Chapter 17 - Seraphina
Seraphina
Iwoke on a bed in a back room of the Bloody Scythes clubhouse, the concrete floor cold beneath me and barred windows offering no comfort. The only light came from a single bulb, naked, humming like a toothache, painting everything in the colorless shade of near-morning.
My throat felt packed with sand. For a second, I couldn’t move.
I’d expected—what? The hospital, maybe. Or the lab, strapped to a gurney, saline in my arm, government men with laminated badges lurking just out of view.
But this was different. This was a bunker, a tomb, a place built to be survived, not remembered.
Across the room, Nitro sat in a folding chair, elbows braced to knees, hands dangling, head down. The lines of his neck were tense, like he was fighting off the instinct to stand up and run. He looked up when I stirred, eyes catching the light and holding it, letting nothing slip past.
He didn’t speak. Just watched, measured. Waiting to see which version of me would wake up.
My legs were numb. I dragged them to the side of the bed, pressed bare feet to the floor, and flinched at the chill.
A blanket—a real one, heavy, army-issue—was tangled around my waist. My arms prickled with sweat in the cold, but I didn’t dare shrug it off.
The shudder in my hands wasn’t from temperature, not exactly.
My brain started a checklist. I tried to remember how I got here, but everything after the last gunshot was a slurry of noise, broken glass, the ragged edge of a knife, and the rough hands that cut me free.
I remembered Nitro’s voice in my ear, low and urgent.
I remembered blood, not mine, running down the side of my cheek, warm and sticky, painting a line from temple to jaw.
I remembered the chair, the Russian with the gun, the metallic click of the safety disengaging. I remembered the smell—urine, cordite, the coppery sweetness of violence. I remembered the certainty that this was it, the black drop at the end of the probability well.
I remembered wanting to call out, but my mouth wouldn’t work.
I didn’t remember how I got from there to here, but Nitro must have carried me and put me on his bike.
I blinked. The bulb overhead flickered, then steadied.
“Hey,” I said, voice gravel-thin.
Nitro nodded. “Hey, yourself.”
The distance in his voice hurt more than the wounds.
I wrapped the blanket tighter and tried to stand, but my knees buckled. Nitro was on his feet before I hit the ground, arms catching under my shoulders. He set me back on the cot, gentle as a field medic, and knelt to eye level.
“You’re safe,” he said.
“Doesn’t feel like it,” I said, and immediately regretted it. My throat closed, and I started to shake—not just the hands, but everywhere. My teeth clacked once, involuntary, and I tasted iron on my tongue.
Nitro saw it coming, long before I did. He put his hand on my back, solid and unmoving, and waited for me to crater.
The first sob hit like a dry heave. I tried to swallow it, but another came, and another, and soon my whole body convulsed with the force of it.
I curled forward, elbows on knees, and hid my face in my palms. I couldn’t breathe.
My lungs locked up, every inhale a struggle, every exhale a whimper.
It was the noise I hated most—a child’s animal noise, pathetic and open.
Nitro didn’t move. He stayed beside me, hand on my spine, thumb working slow circles between my shoulder blades.
He didn’t say it was okay, or that I’d be fine, or that I should pull myself together.
He just stayed, the way a dog stays next to a body until someone tells it the owner isn’t coming back.
The bulb overhead hummed. The world shrank to the echo of my own panic. The room stank of diesel, of leather, of something raw and unfiltered.
I cried until the skin under my eyes burned, until the tears dried out and left me hollow. I rocked on the edge of the bed, a hunched animal, waiting for the next shock to land.
When the storm finally passed, I felt spent, a dry leaf shuddering in the wind. I sat up, wiped my nose on the blanket, and tried to reclaim some piece of dignity.
“Sorry,” I managed.
“Don’t be.” Nitro’s voice was softer now. He reached for the edge of the blanket, tucked it around my shoulders like a makeshift shield, then sat back on the folding chair.
I looked at my hands. The nails were dirty, split. Blood still caked under some of them. There was a cut on my knuckle, the kind that doesn’t start to hurt until the adrenaline runs out. I picked at it, just to feel something real.
He watched me, waiting for the next move.
I took a breath, slow and deliberate, let the cold air shock my lungs.
“How long was I out?”
