5. Cass
CASS
I thought I was overwhelmed before. But I was wrong.
Now, I’m officially freaking out.
Five seconds ago, I was hurtling toward a kiss with a man who, let’s be honest, I definitely shouldn’t be kissing.
But let’s be honest about the other part, too: We all know it was going to be an absolute fucking bombshell of a kiss.
Giana always used to say that you could tell if a man was good in bed if you took him to a single yoga class.
She used to force all her dating prospects to join her for an hour of sweaty vinyasa in that 105 degree torture chamber of hers.
She was merciless about making them sit through the whole entire thing, too— “even though I can always tell from the first downward dog if they’re gonna make me cum or not. ”
Savage. You can see why I loved her so much.
And yeah, obviously, the activities that Matvei and I have partaken in tonight are pretty much the polar freaking opposite of yoga, spiritually speaking.
But maybe I need to amend Giana’s test, because watching a man throw you over his shoulder, beat up some assailants to defend your honor, and then tend to your wounded knee is also a pretty good measure of his prowess in bed.
I just know it. I know it in my bones. Matvei’s got the goods.
Unfortunately for me, though, he also now has Mr. Refrigerator’s ugly little oyster-shucking blade jutting out of his torso.
I look past Matvei to see the man responsible for the stabbing. He’s lying on his back just behind us, gasping like a beached whale. It looks like the last of his strength was used to crawl up and deliver this final, sneaky little fuck you, and he’s now ready for the sweet embrace of death.
Just to be sure, Matvei turns around and stomps on his throat. Shit goes crunch, and the breathing stops.
Goodnight, Mr. Refrigerator.
And good fucking riddance.
But it’s looking like it might be goodnight for Matvei, too. Because as soon as has he stomps the final sparks of life out of our mutual friend, he sags against me. One hand goes to the weapon in his side and comes away red with leaking blood.
“Oh, fuck,” I stammer. “Oh, fuck. Ohfuckohfuckohfuck.”
Matvei grimaces. He looks down the alley to be sure that there aren’t any more bladed threats coming our way, but the other two goons are dead. “Bastards.” He spits on Mr. Refrigerator’s lifeless face.
“Okay,” I babble, hands flittering around the knife handle. “Okay, okay. We need— We need a hospital. Right? Hospitals are where stabbed people go. That’s the protocol. And to get to the hospital, we need an ambulance. So…”
“No ambulance,” he grits out.
“What do you mean, no ambulance?! Matvei, there is a knife in you!”
“Funnily enough, I’m aware.”
“Are you? Because you seem very calm about it. Unreasonably calm. I feel like I’m actually displaying the appropriate level of concern here and you are the one who is worryingly?—”
“Cassandra.”
“What?”
“Shut up for one second.”
I shut up. It’s not easy. My mouth wants to keep going without my permission, but I clamp my teeth down on my tongue and wait.
He takes a slow breath. Then another. His hand stays clamped around the handle of the knife, holding it in place. Smart. I’ve seen enough ER reruns to know you don’t yank those out unless you know what you’re doing, which I certainly do not.
“There’s no time for an ambulance,” he explains. “I need a car. Where is yours?”
“Around the corner. Half a block.”
He nods once. “I can do that. Lead the way.”
Thus begins the strangest three-legged race of my life. Back in elementary school, when this sort of athletic event seemed to crop up a lot, I always thought it was kinda useless. When in life would I ever need this skill of running with someone basically tied to me?
I mean, never, obviously. Duh.
But it’s a bummer that I sucked at the three-legged race then and I still suck at it now.
I’m doing my best, but Matvei is way bigger and way heavier than me.
I mean, for God’s sake, I’m just a girl.
Literally just a girl. And I’m supposed to somehow get The Punisher here into my car and then out of it again once we get to a hospital?
I have to. I have no other choice. If I don’t do it, Matvei dies. The least I can do is save the life of the man who’s saved mine several times over, despite my best efforts to ignore his well-intentioned advice and get myself killed anyway.
So we go. One painful, staggering step at a time.
We’re leaving a trail of blood the whole way, and it’s concerningly thick. How much blood does the human body contain? I know Matvei is big, but is there really that much life juice in him? Can he afford to spare this much and keep on ticking?
God, I hope so. The only thing worse than hauling around a stab victim is hauling around a dead stab victim.
My knee is still screaming, but I selflessly decide not to mention that little tidbit. It just seems rude to bring it up when my companion is leaking out of a hole in his ribs.
“Almost there,” I pant. “Almost there, almost there, you big, stubborn bastard. Don’t you dare pass out on me.”
“Not planning on it.”
“Good. Because if you pass out, I have to drag you. And I cannot drag you, Matvei. You are four of me.”
“Are you calling me fat?” he wheezes.
“Shut up and walk.”
We round the corner. My unprepared little Audi comes into view under a flickering streetlamp, and I swear I’ve never loved an inanimate object more in my life. I fumble the key fob out of my coat pocket and mash the unlock button about a billion times.
Getting him into the back seat is its own special kind of hell. He’s too tall, too heavy, too bleedy, too everything. I shove at his shoulders while he maneuvers his legs as best as he can.
Between the two of us, we manage to fold him sideways across the bench. I do accidentally bang his head against the far door and he grunts in pain.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Comfy?” I ask.
“Exquisite. Please drive the fucking car.”
