Chapter 7 Adrian
Chapter Seven
ADRIAN
I hear them through the wall.
The cabin wasn't built for privacy. The plank walls are thin. Gaps between the boards let sound pass as easily as the cold drafts snaking across the rough floor at night.
I’m in the small bedroom, changing the dressing on my own wrists. Rocco’s grip left deep friction burns—raw, abraded skin and bruised tendons that throb with every small movement. Then their voices filter through the cheap wood.
Alessandro’s voice is a flat, emotionless line. Controlled. He gives orders with the same steady regularity that most people breathe.
"The doctor stays until Killian can be moved. After that, we’ll see if he’s still an asset."
"And if the Russians track him here?" That’s Rocco. His voice is a low, guttural rumble that vibrates the floorboards beneath my feet.
"Then you handle it. That’s your job."
A long pause. I press a fresh strip of medical tape across the gauze on my left wrist and hold my breath. My heart knocks hard against my ribs.
"Rocco." Alessandro’s tone changes. It gets softer. It reminds me of a blade being honed to a microscopic edge. "Don’t break the doctor. We might need him again."
Don’t break the tool. Don’t dull the scalpel. Keep the equipment functional. The phrasing is purely mechanical. It’s how a man discusses the routine maintenance of a car, not a human being.
I close my eyes. The sticky tape pulls at the fine hairs on my skin.
Through the wall, I hear the front door groan open. Heavy boots on the wooden porch. The Audi’s powerful engine turns over, catches, and settles into a low, armored purr. Gravel crunches loudly under the tires.
The sound fades as the car moves down the mountain road. The trees swallow the noise. The silence that rushes back in feels like cold water filling a hole.
The cabin feels smaller now. The walls are closer. The ceiling is lower. The air is thick and heavy with the smell of damp wood and the inescapable iron tang of dried blood. I am alone in the woods with a dying man on a door and an enforcer who has just been told not to break me.
That implies breaking me was on the table.
I press my palms flat against my knees. I start to count. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
The counting doesn't stop my hands from shaking. It hasn't worked in days.
The routine assembles itself out of grim necessity.
Killian improves. Slowly. His vitals stabilize. The fever breaks. His color shifts from the waxy grey of a corpse to something approaching human.
I change his dressings. I monitor the bloody output from the drain in his abdomen. I adjust his antibiotic schedule based on the limited supply Garrett managed to stockpile from some unknown source.
Killian drifts in and out of consciousness. When he’s lucid, his green eyes scan the room with a feral, suspicious intensity. He looks like a wolf caught in a steel trap. He doesn’t speak. He looks at me as a function, not a person.
Garrett handles the night shifts. He sleeps on the floor beside Killian’s table during the day. He keeps a shotgun propped against the sawhorse, always within arm's reach.
Garrett is quiet. His politeness is measured, cautious. He knows I am simultaneously indispensable and completely expendable.
Rocco is the problem.
He refuses to rest. The morning after Alessandro leaves, I find him on the porch. He’s splitting firewood with a hatchet.
He’s doing it right-handed. His left arm is cradled protectively against his ribs. The fresh white gauze on his palm is already spotting red from the violent vibration of the impact. He’s stripped to the waist despite the biting morning cold.
His breath fogs in the crisp air. Each powerful swing of the hatchet sends a visible tremor through his injured forearm.
I watch him from the doorway. He knows I’m there. He doesn't look up.
He swings. Splits. Kicks the halves off the stump with his boot. Swings again.
The rhythm is punishing. It isn't about the wood. It’s a compulsion. He’s using his body to outrun the static in his head.
The gauze on his palm turns from pink to a saturated, weeping crimson. He doesn't stop.
"You’re bleeding through the dressing," I say.
"I’m fine."
"You’re not fine. You’re reopening a deep laceration that took seventeen sutures to close. If you tear the repair, I will have to re-close it under conditions that make the first time look like a luxury suite at the Four Seasons."
He swings. The hatchet buries itself deep in the stump. He leaves it there, the handle quivering.
He turns and looks at me. His expression is a hard mix of raw contempt and pure, bone-deep exhaustion.
"I’ve been sitting on that cot for two days. I don't sit."
"Then stand. Walk. I don't care. But if you keep swinging that hatchet, you will lose the use of your fingers. I will not be responsible for the outcome."
He stares. I hold his gaze.
