Chapter 4
Shaw surfaced slow, only partway. Enough to know he was flat on his back, his head packed full of wet cement. Enough to feel the pain at his side—something tugging at his side, sharp and steady.
His hand shot out toward it.
“Hey. Quit it.” A voice, stern, not afraid of him in the slightest. “You’ll tear the stitches.”
That brought the rest of him up. Shaw opened his eyes.
A ceiling he didn’t know. Somewhere close, a fridge hummed. Where the fuck was he?
He looked down.
The bunny was crouched over him—blood-stained satin, crooked ears—a needle pinched between two fingers, drawing thread through the gash along Shaw’s ribs.
A stranger this close, his own hands empty and useless, was the exact thing his whole life had been built to prevent. He’d put people down for less access than this kid had right now. Every instinct he owned said get up, get gone.
The bunny glanced up. Their eyes met. “You’re awake.”
“Apparently.” Shaw’s voice came out rough. Unused. “How long was I out?”
“Forty minutes, give or take.” Another suture. Another precise knot. “You lost a lot of blood. I thought about taking you to a hospital, but I figured you probably wouldn’t appreciate waking up in handcuffs.”
“You figured right.” Shaw watched him tie off the last stitch. “Where are we?”
“My club. Well, not my club, but the one I work at.” The bunny sat back on his heels, surveying his handiwork with a critical eye. “Not my best work, but you’ll live. Probably won’t even scar too bad, if you keep it clean.”
He grabbed a gauze pad from the first aid kit and taped it carefully over the wound. His touch was impersonal, all business, but Shaw could still feel the warmth of his fingers through the thin barrier of the gauze.
“Welcome back from the dead,” the bunny said, a crooked smile tugging at his lips. “Resurrection’s on theme, I guess.”
Shaw blinked. “What?”
“Easter.” The bunny waggled one drooping ear at him, like that settled it. “Rising from the grave. Pastel. The whole bit.”
Easter. A solid hour of the night rearranged itself behind the word—the plastic eggs, the tails, a whole club dressed like the inside of a candy basket…
“I thought it was a fetish,” he said.
The bunny barked a laugh, surprised and bright. “You—” He pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth, delighted. “You really didn’t know it was Easter?”
“Briefly considered it was a cult.”
“Not a family guy, I take it.”
“No.” Shaw left it there.
Shaw watched him decide not to poke at it. Good kid.
The bunny peeled off latex gloves and dropped them in a neat pile. Then he fixed Shaw with a look that was all business. “You owe me ten grand.”
Shaw waited.
“Five for driving,” the bunny said, ticking off on his fingers. “Five for not letting you bleed out. I think that’s fair, don’t you? It’s a discount on what the hospital would have run you.”
It was more than fair. The kid could have dumped the car and disappeared with whatever cash Shaw had on him. Could have dumped him in the alley, or let him bleed out in the backseat. No one would have blamed him. No one would have even known.
“I’ll get you your money,” Shaw said.
“Damn right you will.” The bunny shifted, wincing as he moved. Shaw looked down. The kid was barefoot—those stilettos kicked off somewhere, his feet red and raw from a night in five-inch heels and forty minutes crouched on a hard floor. “But right now I need a drink. Where’s your wallet?”
“Back pocket. Why?”
“Because you’re buying.” The bunny reached up under the counter and came back with a bottle. Not the well liquor that most places served. The good stuff, kept back for the customers they actually liked.
Shaw huffed. “Help yourself.”
“I will, thanks.” The bunny cracked the seal and took a long pull straight from the bottle. Then he held it out to Shaw. “Add $150 to your tab.”
Shaw took the bottle. Drank. The whiskey burned going down, warm and smooth, and he felt some of the tension drain out of his shoulders. Alive and stitched up, drinking expensive liquor with a stranger in a bunny suit at three in the morning.
His life had taken some strange turns, but this was a new one. “Shaw,” he said, passing the bottle back.
The bunny’s eyebrows went up. “Is that a first name or a last name?”
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not.” He took another drink. “I’m Benny.”
Benny. The name fit—quick and a little scrappy.
Now that the adrenaline had bled off, Shaw let himself actually look at him. Small and wiry, early twenties at most. Slightly wavy hair flattened by sweat and bunny ears. The eye makeup had smeared into bruise-colored smudges that should’ve been a mess and instead made his eyes look huge.
A sharp little face, a sharp mouth. Stupidly pretty, even smudged to hell and streaked in someone else’s blood.
Shaw looked down at his stitches. He thumbed the corner of the tape up—a neat row underneath, the skin drawn clean together. They looked good. He’d been stitched up before, more than once, in worse rooms than this and by worse hands—plenty of times by his own, hunched over a motel sink.
