Chapter 8 Rocco
Chapter Eight
ROCCO
The ceiling comes into focus first. Then the ache. Then the memory.
It’s the kind of memory that makes you want to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt in after you.
His hands on my chest. The wet cloth moving over my skin.
The cold water and the suffocating heat underneath and my body doing the one thing I couldn’t stop it from doing.
I’d risen against the cloth like some dumb animal responding to a stimulus. And he’d just stood there.
Adrian.
Standing over me with those steady surgeon’s hands and those pale, unreadable eyes behind those glasses. Seeing everything. Mapping the shame I didn't even know I had left in me.
Don’t look at me.
I remember saying it. I remember the sound of my own voice—wrecked, gutted. It was the sound a man makes when the last wall inside him comes down and there’s nothing left but the raw, stupid truth of what he is. A slab of meat. A collection of triggers and involuntary responses.
I press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets until I see white sparks.
My skull feels too small for my own brain.
The shame sits on my chest like a cinder block, heavy and immovable.
It’s the specific weight that comes from being witnessed at your absolute worst by someone whose opinion shouldn’t matter.
But for some reason, it does. I’m not willing to examine that on an empty stomach.
The fever is gone. I can tell by the way the world has hard edges again. The light coming through the blanket-covered window has a sharp, grey definition. My thoughts are finally assembling themselves in a straight line instead of sliding around like wet glass.
My body feels hollowed out. Scraped clean. I feel like the aftermath of a three-day bender, when everything toxic has been purged and what’s left is just the drained, aching carcass. I’m a wreck, but I’m a lucid one.
I sit up. The cot frame screams under my weight, the cheap aluminum groaning.
My left hand throbs inside its gauze cocoon.
The hurt is localized now—contained and predictable.
The sutures in my forearm pull when I flex the muscle, a sharp reminder of the Russian's knife, but the skin doesn't feel like it’s on fire anymore.
My ribs ache. My jaw aches. Everything hurts in the specific, catalogued way of a body that is healing despite its owner’s best efforts to prevent it.
I’m not handcuffed. That’s new. Either he finally trusts me or he’s calculated that a man who can’t keep his own blood pressure stable isn’t worth the extra steel.
The door groans on dry hinges.
Adrian walks in. He’s carrying a tin plate and a glass of water.
He’s wearing the same wrinkled dress shirt—I don’t think he has another one in that expensive leather bag.
The sleeves are rolled to different lengths.
One is pushed above his elbow, the other sits at his mid-forearm, as if he started rolling them and got interrupted by another crisis.
His hair is unwashed and pushed back from his forehead. The silver at his temples is more visible without the usual precision of his grooming. He looks like a man who has been sleeping upright in a chair. He looks exhausted.
He sets the plate on the wooden chair beside the cot. Canned beans. A piece of bread that’s going stale at the edges. A single white pill.
"Your temperature broke during the night," he says. His voice is a flat, dead line. "The infection is responding to the antibiotics. I need to check the wound and change the dressing."
He doesn't look at my face. He looks at my hand, my arm, the medical data points. I am a chart to him this morning. A set of vitals and wound margins. He’s rebuilt the clinical wall, every brick perfectly in place, the mortar set hard.
Good. Fine. Two can play this avoidance game. I can be as cold as he is.
Except I can’t. Because the memory of his hands on my naked body is sitting right there, filling the small room between us. Pretending it doesn't exist would require a level of sophistication I have never possessed.
"You enjoyed that."
The words come out flat and hard. I throw them the way I throw a punch—from the hip, no windup. I watch his face for the flinch. I want to see a crack in the wall. I want any evidence that what happened in this room affected him the way it affected me.
His hands pause over the gauze he’s unwinding from my palm. One beat. Then they resume their work.
"I lowered your temperature from thirty-nine point eight to thirty-eight point two using a standard evaporative cooling protocol," he says.
He sounds like a medical textbook. "The physiological response you experienced is a documented side effect of tactile stimulation during febrile states.
It occurs in approximately fifteen percent of male patients and has no—"
"I don’t want a percentage," I cut him off. "I want you to look at me."
