Chapter 61
sixty-one
. . .
The blood wouldn’t stop. It was everywhere. On my hands, my jacket, soaking into the gravel beneath us. I pressed harder, but my palms were slick, slipping off the wound every time I tried to seal it while Ishika’s skin grew cold quickly.
“Stay with me,” I ordered, the words tearing from a throat tight with something I refused to name. “You don’t get to die. I didn’t say you could.”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were half-open, staring at nothing, before the tension left her body and she slipped into unconsciousness. The silence she left behind was louder than my heartbeat.
“He’s almost here.” Rogan stood over me, his face pale. The man he called would prevent a police inquiry.
The wait was torture. Every second was a lifetime. Every breath Ishika took was a rattle in her chest that sounded like a death knell. I wiped my hands on my pants, but the blood was under my fingernails. It was in the creases of my skin, a glaring part of me now.
Headlights swept across the yard, a black sedan screeching to a halt two seconds later. Doc jumped out, medical bag in hand. He didn’t ask questions, already aware of what happened to people who wasted my time.
“Rogan, help me move there.” He pointed to a pallet.
I hesitated as Rogan bent down to take her. My hands were locked around her. Letting go felt like signing her death warrant. But the blood was pooling faster than I could press.
“It’s okay, boss, I got her.” I lifted my hands, allowing him to pick her up and place down on her stomach.
The sight of the open wound, the torn flesh, made my stomach turn. I stood. “She’s not dying.” I didn’t remember drawing my gun, but I pressed the barrel against the side of Doc’s head. “You touch anything else, you die. You let her die, you die.”
Eyes wide, he looked at me, knew I wasn’t lying and nodded. “Pressure,” he said to Rogan,” voice steady despite my threat. “I need to pack the wound.”
I kept the gun on him. “Work fast.”
He moved swiftly. Gauze. Clamps. His hands were bloody within seconds. Although he managed to stem the blood loss, Ishika didn’t stir, adrift in the dark while I stood guard over her broken body.
Sirens wailed closer. Red lights flashed against the rusted steel of the containers before the vehicle swerved to a stop beside us the same time Rogan raced off.
“They can stabilize her better than I can,” Doc said.
The paramedics rushed out, and quickly got to work, checking her stats with Doc and loading her onto the stretcher.
I inhaled harshly, unable to stop touching her. Her hand. Her arm. Her face. She was so pale. “Stay with me, little fox.” My thumb brushed her cheek where smoke and sweat clung.
Behind me, steel rang out as my men repositioned, the dockyard still vibrating with the aftershock of gunfire and adrenaline. I didn’t turn my head when Rogan approached.
“We’re sweeping, boss. Two down. One got away between the stacks. We’ll find him.”
“You’ll drag him back breathing,” I growled, not looking away from Ishika as the medic secured a bandage and prepared to move her. “Or I’ll start tearing pieces off you until you remember how to do your job.”
He vanished into motion again.
“Boss!”
I glanced over my shoulder. One of the soldiers was running toward me, dragging someone behind him. “The shooter.” he announced, breathing hard.
The man was beaten. Blood pouring from his nose, one eye swollen shut, barely standing. Rogan appeared again, shoving him to his knees in the gravel.
“He was hiding behind the pallets, couldn’t get out because of the lock down,” the soldier explained.
The shooter looked up at me, wide eyed, terrified. He should be.
I looked at him then at Ishika. She was being loaded into the back of the ambulance. The doors were open, the clock was ticking.
I walked over to the shooter and crouched down. He flinched.
“You shot her,” I said, my voice quiet. Calm.
“It wasn’t personal,” he stammered. “Just business.”
I grabbed him by the throat, lifting him off the ground as I stood. He struggled, kicking and scratching at my hand.
“Nothing is worth more than her, not even a single strand of her hair,” I warned, tightening my grip, wanting to crush his windpipe, needing to feel his life end under my fingers.
The urge to make him suffer for every drop of her blood on my hands, mushroomed, but the ambulance engine revved. They were waiting. If I went with her, this rat slipped away. If I stayed, she went alone.
