still so quiet, trying not to be seen.

I had to let her think she was getting away with it. I knew that was the kindest thing to do.