Page 123 of Twisted Knight

Shoes squeak by on the floors. Machines beep constantly. Voices say terms I can’t even comprehend right now.

But I can’t feel anything.

Not how cold the room is.

Not his dried blood on my hands cracking as I grip the arm of the chair so tight my knuckles are white.

Not the tears that are sliding down my cheeks.

Not the beating of my own fucking heart.

Images flash through my mind. Images that will forever be burned there.

Mason on the pavement.

The back doors of the ambulance and watching through the window as the paramedic on top of the gurney pumped Mason’s chest as it drove away.

My mom’s rushed footsteps and worried face as she ran into the waiting room to find me. Her frantic words. How cold her hands were as they pulled me against her and just held on as if a hug could make everything better. Could fix how broken Mase was.

My mom crumpling to her knees when the doctor walked out, when he told us Mase was gone. That there was nothing they could do.

The sound. It was a guttural scream that sounded like someone had ripped my mom’s heart out and handed it to her. It’s burned into my brain. I keep hearing it over and over.

The dead weight. How heavy my mom was as I tried to lift her back up. As I tried to help her when I was dying inside myself.

Mason. All the tubes and leads in his little body. All the medical stuff—instruments, rubber gloves, gauze, blood—dropped everywhere from them frantically trying to save him. His cold hands. His one shoe on, the other shoe off, and his big toe sticking through a hole in his sock. His wrist—the stupid blue-and-black friendship bracelet that I used to make fun of—looks so dark against his pale skin.

I fixated on that bracelet. On the specks of blood on it. On its frayed ends. On the fact that I’ll never be able to make fun of him again.

I repeat the words over and over in my mind. My one last promise to my little brother. To my best friend. To my shadow. Whoever did this to you will pay.

It all replays in my mind as I sit in the waiting room.

Over.

This is my fault.

And over.

If I had gone outside with him, he wouldn’t have been hit.

And over again.

I killed my little brother.

“Mr. Simpson?” a deep voice calls into the waiting room. It takes a second for it to register that he’s talking to me.

“Yes. That’s me. But I’m not…” Not a Simpson.

“Father of Mason Simpson?” the man asks.

I shake my head. Even now there’s shame in the stupid response. “No father.” I swallow over the lump in my throat and the tears burning. “Brother. I’m his brother.”

He makes his way over to me. His button-up shirt is strained over his stomach so that the spaces between the buttons are separated and show a white undershirt beneath. There’s a coffee stain on his right sleeve and a badge hooked on his belt.

“Mother?” he asks, stopping before me and pulling out a small pad of paper from the breast pocket on his shirt.

“She’s back there.” I motion toward the closed doors. “They had to give her a sedative to calm her down. She’s … I don’t know what she’s doing. They—the doctor or nurse or someone … told me I had to stay out here.”