I dropped the shooter and he hit the ground, gasping. “Get him to Warehouse 16,” I instructed, turning my back on them. Rogan knew the drill. Once they loaded Ishika into the back of the ambulance, I looked at Doc. “Make sure she lives.”
At his nod I stepped back from the ambulance doors.
My hand lingered on the metal frame for a second, feeling the vibration of the engine, before I forced myself to let go.
The doors slammed shut and I watched until the lights flashed, once, twice, then the ambulance pulled away, tires screeching as it merged onto the main road before disappearing into the night.
Taking a moment to breath, I glanced down at myself. White shirt and black pants soaked with her blood, ticking to my skin. I looked like a monster. Good. Because I fucking felt like one.
As I turned and headed for the warehouse three soldiers wordlessly flanked me. I didn’t speak, my mind stuck in the back of that ambulance, with her. Alone. Vulnerable.
She was mine, and someone had tried to take her.
The dark warehouse reeked of oil, rot and lingering smoke. Rogan had the shooter tied to a chair in the center of the room, blood already pooling beneath his feet.
He looked up when I walked in. “Please,” he stammered. “I didn’t know. I was just paid to—”
My brow shot up, halting his words. I wanted names, pain, blood, not excuses. Accepting the gloves Rogan held out, I pulled them on, the leather snapping against my wrists.
“You shot my woman.” I stopped a few feet from him. “You aimed at me and hit her instead, and I’m trying to decide how long you get to keep your voice.”
He spat blood onto the floor, trying for bravado and landing on desperation. “Wasn’t supposed to be you.”
That sentence detonated something in me, a colder kind of outrage that made my vision sharpen. I crouched in front of him, close enough that he could smell her blood on my clothes,
“No one knew I was coming here.” Each word remained measured, because control was the only thing keeping me from tearing his jaw off with my bare hands.
“No one. Not the city. Not my family. Not even my men. So you tell me,” I leaned in until my voice was almost gentle, “how did you know where to point that gun?”
He swallowed hard, eyes flicking to Rogan as if hoping for mercy there. He found none. “They paid for a reaction,” he said, voice cracking despite himself. “They wanted to see what you’d do. How you’d move. How fast you’d bleed.”
My mouth went dry from the violence of what it implied. Ishika wasn’t collateral, she was the message.
“Who,” I barked.
He shook his head fast. “I don’t know names. I don’t. A broker. A—”
I straightened slowly, letting silence expand until his breathing turned ragged in it. “You do know.” My gaze slid to Rogan without me needing to raise my voice. “Let’s make him remember.”
Behind him, a small burner hissed. The shallow pan of oil quivered as it heated, gold turning darker, heavier, meaner. Oil was honest, it didn’t pretend. When it touched skin, it spoke the truth men never wanted to say with their mouths.
I moved to the burner and dipped a steel ladle into the pot and when I lifted it, the oil clung to it in a trembling sheet.
The man whimpered, “Remo… please… I told you—”
“You told me lies,” I replied, calmly. “And I’ve had a very fucking long night.
” I walked up behind him, letting him hear the ladle tilt, let him feel the heat.
“You know what’s funny?” I chuckled. “This isn’t even boiling.
Then again, I don’t need boiling, just controlled pain.
The kind that makes you talk before you think. ”
He sobbed. “I swear, I don’t know anything else, Remo, please—”
I lowered the ladle.
One drop.
Just one.
It hit his cheek, and a scream ripped out of him instantly. He thrashed, shaking, nearly tipping the chair. I let him scream, steadying the chair with my shoe.
“One more lie,” I warned, “and the next drop hits your dick.”
“I swear,” he sobbed, louder now.
What followed wasn’t a spectacle, just pressure, time, and the inevitability of pain in a room designed for it.
He gave me nothing that mattered. And when I finally accepted, he’d die without telling me anything of value, I ended it quickly, because rage could be indulgent, but precision was power, and I refused to be the entertainment for someone else’s experiment.