Chapter 62
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CASPER
The way he’d explained it to me was that he’d replaced all the bone back there with a device that resembled a slinky. A metal coil that protected the nerves but was flexible so that I could twist and move and flip in ways a normal human couldn’t.
The fact I was born without the ability to feel pain made me a freak show, while the work the doc did to allow me to walk again made me the main attraction—as well as his greatest medical achievement.
I wasn’t kidding when I said I was his favorite. I was the only one of us who was not just returned to a fully functioning state but surpassed that functioning and became something otherworldly.
I did my best to keep still for him. Mostly because it would just make the process longer, and I was jonesing to get off this metal slab.
I couldn’t help but shake my leg from side to side, that pent-up energy building up as the coke made its way out of my system. For most people, it was an aggravator, left them feeling nervous or jittery. It had the opposite effect on me. It calmed me down, helped me focus.
It was why I always did a line or seven before going out on a job. You wouldn’t notice a difference in me unless you were inside my head. But it made everything less… buzzy. It got rid of the noise so that the only thing in my crosshairs was the target in front of me.
I might have done a few more lines on my way over to the apartment for an entirely different reason. Celebratory lines, for a job well done.
“She got away?” he asked as he finished with his poking. I could feel him looping the stitches through my skin but not the bite of the needle.
“Not entirely.” I smirked, letting the little piece of meat dangle behind me as I held it up.
“Got the tip of her finger right here.” I peered over a shoulder, my opposite arm crossed in front of me, and flapped my trophy in the doc’s direction.
“Wanna give it to the wifey? Or does she only like toes?”
I could hear his shoe scrape against the tile floor as soon as I mentioned the missus. It was something he always did when he was thinking about her. He curled his toes—the nine of them that she didn’t lop off when he was sleeping—and shuffled a step.
If there was ever a question about where my penchant for violence came from, the answer was clearly my adoptive parental figures and how spilling blood was their love language.
Don’t ever let Marisela hear you call her Mami, though.
She didn’t find it as endearing as I did.
She also had zero interest in piecing me together.
That was Bossman’s thing. He was the fixer of whatever his lovely wife decided to break.
That didn’t mean the fixing came without a price we all had to pay.
Including her. She just had to pay it by marrying the man who’d been obsessed with her since before she married his brother.
The metal utensils clattered against the tray, which was the telltale sign the doc was done with me. So I rolled off the table, grabbed for the shirt I left balled up on the counter, and started making my way towards the door.
Bossman cleared his throat before I was able to turn the knob. I could sense his eyes penetrating my back deeper than his scalpel.
“And how exactly did she get close enough to stab you?” he asked in that disappointed dad tone again. “It was supposed to be a long-distance shot.”
I shrugged a shoulder as I spun around and tugged the shirt over my head. Whether or not he saw me doing it wasn’t the point. It was just something I did whenever I needed an extra second to come up with a lie. Or a half-truth.
I popped my head out of the collar, the fabric catching on my nose on the way down. It smelled like blood. And sweat. And her.
“You should know better than anyone that things don’t always go according to plan, Doc.” I grinned.
He continued to make no expression at all. His mouth in a thin line and his arms folded over his chest. But it didn’t matter how hard he looked. Getting into my brain wasn’t nearly as easy as digging around my back.
“Right. I’ll send Dr. Michaels then.” He nodded once. It wasn’t supposed to be a discussion. I made it one anyway.
“You could do that…” I shrugged again.
“Or?” The Bossman quirked an eyebrow. He was indulging me because he wanted to see where I was taking this. He suspected I was up to something. And he was right. I was.
We weren’t talking about the same person. The chick he wanted dead was sprawled out on the floor of her condo. A quick shot between the eyes through her living room window and it was lights out. Some mistress who was blackmailing some high-powered politician who now owed Dr. Adrian Lambert a favor.
It wasn’t my fault he assumed she had been the one to stab me, and I had no intention of correcting him either.
“Or… you could let me do what you pay me to do instead of splitting the fee two ways.” The Bossman might have been doing this job for leverage but that didn’t mean we weren’t getting paid. And not out of the goodness of his heart. It was to keep that leverage to himself.
When he didn’t answer right away, I cocked my head to one side and shoved my hands into my pockets. I learned it from him. So that he couldn’t help but see a part of himself when he looked at me.
“Franks’s hand still doesn’t work right,” I added for good measure. “He’s sloppy.”
“Sloppy is letting a target get away.”
“All the more reason for me to find her and keep my record perfect.” Or as close to perfect as a guy could get after someone had ordered me not to finish the job on Franks back when he had been one of our hits too.
Again, that was intentional on Lambo’s part. He wanted another doc on the books.
Bossman took a long breath and nodded once. My cue to get out before he changed his mind.