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** NICK **

I was gasping uncontrollably. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t catch my breath. My vision was fuzzy from the lack of oxygen, but I could still see a blurry outline of Sarah raising the gun and bringing her finger backwards to pull the trigger. Everything was so hazy that I didn’t even see Brian moving until he was on top of her. By the time that my brain registered what was going on, Brian had already captured Sarah around the waist, twisting her body and pulling her forcefully to the ground.

The gun went off; the discharge ringing in my ears as Tony let go of my wrists and hustled out of the way. Even though Tony inadvertently took me down with him as he moved, I still felt the blood. The warm droplets hit my arm and trickled slowly down my skin as I skidded roughly along the floor. My tail bone burned from connecting with the cement and I braced myself for the searing pain that was sure to come; after all, I had just been shot.

“You fucking idiot!” Sarah’s voice rang out admits the commotion.

Forgetting about the impending pain, I forced myself to my feet and stumbled towards Brian who was lying on the ground and defending himself against Sarah’s flying fists. Tony was still trying to collect himself from the tumble that the two of us had taken, while Joey and Vinny were still tussling with AJ and Kevin.

I reached my destination in a matter of seconds, wrapped my hands around Sarah’s tiny frame and slammed her to the floor. She hit the ground with such a sickening sounding thud that I almost felt bad for her. I had always been a strong believer in the notion that it was never okay to hurt a woman, but I immediately pushed my feelings of remorse aside. In all fairness, she had just attempted to shoot Kevin.

“Nick!” Brian gasped; his eyes wide and frantic. “You’re bleeding.”

I pulled Brian up into a standing position and he winced with the effort of getting to his feet. He must have hit the ground even harder than I had.

“I think I’ve been shot.” It wasn’t until the words were out of my mouth that I realized that the pain that I had been expecting still hadn’t come.

Brian grabbed at my arm and then moved his hands quickly to my chest; his fingers leaving bloody streaks on my shirt as he searched for the wound. “You’re okay.” He breathed. ”You’re okay.”

“Then who …”

Brian and I both turned at the same time, our eyes simultaneously taking in the pool of blood and the body on the ground. Everyone else seemed to be moving in slow motion as I hurled myself to the floor by Howie’s side. I could see Brian falling down next to me, but everything else was a blur. I gently pulled Howie’s head into my lap and looked down at his face. His eyes were closed and there were spatters of blood across his neck and his cheeks.

“Howie.” I choked on his name as I looked down at the blood that was seeping out of his stomach and saturating his t-shirt. The stain was getting bigger by the second, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything. I brought my trembling fingers up to Howie’s cheeks and moved them slowly across his skin. The feeling of his stubble beneath my hands was enough to push me over the edge.

The tears were falling hot and fast as I watched Brian push Howie’s t-shirt away from his stomach. The entry point was angry and red, fresh blood was pooling out of the broken skin and running aimlessly onto the ground. The sight was enough to turn my stomach, but I pushed the nausea aside. Instead, I returned my attention to Howie’s face and gently wiped away some of the spatter with my thumb. I knew that I wasn’t being helpful, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything else.

“I did this.” Brian’s voice was the only sound that could have pulled my attention away from Howie and, when I looked into my best friend’s face, I didn’t like what I saw.

Brian was shaking uncontrollably. His faced was laced with guilt and his eyes were blurry with tears. There was blood on his hands; Howie’s blood.

“You didn’t do this.” I forced myself to speak and to keep looking at Brian when I should have been directing all of my attention towards Howie. “Sarah did this.”

Brian shook his head. He was shaking so badly that he could barely speak. “I did this. I’m the one who tried to be the hero. I’m the one who made Sarah fire the shot at Howie.”

“None of that matters!”

Kevin had miraculously appeared on the other side of Howie’s body. I was so flustered that I didn’t even question how Kevin had managed to get away from Vinny as I watched him stick his arms out and roughly push his cousin out of the way before dropping his hands to Howie’s stomach.

“We need to put pressure on the entry point. We need to stop the bleeding!”

Brian fell back onto the cement from the force of Kevin’s push. The guilt that had been crisscrossing his face was immediately replaced by a look of anguish and disbelief. He looked to me for support, but I merely shook my head and returned my eyes to Howie’s painfully still face. I didn’t have the energy to get involved in the middle of a dispute between the Kentucky cousins. This wasn’t the time or the place for any of us to be worrying about a bruised ego.

“Is he breathing?” Kevin demanded. He hastily pulled his sweater over his head and looked at me expectantly when I didn’t answer. “For fuck’s sake, Nick, is he breathing?!”

I redirected my attention towards Kevin’s face, well aware of the fact that my eyes were wide and vacant. I had no idea if Howie was breathing or not, nor did I remember how to check to see if he was. Did I look for a pulse? Did I look at his chest? Did I give him CPR? My mind was racing from the simple task of trying to remember my basic first aid skills. All I wanted was for Howie to be okay; my mind couldn’t focus on anything else.

“You’re useless!” Kevin’s forehead nearly smashed me in the face as he placed his ear next to Howie’s nose and stared at his chest. After a few seconds, he ripped his face away from Howie’s and returned his attention to the blood that was still trickling slowly out of his stomach. “He’s breathing.”

