Chapter 127 He is gone forever.

Chapter 127 He is gone forever.
Tyler's POV
The gunshot was the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life.
It wasn’t like the movies. It didn’t echo dramatically or fade into some cinematic silence. It was just sudden and enormous and wrong in a way that made my entire body seize up before my brain could catch up with what had happened. The sound hit the walls and came back at me from every direction at once, and for a few seconds I couldn’t move or breathe or think anything coherent at all.
Then Cooper started barking.
Loud and frantic and without any of the hesitation he had shown a moment before. His voice filled the hallway and broke through whatever had frozen me in place, and suddenly I was moving.
My eyes found Quin first.
I crossed the hallway in three steps and grabbed him. Both hands on his face, his arms, his chest, looking and searching. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely feel what I was touching.
“Are you hurt?” My voice came out unrecognizable. “Quin. Are you hurt?”
He opened his mouth. Then closed it. He was looking past me.
I pulled back just enough to look at his face properly. His eyes were wide and the controlled expression was completely gone. Not fear exactly. Something past fear. The version of a person that existed on the other side of it.
“I’m okay,” he said. The words sounded far away. Like he was still arriving at them.
My hands kept moving over him anyway. Shoulders, arms, sides. Looking for something I didn’t want to find. His shirt was intact. No tears. No spreading darkness. Nothing wrong.
Then I felt it.
Something wet under my shoe.
I looked down.
Blood on the floor.
My heart stopped.
For a full second it simply ceased to function while my eyes processed what they were seeing. A dark spreading stain on the hardwood floor. Too much of it. My hands tightened around Quin’s arm.
Then I followed the blood to its source.
Aiden.
He was on the floor. I hadn’t even registered when he went down. At some point during the struggle, during the moment the gun went off, he had fallen. He was lying against the wall now, one hand pressed against his stomach, his face turned to the side. His breathing was shallow and audible in the sudden quiet. Short sounds that made my stomach turn.
He was alive.
Barely. But alive.
The gun was on the floor several feet away. Cooper immediately positioned himself between me and it, still barking, still rigid with every alarm he possessed.
I exhaled.
The sound came out of me all at once, like something that had been held under enormous pressure finally finding a release. My knees wanted to buckle. I didn’t let them.
“He shot himself,” Quin said. His voice was strange. Flat. Like he was reading something aloud rather than speaking from thought. “I thought it got to you.”
I looked at Aiden on the floor, then at Quin before finally looking back at the blood.
My hands were still shaking. I couldn’t make them stop. Cooper had stopped barking now that the immediate danger seemed to have resolved itself, but he was still moving. Back and forth behind me. Pressing against the back of my legs. Walking forward. Walking back. His nails clicked against the hardwood in the silence.
I reached into my pocket.
My phone was there. I pulled it out. My fingers fumbled with the screen twice before I got it unlocked. I found Jake’s name,pressed call and lifted the phone to my ear.
He answered on the second ring. “Tyler what's...”
“We have a dead body situation,” I said.
“What?”
“Aiden is in our house.” My voice was steadier than I expected it to be. Steadier than I felt. “He’s been shot.” I looked at the floor. “There’s a lot of blood.”
The sound of Jake moving immediately. A door. Fast footsteps. “Are you and Quin okay?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Jake.”
“I’m on my way. Do not touch anything. Do not move him. Do not—”
“I know.”
“Tyler.”
“I know, Jake. Just come.”
I ended the call.
Cooper pressed his nose against the back of my hand. I looked down at him to find him looking up at me with those enormous eyes and then wagged his tail once Like he was checking in.
“Good boy,” I said quietly.
He pressed closer.
Quin moved toward Aiden. I caught his arm immediately. He looked at me. His expression had returned to something more like itself, but underneath it everything was still raw.
“Don’t,” I said. Jake said don’t touch anything.” I held his gaze. “So we don’t touch anything.”
For a moment he looked like he was going to argue. Then he exhaled and stepped back. I kept my hand on his arm. Partly for him. Partly because my hands needed somewhere to be that wasn’t shaking uselessly at my sides.
Aiden’s breathing was getting worse.
I could hear it changing. The shallow rhythm becoming something more uneven. More effortful. Like something inside him was working very hard to keep going and wasn’t sure it could manage it much longer.
I made myself look at him while he suffer on the ground.
This man who had started everything. He had taken me off a street and kept me in a basement, Who had been connected to Julian who had been connected to Billie who had been connected to everything.
He looked helpless on the ground. He had taken up so much space in our lives for so long. In the fear and the planning and the anticipation of what he might do next. But now, he was on the floor with blood spreading beneath him like a man who had made a series of choices and had finally reached the end of them. Which was who he was.
