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Beth taps frantically at her screen, the splintered glass making it difficult to see clearly but not compromising the functionality of the phone. She hastily pulls up her contact list with trembling fingers, her heart hammering in her chest as she readjusts her grip on the gun. The man cradles his face with both hands, blood now painting a trail of crimson from his nose to his upper lip. She’s filled with a sick satisfaction at the sight of it, his nose an angry bright red and slightly crooked at the bridge.
Beth knows she’s got the right contact when she comes across “Christopher” while scrolling down alphabetically, not sparing any time to analyze his decision to file himself as such before dialing his number. Without delay, she brings the phone to her ear, her full attention falling back on her attacker as it rings. He’s staring her down with a bloodthirsty gaze, his lips curled into a snarl and his expression void of the twisted humor that had been present when he held all the cards. He’s livid, the blood coating his skin only aiding in making his composure more menacing.
On the fourth ring, Beth feels a fresh wave of nausea coming on; what if he doesn’t answer? She barely had enough time to think this far ahead, and the man in front of her is a complete loose canon. She has no way of knowing whether the threat of a loaded gun is even daunting to him, or if he’s simply waiting for the proper moment to take back control.
Luckily, the click of the line connecting on the fifth ring drowns out her anxieties, and Rio’s harmonious drawl drifts through the speaker.
“Elizabeth?” There’s a mix of confusion and unease in his tone, and Beth can hear the ambient din of his car engine in the background. A torrent of relief floods through Beth at the sound— he’s still on the road.
“I need you at my house, now. I was followed back,” she states firmly into the receiver, not giving him time to ask questions before disconnecting the call and shoving her phone into her back pocket. She raises her other hand to the gun, gripping it firmly in both as she trains it at the man’s head.
It’s a mere waiting game, now.
As he stares down the barrel of his own gun, a grin unfurls on the man’s face. It’s something truly ugly and twisted; Beth doesn’t foresee herself forgetting the image of it.
“I see now. You’ve got him tied around your pretty little finger. You call him up to take care of your messes, and you ain’t ever gotta get’chur hands dirty,” he spits at her, his voice full of resentment, and it’s enough to make Beth falter at the familiarity of his words.
It stirs up a mixture of embarrassment and anger deep in her chest, because he has no idea how much history that phrase bears and suddenly he’s under her skin with ease. He doesn’t know that she’s dug herself much farther into the dirt than she had ever thought herself to be capable of; farther than she had ever wished to go.
He doesn’t stop there, though, not allowing her any time to recover before he’s spewing more malice through gritted teeth.
“If you were gon’ shoot me, you’d’ve done it already. You don’t got it in you,” he snarls.
And she can see that he’s trying to get into her head; she realizes that it’s all he has left at this point in terms of power, but that doesn’t mean his words aren’t reaching something buried deep inside her and squeezing at it until it’s difficult to breathe.
She rebuilds her resolve, slotting the bricks of her wall that he’s knocked loose back into place and steadying her voice before she grounds out, “Keep running your mouth and we’ll test your theory. See if you’re as talkative with a bullet between your eyes.”
The bastard has the nerve to laugh at that, his eyes vicious and alight with fiendish amusement.
And she doesn’t realize the shift in her own demeanor any sooner than the man must clock it. It might be the infuriating familiarity of being laughed at, of being belittled by another man who has taken her at face value and has debased her capabilities as such. It also may be the tension pulling her muscles taut like a bow string from the overwhelming spike in adrenaline and fear and that ever-fucking-present exhaustion— Beth just snaps.
With her hands absently tightening on the gun and the last of her nerves depleting, Beth lowers the barrel of the gun, levels it at the man’s right kneecap, and before she can fully comprehend that she’s doing it she’s clicking the safety off and squeezing the trigger.
The gunshot is piercing, simultaneously deafening and whisper-quiet as it seems to ricochet off the surrounding houses. For a second, she doubts she’s really heard it, doubts she’d really pulled the trigger again after the consequences of the last time she did such.
