3. Hudson
HUDSON
The health center is dark when I pull up, my headlights sweeping across cracked brick and the faded sign out front.
Community Health Outreach Center.
A place for coughs, flu shots, prenatal checkups, and worried mothers with feverish kids.
Not for men bleeding all over the passenger seat of a black SUV.
Beside me, Cal makes a low sound in his throat. He’s barely conscious, his head knocking against the window with every bump.
Blood has drenched his shirt and seeped into the seams of the seat beneath him.
He’s got a shoulder wound. Looks like the bullet went straight through. He’s lost so much blood that I’m moving faster than I’d like.
I cut the engine and get out.
Cold air slaps me in the face. I go to the passenger side, wrench the door open, and haul him out by his uninjured arm.
“Come on,” I mutter.
He’s heavy, all muscle and bad decisions, leaning on me as I drag him along. His boots scrape the pavement, and the smell of blood follows us into the alley.
“Stay on your feet, you big idiot,” I snarl, dragging him through a dark alleyway.
I drag Cal around the building, one arm slung over my shoulder, his blood soaking into my sleeve.
The backlight is on.
The door opens before I knock.
Maya Patel stands there in dark scrubs and running shoes, her black hair yanked up into a knot that’s halfway fallen loose. She takes one look at me, then at Cal, and steps aside.
Her dark eyes are sharp and assessing.
“Get him inside, quick.”
Cal is incoherent, pale from blood loss, as I man-handle him up onto an exam table. He passes out, that last walk to the door just enough to send him over the edge.
“What happened?” Maya asks.
“We went to question some contacts, and there was a shootout. Nothing to do with us, actually. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He got caught in the crossfire.”
“Gang related?” she asks.
I nod. “I think so.”
She shakes her head as she cuts away Cal’s shirt, pulling it away from a bleeding bullet hole in his shoulder. It’s just gushing.
“Goodness, he’s a bleeder,” she says, stating the obvious, tortoiseshell eyeglasses perched on her upturned nose. “I can’t believe what this city has become.”
She irrigates the wound, and Cal jerks, a broken sound ripping out of him.
“Hold him still.”
I plant a hand on his sternum and pin him to the table. He’s burning up already, sweat slick on his skin, face gone gray beneath the blood and stubble.
Maya works calmly, like she’s seen it all before. She grabs forceps, gauze, and more saline. Her jaw is tight, but her hands don’t shake.
Outside this room, she spends her days treating kids with ear infections and old men who ration insulin because they can’t afford more.
After hours, she fixes up people from my world and tries not to show how much it bothers her.
A second later, she finds the bullet.
Metal taps into a tray with a sharp little ping.
Cal passes out fully when she starts stitching, probably for the best.
I watch her work while I keep pressure where she tells me.
“Without an X-ray, I won’t know for sure, but he likely has a hairline fracture and some bone chips floating around. It’s too bloody to see.”
I nod. “He can go follow up somewhere later.”
“If he was just caught in the crossfire, you could have taken him to the ER,” she says.
I give her a look and say nothing.
We both know why I didn’t.
Maya sighs and goes back to her work.
She irrigates the wound again, then cauterizes a damaged artery. The sharp burn fills the room briefly before she cleans everything one last time and starts stitching him up.
Cal doesn’t wake up for most of it.
That’s probably for the best.
When she’s done, she tapes gauze over the wound and steps back.
“He’ll live,” she says.
“Lucky him.”
“He needs antibiotics and pain meds when he wakes up. No alcohol. No fighting. No dumb shit.”
She gives me a pointed look.
“And absolutely no getting shot again for at least a week.”
I snort.
Maya peels off her gloves and tosses them into the bin. “I’m serious.”
“That’s your first mistake.”
Her mouth twitches faintly, almost a smile, but it disappears before it fully forms.
After washing her hands, she crosses to a locked cabinet and pulls out two orange pill bottles.
“One’s an antibiotic,” she says. “The other’s for pain, but it’s nothing addictive. I’m not handing out opiates to a bunch of men already surrounded by drugs.”
I take the bottles from her while she moves to the computer and prints out a wound-care sheet.
“Keep the area clean and dry,” she continues. “If the skin gets hot, swollen, starts leaking pus, or he spikes a fever, he needs a hospital.”
“He won’t like that.”
“Then tell him not to get an infection.”
I tuck the papers under my arm. We leave Cal unconscious on the exam table and head down the hall to Maya’s office.
She sinks into her chair with a tired exhale and finally looks at me.
“Did you at least get the information you needed?”
I nod.
Maya studies me for a second.
“Was it worth it?”
“Yeah,” I say.
And it was.
Now I know where the weapons went, who intercepted them, and where they’re headed next.
But what matters most is that getting them back gives me a chance I’ve wanted for nineteen years.
A direct line to the men who ruined my life.
But Maya doesn’t need to know any of that.
She leans back in her chair and keeps her eyes on me.
“You look awful.”
I bark out a laugh. “That’s not exactly breaking news.”