My adrenal system is betraying me. My heart hammers against my ribs. But I keep my voice perfectly level and my posture rigid. The only authority I possess in this place is clinical. If I let that crack, I have nothing left.
He pulls the hatchet from the stump with a grunt. For one terrifying second, I think he’s going to swing it at me.
Rationality says he needs me. Rationality says he was told not to break me. But my body takes a half-step back before my brain can stop it.
He drops the hatchet. It thuds heavily into the dirt. He walks past me into the cabin.
His shoulder clips mine as he passes. The contact is deliberate. He wants me to feel the sheer weight of him. He wants me to know that the space between us exists only because he allows it to.
The next day he tries to check the perimeter.
He makes it two hundred yards before the blood loss wins. Garrett finds him sitting against a pine tree, grey-faced and panting. His palm is a mess again.
I have to re-close two of the sutures that evening. He sits on the edge of the cot and stares at the plank wall while I work.
He doesn’t make a sound. His jaw is locked so hard the masseter muscle bunches under the skin.
He is managing the pain through pure, brutal suppression. He refuses to let his body dictate terms to him.
I should admire the discipline. Instead, it makes me want to put my fist through the wall.
"You are undoing my work," I say. The words come out louder than I planned. My professional distance fractures. Something raw pushes through the gap.
"Every time you tear these sutures, you introduce contamination.
If that wound gets infected in this shack, I will have to cut away necrotic muscle.
That means permanent impairment. Do you understand?
I am trying to save your hand, and you are fighting me harder than you fought the men in my hallway. "
He looks at me. Something shifts in his hard face. The contempt is still there, but it reorganizes into a strange, grudging recognition.
"You’re angry," he says. His voice is flat. Observational.
"I’m frustrated by a patient who is actively sabotaging his own recovery."
"No." He leans forward, closing the distance between us. His dark eyes hold mine. "You’re angry. First time I’ve seen it."
I don't respond. I tie the final suture. I cut the thread and begin dressing the wound again.
My hands are steady, but something behind my sternum is vibrating. It’s a heat. A pressure. It feels like a locked door being forced open from the inside.
I tape the gauze. I stand. I leave the room without another word.
The fever spikes on the fourth night.
I’m checking Killian’s vitals when Garrett appears in the doorway. "The big one’s burning up."
His voice is calm, but the urgency is conveyed through the facts. I cross to the small bedroom.
Rocco is on the cot. The sheet is a tangled mess around his powerful legs. His skin is flushed and slicked with sweat.
I press the back of my hand to his forehead. The heat is alarming. Thirty-nine point five degrees Celsius, at least.
His pulse is rapid and thready. His breathing is shallow. His eyes are open but glassy and completely unfocused.
"How long?" I ask Garrett.
"Found him twenty minutes ago. He was lucid an hour earlier."
I check his bandaged palm. The suture line is intact, but the surrounding tissue is swollen, angry, and red. Cellulitis.
The deep laceration created a perfect pocket for bacteria despite the antibiotics. I need to bring the fever down now. If his core temperature hits forty-one, he seizes.
"I need cold water. Every towel in the house. And the basin."
Garrett moves. I pull the sheet off Rocco’s body.
He’s wearing the same bloodstained jeans he arrived in. We couldn't get them off over his heavy boots when he was unconscious. He refused to let me near them later.
I unlace the boots and pull them off. His feet are enormous. Callused. Thick ankles.
I unbutton the jeans. I unzip them. I hook my fingers into the waistband and pull.
The denim is stiff with dried blood. It resists. I have to work it down over his massive hips.
His thighs are immense. The quadriceps are so heavily developed the fabric catches on the thick muscle. I pull the jeans over his knees and calves.
He’s wearing nothing underneath. I drop the heavy denim on the floor. The man on the cot is completely naked.
My clinical training tells me this is just a body. Two hundred and forty pounds of human anatomy. Skeletal framework. Muscular system. Integumentary covering.
My clinical training is a liar.
The sheer scale of him is the first thing that hits me. He is too much of everything. Too wide. Too dense. Too physically present.
The cot frame bows dangerously under his weight. His long legs extend past the end of the frame. His broad shoulders span the full width of the canvas.
The prison tattoos look different in the low, flickering lantern light. The Madonna on his chest seems to breathe. Her praying hands rise and fall with his laboring lungs.