The regret comes next, panic slamming into her like a semi because she just fired a shot off in a residential area. Her residential area, where she knows every child and their mother has most likely just startled awake in response to it.
Before she can fully grasp the consequences of her rash decision, Beth is startled out of her thoughts by the advancing hum of an engine. Immediately, she’s filled with an immense influx of relief, and she finds herself fighting to stay upright while her knees threaten to buckle beneath her weight.
Rio is flying out of the driver’s side door barely a second after the car is thrown into park, rounding the hood and stalking towards her with determined, leonine strides. He barely spares a glance at the man now clutching his right thigh, Beth’s shot having landed a little higher than she intended, but then again, had she really been aiming somewhere precise?
And she’s relieved that Rio’s here, she is, because she knows that despite all of the ways she’s fucked him over in the past, despite the fact that she doesn’t deserve it, she knows he’s going to fix this. But with the adrenaline coursing through her veins like morphine and her emotions rapidly flowing over her confident façade, she barely processes her own actions when she swings the gun in Rio’s direction, causing him to stop dead in his tracks.
An expression of tampered down irritation spreads across his features in the same moment he raises his hands slowly in front of him.
When she registers the position she’s placed herself in, her fingers clasped around a gun that’s aimed at Rio’s chest, the pain in her chest is immediate and agonizing. A sob claws its way up her throat as she releases her grip on the gun, her hand reeling back from the metal as if burned. It greets the concrete with a sharp clatter, but she barely hears it amidst the ringing in her ears as she draws one hand to her mouth to stifle another cry.
An indecipherable emotion flickers across Rio’s expression before he’s making two swift strides in order to close the distance between them. She hears him kick the gun away as she squeezes her eyes shut, the tears she’s been restraining throughout this endless night threatening to spill over.
But then Rio has her wrists in his grip, and he’s gently tugging her hands away from her face so that her eyes flutter open to meet his. He licks his lips promptly, his gaze flickering across her features as his eyebrows pinch together in concern and all be damned if it doesn’t make the knot in her chest tighten even further.
“You good?” He asks, his voice apprehensive but firm and she nods curtly in response; they can return to that question when there’s no longer a man bleeding out on her driveway at their feet.
She finds herself lethargic with the aftermath of her adrenaline spike, and she absently complies when Rio gently gathers her wrists in one hand and guides her towards the car with the other on her lower back. She cranes her head to glance over his shoulder — with what intention she isn’t quite sure — but the hand on her back is insistent as Rio applies more pressure, ushering her away from the body crumpled on the ground behind them.
For the second time today she allows herself to be guided into his passenger seat with hands that are too gentle, too forgiving for what she’s deserving of. Somewhere within her lies the masochistic desire for him to handle her roughly, for his touch to be cold and disconnected because somehow the last several months of mourning his death and ruing her actions wasn’t enough of a retribution for her wrongdoings.
As soon as her bottom hits the car seat, she’s lowering her head between her legs and capturing greedy breaths of air from the enclosed space. She tells herself that it’s in an attempt to soothe the nausea stirring up her insides at the grating scent of metal, and if it means she doesn’t have to meet Rio’s eyes just yet, well, that’s just an added aid in maintaining her rapidly-depleting composure.
It’s silent for a few beats, the rumbling of the engine white noise in her ears as she focuses on controlling her breathing. Then, dulled tapping, and she recognizes it as the sound of Rio typing away on his phone. She can only assume he’s arranging to have her mess (that is, the bleeding man on her driveway) cleaned up, and although she can’t fault herself for practicing self defense, she can acknowledge that shooting the man may have caused more problems than doing so was worth.
It sure as hell felt good, though.
Beth doesn’t plan on breaking the silence when Rio pulls away from the curb, or when she finally raises her head from her lap and settles back into her seat, or when her phone begins to vibrate and she pretends not to notice.
Rio is the first to speak, his voice too loud between the incessant ringing in her ears and the limited distance between them when he says, “You gon’ tell me what happened back there?”
