ONE SEVENTY EIGHT
He was just a doctor. A doctor caught in the heat of something far bigger than himself. A man who, if circumstances had been different—if life had been kinder—might have still been living some quiet, normal life, treating patients, prescribing medicine, saving people instead of helping fugitives nurse stab and bullet wounds in the backrooms of an old estate tucked away in the Catskills.
As I stood there, staring at him slumped against the floor, my arms still crossed over my chest like a shield I didn’t know how to lower, the weight of all the ifs bore down on me.
If he hadn’t been there when we arrived...
If Isabella had been alone...
If it had been just a frightened woman and an empty house...
I tried to imagine it—us barging in, desperate, bloody, hunted like dogs. Isabella, with no defense except locked doors and trembling hands. She wouldn't have stood a chance against Dominic and me, against the urgency that had stripped away all our manners and mercy. We would have broken in if we had to. We would have taken what we needed, no matter who stood in our way. That was the truth I didn’t want to admit, even to myself.
And Gael had reacted as any human being would.
Was it really fair to punish him for trying to protect what little he could?
My chest tightened painfully. I thought about how he must have seen us—three strangers armed and desperate, dragging danger to their doorstep. People the news had plastered across the television all day, calling us "armed and dangerous," criminals to be avoided, fugitives with nothing to lose. If I had been in Gael’s shoes, if strangers had crashed into the place my cousin managed, dragging death and destruction in their wake...what would I have done?
I’d like to think I would have been brave. That I would have stood my ground, asked questions first before calling the police. But if I was honest...
Truly honest...
I might have run too.
I might have fought, clawed, screamed for help.
How easy it was to sit in judgment when my world had already crumbled and there was nothing left to lose. How easy to pretend I would have chosen kindness when the truth was, survival made cowards and monsters out of everyone eventually.
Maybe we had been too harsh with him.
Maybe we were becoming the very things we hated—the monsters who punished first, asked questions later. The ones who lashed out at anything that smelled like betrayal because we were too scared, too battered, too broken to tell the difference anymore between friend and enemy.
I looked at Gael, really looked at him—the trembling hands, the bloody clothes, the hollow, bruised face of a man who hadn't eaten, hadn't slept, hadn't even been given water since morning. His dignity stripped down to nothing but a battered shell.
And the worst part?
He didn’t even fight us anymore.
He had accepted it—the cruelty, the punishment—as something he deserved. As if in his mind, this was justice, and all he could do was bear it.
Something twisted sharp and ugly inside me. A sick, bitter taste coated my tongue.
We should have treated him better.
The thought slipped in quietly, barely more than a whisper against the noise in my head.
We should have at least given him water. A fucking sandwich. Something. Anything to remind him—and ourselves—that we weren’t completely gone yet. That we hadn’t turned into animals scrabbling for survival in the ruins of what was once a life.
I swallowed hard against the knot forming in my throat.
He tried to escape, the cold, rational part of my mind argued. He could have exposed us. He could have gotten Tina killed. He could have handed us over for a reward, sold us out to save his own skin.
But even that voice sounded brittle now, a hollow justification that crumbled the longer I stared at him.
What would you have done, Eleanor?
The question gnawed at me, relentless.
And I knew the answer.
If I'd been locked in a room all day, terrified, convinced I was being held hostage by criminals with blood on their hands...
If I hadn't known why they were here, hadn't known the story behind the wounds or the terror or the desperation...
If I thought every second could be my last unless I fought for it...
I would have run too.
My breath hitched quietly in my chest, and I turned my face away slightly so Dominic wouldn't see the raw emotion flickering in my eyes. I wasn’t ready to explain myself. Not yet. Not when survival was still so precarious, still so brittle that even the smallest crack in our armor could be the end of us all.
Gael shifted slightly on the floor, letting out a low, broken sound that wasn’t quite a groan and wasn’t quite a sob. It was the sound of a man who had hit the very bottom and wasn’t even sure he wanted to get back up.
And still...some stubborn piece of me clung to that almost-pity.
Almost.
Almost enough to soften the anger.
Almost enough to want to reach for him, to say I’m sorry.
But survival was still king here.
And softness was a weakness we couldn’t afford.
Not yet.
So I swallowed it all down, the pity, the guilt, the ugly ache in my chest, and wrapped my arms tighter around myself. I sealed it up deep where no one could see it.
Because feeling bad for Gael wasn’t going to save Tina.
It wasn’t going to save any of us.
And yet, as I looked at him one more time, at the bruised, broken man we had made in a single day, I couldn’t help but wonder—
When this was all over, if we survived this at all...
Would there be anything left of us worth saving?
I swallowed hard, my mouth dry, my own body tense and coiled. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel looking at him like this. Rage, definitely. A savage sense of betrayal that he had brought this nightmare crashing down onto us with his lies and half-truths. Pity, maybe.
But all I could really feel was cold. A numb, hollow kind of cold that nothing seemed to penetrate anymore.
Dominic stalked past him, shoving his gun back into the waistband of his jeans with a hard, frustrated motion. His fists flexed at his sides like he was debating whether or not to turn around and land another blow just for good measure.
I crossed my arms tightly across my chest, trying to keep the tremor out of my hands.
"Dominic, not too hard," I asked, my voice softer than I intended. It scraped out of me like broken glass.
Dominic didn’t answer immediately. He prowled around the room like a caged animal, every movement radiating barely restrained violence. He looked down at Gael like he was a piece of garbage that had washed up on the shore, something foul and rotting.
"Get up,” Dominic finally said.
Gael let out a rough, bitter-sounding laugh from where he knelt on the floor, but it turned into a dry, hacking cough almost immediately, the sound rattling painfully in his chest. When he finally looked up at me, there was no defiance in his eyes. Just a weary kind of resignation.
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