“I don’t mean your face. You been okay?”
I shrug.
Have I? Who the fuck knows anymore.
“I’ve been playing like shit lately.”
“I think you’re playing to the level of the team around you,” she says.
I snort. “That sounds suspiciously like an insult.”
“It is.”
That pulls a tired laugh out of me.
“You’re not wrong,” I admit. “I fucking hate playing for the Reapers.”
“Then why stay?”
Her accent is barely there after years in Chicago, but it gets stronger when she’s tired.
“The pay is decent.”
She rolls her eyes immediately.
Right.
She knows I don’t give a shit about money.
I drag a hand over my jaw.
“It’s nice being near my brother,” I admit. “And the guys are okay. Kinda scary bunch of motherfuckers, but okay in their own way.”
“Lucian doing okay?” she asks.
“Yeah. He’s good. Nineteen. Fixes bikes. Plays video games. Hangs out with his friends. Normal.”
“Good.”
“It is.” I glance at her. “What about you?”
She lets out a long breath and tips her head back against the chair.
“Busy. Tired. Burned out.” She rubs her eye. “I can’t keep staff. No one wants to work for low pay and get yelled at all day.”
“That sounds…awful.”
“People do horrible things to each other,” she adds, giving me a heavy look.
I look away.
She's not wrong.
We’re here in her clinic early in the morning because we were out making trouble and got caught up with other violent people doing the same.
“I’m sorry I had to call you,” I say.
“Me too,” she says. She looks at her wristwatch. “I have to be back here in a few hours.”
“I’ll get out of your hair,” I say, standing and pulling my wallet from my pocket. I take out about five hundred dollars and put it on her desk. “It’s all I have, but I’ll wire a donation to the clinic. Maybe that will help.”
We’ve had this arrangement for years.
“You have a career,” she says. “Why do you keep doing…this?”
This.
She means the Iron Eagles—the shit I do for my uncle.
Maya’s asked me this before—more than once.
It’s also the reason that whatever we had burned out almost as quickly as it started.
We met not long after I got traded to Chicago.
A clinic visit turned into coffee.
Coffee turned into dinners.
For a few months, I let myself pretend I could have something normal.
Then she learned the truth about me.
The Iron Eagles.
My uncle.
The things I do for him.
That was the end of it.
But she still patches us up.
And I still make donations big enough to keep the lights on.
“Maya, this is my life. It is what it is. What the fuck else would I do at this point? I’ll age out of the game soon enough, and honestly, they might cut me loose sooner if I don’t get my shit together.”
“You are a wealthy man, Hudson,” she answers. “You can do anything. Literally anything. You can walk away.”
What scares me is not knowing who I’d be without all this.
I scoff. “Sure. I'll just walk away.”
She presses her lips together, not wanting to argue about this again.
"I'm not a good person, Maya."
I drag a hand over my jaw.
"I hurt people."
There’s a pause.
"I've spent years becoming exactly what this world wanted me to be."
She watches me for a long moment, long enough that I shift uncomfortably under the weight of it.
“I don’t think you’re a monster,” she says finally. “I think you were traumatized young and taught that violence was survival. There’s a difference.”
I stare at the floor.
“You could deal with it if you weren’t so stubborn, address that trauma in a healthy way: therapy, distance, boundaries. You could walk away from all this.”
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
Her shoulders drop a little, like she expected me to say that.
She pushes out of her chair and walks toward me anyway, wrapping her arms carefully around my waist and resting her cheek against my chest.
I stiffen.
I don’t know what to do with her gentleness.
She pulls back and looks up at me. She’s quietly beautiful, tired, with big brown eyes behind crooked glasses.
I like her.
I respect her.
And I know she still cares about me.
Enough that if I kissed her, she'd probably kiss me back.
The thought weighs on me.
Not because I want her.
Because I know better.
She deserves better than being someone’s way to forget about real life for a while.
So I take a step back instead.
I don’t miss the look of disappointment crossing her face.
“I told you once, and I’ll tell you again: you’re too good for me, Maya Patel.”
I turn and head back to the exam room, where Cal is slowly coming to consciousness. He groans louder this time, blinking awake, confusion on his face.
“Jesus,” he mutters. “Feels like I got hit by a truck.”
“Close,” I say.
He tries to sit up and immediately regrets it, clutching his shoulder. “Fuck.”
“Easy,” Maya says, already moving back into doctor mode. “You’re stitched up. Don’t make me do it again.”
He slumps back, breathing hard, and squints at me. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere you don’t need to ask questions.”
He grunts.
I move to his side and haul him up, ignoring the way he winces.
“Come on.”
Maya starts cleaning up the room as I help my associate to the door.
She follows, ready to lock up behind us when we leave. I bend down as she reaches us, kissing the top of her head.
“You’re one of the rare good ones, Maya,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Well, you’re a grumpy, stubborn bastard, and I’m tired of patching up your people.”
I roll my eyes. “See you whenever.”
“See you whenever. Be careful out there.”