I don’t like how his retorts are getting less and less snappy, his voice quieter and quieter. It’s like his spirit is pouring out of him through the wound in his side.
Fuck me, this is not the death I wanted tonight. I should’ve known I’d fuck it up. Who hires a hitman and then immediately gets that hitman killed? Me, that’s who. Hapless, luckless Cassandra Snyder, who will forever remain trapped in a prison of her own making.
Just when you think you’ve found rock bottom, the earth opens up and shows you that there’s a whole ‘nother level waiting below.
I shut the door, race around, and get behind the wheel. Unthinking panic is working my body like I’m a Muppet right now. My clothes are drenched in blood and my hands are, too, so they keep slipping on everything I touch.
Eventually, I get the motor started and the car moving. I’m barely paying attention to where I’m driving, and fuck knows I have zero mental capacity for the rules of the road. Lights are red and oncoming traffic is laying on their horns, but I don’t even glance their direction.
It’s not bravery steering the ship. We’re operating on pure stupidity.
Maybe that explains why we end up where we do. I didn’t know this was my destination until I pull up in front of the ER doors.
And then…
Oh, God.
I can’t.
I can’t do this. We’re back at the Ground Zero of my personal life. The toxic well from which the trauma sprung. This is where it all went wrong.
This is where Giana died.
Mount Sinai Hospital is marked on the brick facade in simple white letters. A few ambulances idle around, with various patients limping to and fro. I sit in the car for a second and try to breathe through the absolute terror that’s once again clawing at my throat.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Matvei gasps sarcastically from the back. I hear a nasty squelch as he tries to sit up.
I snap myself out of it and leap out of the driver’s seat. By the time I make it around to his door, he’s flickering in and out of consciousness.
Fuck. If he’s out, I’ll never be able to get him inside. I look up and see an orderly pushing an empty wheelchair back toward the front doors after depositing its former occupant in a waiting car. I can’t find the words to ask for what I need, so instead, I lunge over and snatch it from him.
The man lurches backward in surprise, shouting at me, but I ignore him and drag the contraption over to my vehicle.
I extract Matvei from the vehicle—don’t ask me how; things are blurring together in strange ways and time no longer seems to move at its usual pace from one second to the next—and get him slumped into the wheelchair.
“Oh, God,” I croak when I see just how much blood there is. His pants and jacket are absolutely soaked with it, and when I look in my car, I see an inch-deep puddle of the stuff in the footwell.
He looks pale, even by his standards. Humans aren’t supposed to be that shade of ivory white.
“This is bad,” I say again and again under my breath as I grab the handles of the wheelchair and start to canter toward the doors. “This is so, so fucking bad.”
I hear a gurgle and I realize Matvei is trying to tell me something. I screech to a halt and bend down so his mouth is right by my ear. “What?” I ask. “What did you say?”
He swallows thickly, clears his throat, and says in a thin rasp, “Par for the course.”
Par for the course, he said. How cute! How quippy! How funny? How absofuckinglutely ridiculous?!
Joking at a time like this—is he crazy?
If he wasn’t already dying, I’d kill him myself.
It’s been an hour. I’m sitting in a chair that Satan himself surely had a hand in designing, based on the damage it’s doing to my tailbone.
I keep having this insane urge to laugh, then to cry, and I end up doing this bizarre hybrid of the two instead.
I keep a hand plastered over my mouth, because if anyone hears me making these noises, I’ll be admitted directly to the psych ward.
It doesn’t help that my brain, motormouth that it is, refuses to shut up. Even here and now, while Matvei is somewhere on the other side of those double doors with a team of strangers rooting around in his ribs like he’s a Thanksgiving turkey, my stupid, stupid brain is weighing options.
He’s a killer. That much is obvious. I watched him turn three grown men into ground beef in under thirty seconds. He’s exactly what I came to Khaza looking for. If he pulls through, maybe I could still…
But no.
No, that’s a bad idea. I can’t drag him into the Raymond thing. Not after this. He took a knife for me before he even knew my last name, and now, I’m going to keep asking for more?
No. Bad Cassandra. Terrible Cassandra. Read the room, girl. Don’t you know when enough is enough?
And then there’s the other aspect, the one that scares me even more.
I don’t want Matvei dead. I don’t want him gone.
I want him .
Which is exactly why I need to walk away.
A nurse steps out and looks around the waiting room. She sees me and starts her walk over. For a second, I wonder how she knows I’m the one she wants. Then I remember that I’m the only person in here covered head to toe in someone else’s blood. Kind of a dead giveaway.
I stand up too fast. My knee buckles, then catches.
“You’re with the gentleman who came in with the stab wound?” she inquires.
“Yes. Yeah. That’s me. Is he?—?”
“He’s going to be fine.”
It takes everything I have not to sag to the floor in gratitude.
“The knife missed anything vital,” she goes on. “He’s lost a lot of blood, but we’re replacing it. He’ll need to stay overnight, maybe two. But he’ll live.”
He’ll live. Two words. Such small, stupid, essential words.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
She nods, already turning to go. “Someone will come get you when he’s out of recovery.”
I stand there for a while after she’s gone. Weighing, waiting, wondering.
In the end, though, there’s only one right thing to do. I unclench my fist and slip my wedding ring back on my finger.
Then I turn and slip out of the door.
I’m glad he’ll live. But for both our sakes…
It’s best if I never see the Blue-Eyed Bastard again.