Backstreet Boy

|Chapter 61: The Promise|

Isabella

"If you can't leave her, then carry her back!" Jason bellowed, his voice breaking slightly. "We need to hurry!" It looked like it pained him so much to even speak.

Matt wiped at his crimson face. The tears were just smeared all over his cheeks so his mission was unsuccessful of wiping them away. He knelt down and picked Lizzie up delicately as if she was a porcelain doll.

Despite the wide eyes and blood, she looked peaceful. But then I noticed the gaping hole in her chest and the bruise forming with extreme rapidity around her eye. Though no bones appeared to be broken, she looked... sad. Her eyes were devoid of the usual glint of life.

For as long as I had known Lizzie, God, she would smile a presumable ninety percent of the time. It was such a rarity to experience her when she was sad that... it was mindbogglingly unfair. How could someone like Lizzie be good from this world? She was so young, so clever, so beautiful and so happy. My heart felt like it was being ripped out of my chest.

Only the day after meeting Jason, she told me her sister had put in hair extensions, and she knew my irrational abhorrence for hair extensions. She noticed the way I was so peculiarly unconcerned and unresponsive in her anecdote. She knew these finer details about me that no one else would know unless by some miracle and then that would be the new revelation. She noticed the intricate details like no one else did. She was irrefutably brilliant and gut-wrenchingly beautiful, and she would never smile again.

"She told me," I began, finding my voice to be a mere whisper as Jason snapped his head to me, "she told me it would take more than one boy to break us apart," I breathed, gawping down at Lizzie.

You're not going to lose me over a boy – it's going to take a hell of a lot more than that, she said to me. Those words will never be forgotten.

But I'll always remember her last words to me: I can't run in these heels! One sentence, six words, and it summed Lizzie up perfectly, to a T.

Jason stepped up to me and grasped my biceps gently. His look was pained, and blood was continuing to ooze out of the hole in his upper arm. Still, he was somewhat calm and collected as he said, "We really need to go. And if you don't move in one second, I will carry you."

My feet still felt glued to the floor. Matt was sobbing quietly as he held Lizzie in his arms; it seems like he was more than adamant not to even glimpse down at her. But the hold he had on her seemed tight... but not that she'd ever feel it. My heart clenched just watching them. But in the next moment, I was lifted off my feet. My first thought was that someone had gotten to me, but it turns out, Jason had picked me up bridal style.

Jason and Matt were now flat-out running to the end of the pier. They both weaved in and out as I wrapped my arm around Jason's neck. My other lay on my body, my clutch clammy but still holding my heels in an iron-tight clutch. Jason seemed intent, though his arms were trembling. His face was pale, but his eyes were set on the end of the pier.

But then I saw someone who was someone I least expected to witness on the pier. Sabrina. She was running away and screaming simultaneously from one man who had already brandished his knife and held it high. I hopped down from Jason's grip, losing my shoes on the floor and neglected them. Dashing over to the man, I pushed him diagonally to the side to evade Sabrina.

She turned around and gawped at me. Jason pounced on the man on the floor and began sending blows to his face incessantly. There wasn't enough time for the man to retaliate, and instead he lay unconscious a second later once Jason yanked his head up by his hair and smashed it back onto the pier boards. There was a repulsive crash, but Jason sniffed loudly as he stood up.