He checked his phone. “Three hours, give or take. Doc says you should’ve had a concussion. But you’re too stubborn for that.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out a croak. “Did you get everyone out?”
He nodded. “Seneca patched up the boys. Damron’s on cleanup. They won’t come back tonight. Maybe not ever. Despite what the local or federal authorities say, Los Alamos belongs to us.”
I didn’t ask about the Russians. I already knew the answer.
I stared at the bulb, watched the afterimage dance behind my eyelids. My skin crawled with the urge to move, to run, to do anything except sit here and feel the shape of my own brokenness.
Nitro seemed to know. He got up, crossed to the corner, and returned with a cup of water. He held it out. I took it, hands shaking, and drank half before I could breathe.
He didn’t ask if I wanted more. He just waited.
After a minute, I found the edge of my voice. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
I shook my head. “Survive. I was never supposed to be the target. I was always supposed to be the one watching.”
He sat back down, closer this time, elbows on his knees. “You don’t have to do anything. Just breathe.”
I tried. It didn’t feel like enough.
“This thing we have going on may be more than you need to deal with. We live unique lives, usually not answering to anyone, usually doing something illegal, usually in a fight somewhere in town. It’s not for everyone, Seraphina.”
I studied his face in the overhead glare, the scar on his jaw a white seam in the shadow.
There was blood on his shirt—some of it mine, maybe, but more likely not.
His knuckles were split, skin peeled back in a way that looked deliberate, as if he’d gone out of his way to collect a wound for every man he’d killed.
“You get hit?” I asked.
He glanced down, like he’d forgotten he had a body. “Not bad. Nothing that won’t heal.”
I wanted to believe it, but I saw the way he carried his left arm, close to the ribs, fingers flexing every time he moved.
“Liar,” I said.
He smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes.
The silence stretched. I finished the water and set the cup on the floor. The bulb flickered, threatening to go dark, then caught itself.
I drew in a shaky breath. “I’m not going back to the lab.”
He nodded, as if this were obvious.
“If I do,” I said, “they’ll use me as bait. I’ll be watched. Everything I do, everything I say, will be a trap.”
He considered, then said, “What do you want?”
I nearly laughed. It was the stupidest question in the world, and yet nobody had ever asked it. Not once. Not my parents, not the grant committee, not even Holloway. The answer lodged in my throat, too raw to speak.
“I don’t know,” I said at last. “To disappear, maybe. To not be the only person in the room who knows how things end.”
He nodded again, as if he’d already made his decision.
“You could stay here,” he said. “Nobody would find you. Not unless you wanted them to.”
I almost said yes. The word hovered on my lips, a fragile molecule of possibility.
But I knew how it would go. The world had a way of tracking you down, of mapping your movements, of cornering you no matter how well you learned to hide. The only freedom was the freedom to run, and I was already tired.
Still, the idea was a comfort.
I let the blanket fall away and stood. My knees wobbled, but I made it to the wall, steadying myself on the cinderblock. I traced a line in the dust, just to see if I could leave a mark.
Nitro followed, silent, a shadow at my side.
I leaned my head against the wall, cheek pressed to the cold, and let myself believe for a second that I was safe.
He stood behind me, close enough that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.
“You’re not alone,” he said.
I closed my eyes, let the words soak in.
For the first time, I believed him.
We stayed like that, the two of us, marooned in a bunker built by dead men, the world outside waiting for the next excuse to burn us down.
At some point, I pushed away from the wall and turned, legs shaky, to face him.
The breakdown was over, but my eyes still burned, and the taste of salt stuck to my lips.
I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand.
The sleeve of the borrowed shirt—whose, I had no idea—came away wet.
I felt weak, exposed, but the part of me that usually cared about appearances had gone dormant.
I sat back on the edge of the bed. Nitro hovered, not quite sitting, not quite standing, caught in the limbo between bodyguard and something else.
I watched his hands. The knuckles were already scabbing over, dark and uneven.
One finger was crooked at a new angle, like it had been broken and set on the fly.
He must have noticed me staring, because he flexed it with a faint wince and then tucked it into a fist, hiding the damage.
I swallowed, tried to find my voice. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
He shrugged, the movement so small I almost missed it. “It never is.”