He knew the difference between someone who’d been taught and someone winging it. “Where’d you learn this?”
Benny’s guard went up—a fast, practiced thing, there and gone—but he recovered quickly. “Who says I know what I’m doing?”
“Your work. If you wanted to play dumb, you’d have left a gap I could lose a finger in.”
That got a snort out of him, quick and low. “I’m in school. Nursing program. Three years in, one to go, assuming I don’t flunk out from missing too many clinical hours because I was too busy stitching up hitmen.”
“You won’t flunk out.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You don’t drag a stranger out of a car and sew him shut on a bar floor if you’re the kind who washes out. You’re good. You know you’re good.”
It landed. The kid’s eyes cut away, color creeping up under the smeared liner. His mouth opened—but instead of saying anything, he just took a pull from the bottle.
Shaw liked that. Liked finding the one thing the mouthy little thing couldn’t talk his way out of: being told the truth to his face.
He let his gaze drift down the ruined satin. “Long way from a hospital.”
Benny grabbed the lifeline with both hands.
“The club stuff’s a side gig. Good tips, flexible hours.
” He waved at the dark club around them.
“I work here, usually. Decent place, boss keeps his hands to himself. The Dunham gig was a one-night thing. Holiday pay, double rate. Easy money.” His mouth twisted.
“Turns out there’s no such thing as easy money when Rick Dunham’s involved. ”
“No,” Shaw said. “There isn’t.”
Their eyes caught and held.
“For someone who just watched his boss take a bullet,” Shaw said, carefully, “you’re not exactly grieving.”
Benny’s mouth curved. “I’ve cried harder over parking tickets.”
The joke eased something in the room. Enough that Shaw asked the thing he actually couldn’t work out. “Why did you stay?”
Benny’s head came up. “What?”
“When I was out. In the car.” Shaw watched his face carefully. “You could’ve taken the money and run. Dumped me somewhere. No one would’ve known.”
“I would’ve known.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Benny turned the bottle in his hands, watching the light slide around inside it. When he answered, the easy patter was gone from his voice.
“Nobody’s ever done that for me. Stepped in front of something.” He said it to the bottle, not to Shaw. A one-shouldered shrug. “Figured I owed you a ride.”
“That’s not why you stayed.”
“No. It isn’t.” It cost Benny something to let that show, and he knew it. He dropped his eyes and went hunting for safer ground. “So… not a family guy, huh?” Lighter now, but the question was real under it.
“No” was all he said. The honest answer was a lot longer. He’d aged out of foster care at eighteen with a trash bag of clothes and no one waiting on the curb to take him anywhere. You learned to stop waiting for anyone after that.
“Wife?”
“No.”
“Kids?”
“No.”
“Boyfriend?”
Shaw held his eyes a second. “…No.”
Something about Benny’s eyes made Shaw think he’d caught the difference. He kept going, though. “Dog?”
“No.”
“Favorite third-grade teacher you still send a card at Christmas?”
“What are you doing?”
“Building a profile, that’s all.” Benny took a pull, but he didn’t ask another question. “Nobody, huh.”
Shaw let that go. Being alone had never bothered him—it came with the work, and he’d stopped counting it as a loss a long time ago.
But three in the morning behind a dark bar, stitched back together by a barefoot kid who’d had every reason to run and hadn’t, he caught himself not minding the company. He couldn’t remember the last time.
He didn’t have a line for any of that. He held a hand out, and Benny passed him the bottle.
After that they just drank, the bottle going back and forth. He wasn’t going anywhere yet anyway—not with the cops still out there.
So, time to wait the night out. Shaw had his back to the wall. Across from him Benny had settled against the cabinet, legs stretched out until their feet nearly met. The fridge hummed.
It wasn’t long before the worst of it started to let up.
The room stopped tilting when he turned his head.
The pain in his side eased from a sharp pull to a steady throb, and the whiskey did the rest—warm in his chest, taking the edge off the cold that came with losing that much blood.
Sitting still helped. So did being somewhere that felt, against all odds, almost safe.
But there was something nagging at him. An imbalance he couldn’t shake.
“I don’t like owing people,” he said.
Benny looked up from the bottle. “You’re paying me ten grand.”
“I should do something for you,” Shaw said. “Square us up.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“I owe you my life.”
The words hung between them. Heavy. True. Benny looked at him without a single thing ready to say, and then the easy grin came back down over the top of it.
“You could give me a foot rub,” Benny said.
He stretched one leg out as he said it, bare foot flexing. His tone was playful. Teasing.
Shaw reached out and took his foot.