I didn’t feel sorry for him.
I had thought maybe I would and I didn’t. He tried to speak on the floor but nothing was coming out.
Cooper nudged my leg again at that moment. I looked down. He wagged his tail, walked two steps toward the living room, walked back, and looked at me. I walked toward the living room again.
“He wants us to move,” Quin said.
“Smart dog.” The dog really was smart for how small and young he was.
We moved to the living room. I sat on the couch while Quin sat beside me. Cooper immediately climbed into my lap, which given the circumstances I did not object to. His warm weight settled across my legs and I put both hands in his fur and focused on the feeling of it.
My hands were still shaking.
“You’re okay,” Quin said.
“I know.”
I looked at him. His eyes were on my hands. I looked at them too. The trembling was visible even in the low light.
“I thought it was you,” I said quietly. The words came out before I had decided to say them. “When I heard the shot. Before I could see anything.” I swallowed. “For that second I thought it was you.”
Quin put his hand over mine.
“It wasn’t,” he said.
“I know that now.”
“It wasn’t, I thought it was you too.” he said again.
I looked at our hands. His over mine on Cooper’s back. “I didn’t even care if it was me,” I said. “That was the part that was strange. I ran toward you immediately without thinking about whether I was walking toward the gun.”
“Hey...”
“I’m not saying it was smart. I’m saying it was true.”
He squeezed my hand. I turned mine over and held him properly. Cooper made a sound between a sigh and a groan and rearranged himself more comfortably like he had been waiting for me to settle down so he could do this.
We sat in the living room leaving Aiden to suffer alone.
Cooper lifted his head. His ears went up. He looked toward the hallway for a moment then he put his head back down on my knee.
Aiden had stop making the sound of difficulty in breathing.
Twenty minutes later Jake arrived. He came through the front door with two security personnel and a woman I didn’t recognize who moved with the focused competence of someone who handled situations like this professionally. I could hear the sound of the ambulance outside.
He took one look at us on the couch, then moved into the hallway.
He came back a minute later.
His expression said everything before he opened his mouth.
“He’s gone,” Jake said.
Jake rubbed a hand over his face. He looked exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with tonight and everything to do with the accumulation of every night before it. “Okay.” He turned to the woman beside him. “Start the process.”
She moved immediately.
Jake came and sat in the chair across from us. For a moment he just looked at us. The couch. Cooper stretched across our laps. Our hands still linked between us.
“How did he get in?” Jake asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Quin said.
“I’ll find out.” he paused. “Are you both actually okay?”
“We’re fine,” I said.
He looked at me with the expression he used when he knew someone was telling him a partial truth and was deciding whether to push on it. Then he looked at Cooper.
“He alerted us about Aiden's presence," Quin said.
Jake looked at Cooper who was wagging his tail without lifting his head. “Good dog.”
Cooper’s tail wagged harder.
I almost smiled.
The next hour was a blur of quiet, efficient activity. People moved through the house. Questions were asked and answered. Photographs were taken. At some point someone brought us water and I drank mine without tasting it.
Cooper didn’t leave my lap through any of it.
Every time someone new moved through the living room he lifted his head and backed a little. When I set my water glass down he sniffed it thoroughly before apparently deciding it was acceptable.
At one point I stood up to speak to one of Jake’s team and Cooper stood up with me, pressed against my leg, and followed me across the room. When I stopped he stopped. When I turned he turned. A small golden shadow that had apparently decided his entire purpose was to remain in physical contact with me until further notice.
Quin watched it happen.
Around two in the morning Jake finally sat back down across from us.
“It’s done,” he said. “The official version is being handled.”
Quin nodded.
“Aiden Grey,” Jake said. He shook his head slightly. “I can’t believe it ended like this.”
“How did you think it would end?” I asked.
Jake was quiet for a moment. “Not here,” he said finally. “ Or at least not like this.”
I looked at the hallway. The floor had been cleaned. The gun was gone. Everything was quiet and entirely ordinary looking in a way that felt slightly wrong.
“Is it over?” I asked.
Jake looked at me. Then at Quin. Then back at me. “The trial can’t proceed without the defendant.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He held my gaze. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I think it’s over.”
I sat with that for a moment.
Over.
After everything, all of it was over under a few seconds on
Cooper climbed back into my lap. I put my hands in his fur. Quin’s shoulder was warm against mine.
I looked at the ring on my finger. Then at the one on Quin’s.
“Okay,” I said.
Jake nodded. “Okay.”
Cooper sighed deeply and closed his eyes.
I think things are finally falling in place for both of us. All the people involved in making our lives hell are gone.
I guess it's time for some more good things to happen.