And she shakes her head because no, she had been so focused on on replaying the last twenty minutes that she hadn’t considered that he would want to know the details, doesn’t think she wants to share them. She thinks back to the last time he had assured her that he wanted a detailed account of something she had done; wanted her to relay her method of murder to him, the memory causing her to shiver.
“It ain’t up for debate, darlin’,” he clarifies definitively, his tone leaving no room for argument. When she glances at him, she takes note of the firm line his lips form when he purses them together, his sparse level of patience already dwindling.
She ignores the way her stomach churns at his word choice, the man’s objectionable use of it tainting the term of endearment.
“You turned down a client and he followed me home. What do you think happened?” She replies with more bite than he’s probably deserving of, and it’s as if she can physically feel his patience bend past its breaking point. Even as she braces herself for the fight that’s already brewing between them, she can’t be bothered to care that she’s being unreasonable; she just wants this day to be over.
“Do I really gotta remind you who’s fault it is that he even knew about you in the first place?” He snaps, his patience thinning and his gaze burning when he turns it on her. She feels so small all of a sudden, like she’s a child being scolded, and where she would have expected anger to flare like a wildfire in her chest at his scrutiny, she finds herself oddly hollow.
At her silence, he releases a weighted sigh, and she can sense it when he attempts to reign his irritation in for her sake. She can tell he wants to clue her in to every way tonight’s events have been brought about of her own choice in actions, but knows she doesn’t need that from him.
“Where to now?” She asks through a sigh, her energy rapidly thinning as she sinks further into the leather seat.
It takes Rio a moment to deliberate over whether he wants to answer her honestly, but he comes to a decision after a minute when he says, “I got a place. Use it to lay low when I need’a let shit blow over.”
Beth finds herself nodding for a variety of reasons. In appreciation for this snippet of information he’s divulged to her, in concurrence with the fact that he would need a place to lay low given his precarious line of work; acknowledging the unspoken fact that she would be sharing a space with Rio for an indeterminate amount of time.
When she gives no verbal response, he takes another shot at prying her for information.
“What’d he do, Elizabeth?” His voice is quieter this time, more cautious of her reaction. They both know all too well how sour things can turn when either of them pushes the other too far.
She shakes her head dismissively, refusing to meet his eyes and refusing to relive tonight’s events. It’s too much in combination with the dull ache of her children’s absence.
“It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter to you,” she replies, the words void of any malice; she’s simply being honest.
Regardless of how he seems to sense the defeat in her voice, his defenses still shoot up around him like barbed wire.
“You ain’t givin’ me much to work with,” he admits restlessly, his patience never having enough time to fully regenerate before she’s attenuating it all over again, “He mention why he went after you?”
She breathes out a chuckle that’s devoid of any humor before she answers, “He wanted to send you a message for dismissing him.”
She clocks it out of her periphery when his fingers tighten on the steering wheel incrementally, and she reasons with herself that this is merely presenting another rotten egg situation that he’ll have to deal with. If his earlier bout of rapid typing was anything to go by, however, she would figure that that process is already well underway. So it begs the question, why does this information seem to agitate him more than it has any other time she’s witnessed him handle a wayward associate?
Beth can’t find it within herself to answer it tonight.
“You throwin’ yourself in the firin’ line, you know that? Bein’ seen with me. It ain’t smart, mama,” and the underlying note of concern in his voice causes her to bristle. At what exactly, she’s not quite positive, but she doesn’t think it’s him.
It very well may be their entire state of existence; this connection forged between them by extenuating circumstances that were at odds with every other aspect of her life. It was never meant to exist; she was never meant to get involved in his life, and he was never meant to care about what happens to hers.
“Maybe,” she responds, because there really is no other way to do so without waywardly admitting to the ineffable draw she feels towards him despite everything that should’ve pushed her away for good.
Rio doesn’t say anything to that, has no quip in regardless to her flippant recklessness even when it’s specifically in relation to him. A comfortable bubble of silence grows between them, and Beth takes the opportunity to sink back into her seat and shut her eyes like she’s been wanting to for the past twelve hours.