He stops unwinding the gauze. His jaw tightens, the masseter muscle leaping under his pale skin. He lifts his eyes and meets mine. What I see behind those lenses isn’t shame. It isn't arousal or the flustered heat I wanted to provoke.
It’s patience. Cold, measured, infinite patience. He’s been accused of worse by worse people. He survived by never giving them an inch to hold.
"I performed a medical procedure," he says, his voice like ice. "That is all that happened in this room."
"That’s not all that happened. You saw me. You touched me."
"It is all that happened that is clinically relevant," he clarifies.
He holds my gaze for three long seconds.
I count them, the way I know he counts them.
Everything between us is measured in controlled intervals now.
"Would you like me to change your dressing, or would you prefer to have this conversation until the wound gets infected again and I have to amputate your hand? "
I want to hit something. The wall. The cot frame.
His perfect, composed, arrogant face. I want to smash that clinical architecture of his until I find whatever’s hiding underneath—the man who shook in my truck, the man who sat outside my door all night, the man who pressed a wet, cool cloth against my burning skin with hands that didn't tremble until the very end.
I extend my left hand toward him. I don't say another word.
He unwraps the dressing. His long fingers work the gauze with the same steady, mechanical efficiency. He doesn't look at me again. I sit there with my ruined hand in the hands of a man who saw me at my lowest and filed it away under "irrelevant." The shame in my gut curdles into pure, hot anger.
Anger is better. Anger is a weight I know how to carry.
He finishes taping the fresh gauze. He sets my hand on my knee.
"Eat," he orders. "Take the antibiotic. I’ll check on you in—"
The bedroom door bangs open violently.
Garrett fills the frame. He’s holding the shotgun, the stock braced against his hip. His face has the compressed, hard tension of a man delivering bad news on a short timeline.
"We’ve got company."
I’m on my feet before the second word fully lands. The room tilts violently. I grab the doorframe with my right hand and ride out the vertigo until the wooden floor stabilizes beneath my feet.
"What kind of company?" I grunt.
"Drone. Small rotary, commercial grade. I spotted it over the tree line twenty minutes ago making a precise grid pattern. It’s not a hobbyist. The flight path is systematic. Someone’s mapping the property."
The Russians.
The blond I left alive in the hallway—I should have killed him. I should have put a round through his skull instead of pistol-whipping him, because unconscious men always wake up, and they always talk.
"How long do we have?"
"If the drone is their advance element, the ground team is probably staging within a few miles. Could be an hour. Could be less."
I push past him into the main room. Killian is lying on the door, the IV still running into his arm.
His color is better than it was, but his color is still grey-yellow—too much blood loss, not enough time.
His eyes are closed. His breathing is a shallow, rhythmic rasp.
The dressing on his abdomen is clean. Adrian’s work is holding.
I inventory our options. Two handguns—the Makarov I took from the hallway, plus a Glock 19 that Garrett keeps on his hip. The shotgun. A bolt-action hunting rifle I found in the bedroom closet, with five rounds. Maybe forty rounds of mixed ammunition total.
Against a Russian ground team that will come with suppressed weapons, body armor, and the operational understanding that leaving witnesses is a liability.
"We can’t fight here," Garrett says, his voice grim.
He’s right. The cabin is a box with four walls and two exits. If they surround us, we’re dead. If they breach, we’re dead. The only way we survive is if we’re not here when they arrive.
"The truck?"
"Gassed up. I topped it off from the jerry cans in the shed yesterday morning."
I look at Killian on the table. One hundred and ninety pounds of dense muscle on a door that’s six feet long. Abdominal surgery less than a week old. A body that will split open if it’s handled wrong.
"We need to move him."
Adrian appears in the bedroom doorway behind me. His medical bag is already in his hand. The surgeon is back on duty.
"Moving him risks dehiscence of the surgical site," Adrian says, his voice sharp and clinical. "If the anastomosis fails, he will go septic. Without a sterile environment and proper equipment, I can’t repair it a second time."
"If we stay here, the Russians put a bullet in all four of us and burn this shack to the foundation. Which scenario gives Killian better odds, Doc?"
He doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. The math is the same math it’s always been in my life—bad options measured against worse ones.
"Garrett," I bark. "Get the truck backed up to the porch. Fold the rear seats down. We need a flat surface in the back."