Chapter 11 #2
I push myself up off the floor, my bloody leg screaming at me and I grab my gun that got tussled to the ground and point it at the man.
“Please I—” he starts, but the next moment my finger pulls the trigger, and a bullet goes straight into his groin. Then his stomach, then his chest.
“Who’s the nasty bitch?” I sneer and limp over to him as more bullets fly across the room.
“Ah fuck!” one of the guards on my side shouts, “Son of a bitch! You’re gonna pay for that, you fucker—” his words are cut off by the sound of him beating the other man to death with his gun.
The room is absolutely covered in blood and bullet holes.
As the guards get the only man alive in the room onto his knees, I look to Soren whose eyes are laced with a familiar emotion.
Guilt.
It’s difficult to stay standing, much less walk, but I make my way over to him as I hear the final bullet being placed in the last man’s head.
Leave no man alive. That seems to be the Fiorelli way, but the way Soren is looking at me, and how the anger is blazing in his eyes, tells me that he didn’t just follow me into a trap.
“Did you know about this?” I ask him, voice low.
He doesn’t answer me. Instead, he looks to the side away from me. I feel like I already know the answer, but instead of feeling anger, all I feel at this moment is relief that he showed up at the last minute to handle these guys. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter right now.
All that matters is that we get the fuck out of here before someone else shows up.
As I make my way toward the door and out into the alley again, Soren follows me. I’m limping, and my head is getting dizzier by the minute. I don’t know how much blood I’ve lost, but I’m sure it’s a few pints.
“You’re injured,” Soren tells me.
“Wow, you’re a fucking genius,” I reply with a gasp. My voice sounds weaker than I expect.
Soren growls and moves in front of me. “Let me take care of you, for fucks sake. You’ve got a bullet in your leg, again.”
I shove him out of the way. “Not until you answer my question,” I insist.
He doesn’t reply, just stands to the side of me while the guard behind us is being lead out by another.
“He’s more injured than me,” I motion behind us. “Why don’t you baby him?”
“I’m not babying anyone. It’s my job to watch after you, remember?” Soren reminds me.
I roll my eyes. It’s getting difficult to walk. I lean against the brick wall next to us, trying to make it look casual. My breath is heavy.
“Y-you’re doing a great job at that, are you not? Showing up after a fight has already started. After the bullet’s already in my leg,” I say, waving a hand. A blood covered hand.
“Oh, fuck you,” Soren says and grabs me by the arm. “You showed up here without telling anyone. You knew it was trouble; you came to start it.”
“If you’re watching me, then you know where I am. You could have stopped me before I walked in,” I accuse him as he drags me through the alley. I’m too weak now to stop him, and I don’t want to.
If anyone is going to give me less of a hard time, it’s him. If my own family were here…I’d be ass deep in consequences by now. I don’t need that.
As annoying as Soren is, something about the way he nudges me into his car and brushes my hair out of my face makes me want to be with him more than anyone else right now.
“Oh no, you don’t get to claim anything, ass,” Soren swears at me and then his fingers brush along my jawline. “You came here all on your own.”
“Did I?” I ask, looking up at him through blurry vision. He stares back at me for a second and then shuts the door nearly on my face. I flinch back away from it and then relax back against the backseat.
“Didn’t want your front seat g-getting…dirty?” I ask him with shaky breath as he’s sliding into the driver seat. I see the car the guards came in speeding away, headlights in the distance.
Siren’s blare behind us.
I don’t hear Soren’s response. I just go tumbling over in the back seat as he drives toward and down two different side roads before heading to a run-down neighborhood in his uncle’s domain.
“Just take me home,” I order. “They can patch m-me up there.” I ignore the fact that I am not even remotely intimidating with my face pressed against the worn leather of the car and my eyes half open.
I can just barely see Soren in the rearview mirror when I glance up, and I notice his eyes glance over as well. Meeting mine briefly.
“We’re closer to my place,” he says just before pulling into a lot that’s so dimly lit the moon is brighter than the street lamps.
Several of those lamps flicker, and I hear shouting from across the street.
“Safe?” I ask with a weak chuckle. “In the slums?”
Soren turns the engine off and gets out, pulling my door open, and I groan as he grabs me by the arm and yanks me up into a sitting position.
“Please, it’s safer here than in your own house. Folk here ain’t got much to lose, so they protect what they do got. We got so much to lose that we’re reckless with it.”
I hiss as I stand on my bad leg and Soren puts his shoulder under my arm to help me stand up and walk toward the stout brick building with small iron balcony’s every floor.
“I’ve been here, I remember,” I sneer in response. “You ever lived in a rat-infested building before, Fiorelli?”
Soren snorts and uses a key to open what appears to be a side door into the building, but is actually a side door into the basement. The stairs are too narrow for both of us to walk down, so he locks the door and then shuffles around me.
I walk behind him, feeling the stairs sway underneath me. I feel more and more uneasy as I go on. My leg is starting to feel like I’m walking on bone. I know I’m not, but the pain makes my eyes sting and I’m gritting my teeth trying not to let those tears drip down.
“I know for a fact you haven’t,” Soren tells me once we’re at the bottom. “Both of us might’ve been here short term, but we get to go home at the end of the night, they don’t.”