Wrong Question, Right Answer (The Bourbon Street Boys #3) - Elle Casey Page 0,112

get back to my car, desperate to reach safety, but she whacks me in the middle of the spine with her heavy baton before I can take more than two steps. I arch over backward as the pain rockets through me, and I stumble, falling to the ground.

I’m stunned, my mind whirling as I try to figure out what I’m going to do to save the situation and myself. I can’t fight back. It wouldn’t be right. I promised Charlie I wasn’t here to do any harm. And besides, I took this woman’s son from her. Is it wrong to let her take something from me? I don’t know the answer to these questions and my body is wracked with pain.

Suddenly Dev is in my head, yelling, ‘Block, block, block!’

I twist onto my side and hold my forearms up over me, kicking out with my legs feebly, hoping I’ll catch her in the shin and maybe slow her down. As more blows rain down on me, Dev’s voice is drowned out by another’s.

Not the babies, Lucky’s saying. Don’t let her hurt our babies.

I can’t block her blows and protect them too, so there’s only one thing for me to do: I curl up into a ball as tightly as I can to protect my unborn children, praying it’ll all be over soon.

She pauses and then yells at me, her voice coming out as a screech. “What’s that . . . ? Are you pregnant? You bitch! My son never got to have any babies! I ain’t never gonna get no grandbabies from Charlie because of you!”

I’m in a desperate panic now, thinking the Devil let her read my mind. She knows. She’s going to try to kill the peas in the pod, Milli and Vanilli . . . take them from me like I took Charlie from her.

I try to look up at her so I can block the next blows, but there’s blood in my eyes and it stings, blinding me. I scream as loud as I can, hoping somebody will hear me and come to my children’s rescue. My legs are numb and don’t seem to want to work, making me fear she’s bruised my spine.

This is not generally the type of neighborhood where Good Samaritans hang out, but after five or six more whacks with the baton, most of them to my ribs and arm, I hear voices and then somebody yelling.

“Quit, Eunice, quit!” It’s a man, but I don’t know who he is.

“I’m-a kill this bitch,” she yells as another crack comes, this time against my skull.

I’m woozy, sliding in and out of consciousness. I feel euphoric, though, over the fact that despite the decent shots she’s laid on my body, she hasn’t gotten a single hit in on my abdomen yet and there are witnesses here now. There’s hope my babies will survive this.

I don’t trust Eunice is done trying to hit my belly, even with witnesses standing around, so I stay in the fetal position and pray that the scuffling noises I hear around my head are my rescuers getting her away from me.

Onion breath hits me in the face. “Are you okay? What’s going on? Why’s she hitting you like that?”

I try to answer, but my jaw doesn’t seem to want to work. All I can mumble out is a single, unintelligible syllable. “Uhhhhnn . . .”

Someone’s shouting over my head. “Go check her car. See if she has a phone or somethin’. Somebody we can call.”

“I think you better jus’ dial nine-one-one,” says a female voice.

Eunice is screaming. I can’t quite make out what she’s saying . . . something about a murdering bitch. Oh. That’s me she’s talking about. I hope her neighbors don’t take up the stick and finish the job for her. I’m too worried about the babies to think about getting up. I continue to huddle in on myself, waiting for the sounds of sirens to signal my rescue. They sure do take a long time to come.

Through the haze of pain I’m suffering and during a very long ambulance ride, I think about my friends and family. Lucky’s going to be so upset. Ozzie’s going to be very disappointed. Thibault’s going to be pissed. May and Jenny will never understand.

Hell, nobody’s going to understand, because what I’ve done defies reason. But I get why I thought it was good before, and regardless how it ended, I’m not going to back away from that. Sometimes a person just