Never in my life had two simple words brought me so much relief. I continued to cradle Howie’s head in my lap, watching in a haze as Kevin went to work applying pressure and wrapping his shirt around Howie’s stomach. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see AJ falling down next to Brian; the two of them grabbed at each other as AJ subtly prevented Brian from interfering with Kevin’s actions. I knew that Brian was crying and I could hear AJ rasping what I assumed were words of comfort at an alarming rate of speed, but I didn’t dare take my eyes away from Howie. For the first time in days, I didn’t care about what AJ and Brian were doing.

Kevin pulled the knot that he had made with the arms of his shirt as tight as he could and Howie’s eyes fluttered open from the sudden jolt of pressure.

“Howie?” I gently pushed my hand through his hair and leaned down towards his face. “Howie, can you hear me?”

Howie’s eyes were glossy and only partially open, but he managed to nod his head ever so slightly. He opened his mouth and let out a single word, barely above a whisper. “Hurts.”

“I know.” The tears were streaming down my face again. I watched as the fat droplets rolled off of my chin and landed in Howie’s hair. Any other day, Howie would have skinned me alive for making a mess of his hair, but now he didn’t even flinch. The observation made me cry even harder. Dear God, I really needed Howie to be okay.

“Well, isn’t this touching?”

Despite my best efforts to keep my eyes trained on Howie, I raised my head at Sarah’s comment. I had been so consumed with Howie that I had forgotten all about our situation. I blinked several times in rapid succession to clear my vision. The sight of Sarah and her goons seemed like an illusion. It was hard to fathom that there were other people around, let alone four very angry people who were now surrounding us with their guns drawn.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it!?” I screamed, my voice cracked and splintered with rage and emotion as I took in Sarah’s self-satisfied smirk. “You wanted to cause me pain and you’ve succeeded! Are you happy?”

“What you’re feeling right now is only a very small fraction of the hurt that you’ve caused me.” Sarah seethed. “I put my life on hold for you. I could have done so much more. I could have had so much more, if I hadn’t spent all of that time waiting for you.”

“You’ve fucking lost it!” I placed Howie’s head gently on the ground and stood up. I took a few steps towards Sarah, feeling more than a little unsteady on my feet as I watched her bodyguards begin to close in on me and the rest of the guys. “You’re delusional! You’re clearly just looking for someone to blame for the fact that you’re life is shit!”

“I rejected everything for you!” Sarah screamed back, her face reddening from the sheer effort of projecting her voice. “I didn’t go to school overseas! I didn’t try to find a boyfriend! I put myself in debt buying concert tickets, VIP passes, plane tickets, and cruise packages! I lost friends because I was so preoccupied with you!”

“I didn’t ask you to do any of those things.” I struggled to keep myself from shouting. “You destroyed your own life.”

“You don’t understand!” Sarah continued to scream. “It’s not just me who feels this way. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of girls out there who you’ve made promises to that you haven’t kept. I’m doing this for all of the fans that you’ve rejected and let down over the years! I’m doing this for all of the girls who have spent their life's savings in the hopes that you would look at them and smile and pose for a picture, but who always end up going home empty-handed.”

“Fans?!” I was shrieking now. “Our fans care about us! They would never do anything to hurt us! Look what you’ve done to Howie? Do you really think that any fan of ours would have put a bullet in Howie’s stomach? He could die because of what you did! You’re not a fan; you’re nothing but a coward with a seriously deranged vision of reality.”

Sarah’s face was turning from red to crimson. She glanced once in Howie’s direction before steeling her eyes on me. “I hate you, Nick Carter! I hate you for ruining my life!”

“I don’t care if you hate me!” I raged. “I just want to make it perfectly clear that if Howie dies I will hunt you down and kill you myself! Do you understand?”

I was moving quickly now, crossing the distance between myself and Sarah in long, rapid strides. I was so fixated on getting my hands around her tiny neck that I didn’t notice what was happening behind me. I didn’t notice that AJ, Brian, and Kevin were being pulled from the floor. I didn’t notice that they were, once again, having their hands bound behind their back. The blood was pounding so heavily in my ears that I didn’t even hear them struggling, or maybe I did and I blocked it out. The anger was all consuming; Sarah had hurt Howie and now I was going to hurt her.

I lunged at Sarah, but she was too quick, too agile. She easily sidestepped my advances and clicked her gun into position. “Are you sure that you want to come after me? What about your friends?”

I whirled around; all thoughts of revenge forgotten. How could I have been so stupid? Howie was still lying on the ground, his eyes opening and closing in such a way that made it easy to see that he was slowly, but surely slipping away. Kevin, AJ, and Brian were now standing shoulder to shoulder with their arms twisted painfully behind their backs. Vinny, Joey, and Tony were standing a few feet away from them with their guns at the ready. None of them said anything as I looked back. They didn’t have to; their faces said it all.

“You really are a tool.” Sarah’s voice hissed in my ear as she wrenched my arms behind my back. “I never should have cut you loose, but I wanted you to turn the guns on each other. I suppose that I’m just going to have to do all of the dirty work by myself.”

“You’ve already done more than enough.” I tried to resist, but her movements were too fast. Sarah may have been small, but she was strong and swift, and I was completely unprepared. The cable ties were around my wrists before I could blink and Sarah wasted no time in pushing me roughly back towards the others.

“You think that you’re upset over what happened to Howie?” Sarah’s voice was biting. “Just wait until you see what I’m going to do next.”