Chapter 3
The hitman was bleeding in the backseat and Benny had no idea where he was going.
A left, right ahead… That was all he’d gotten before the guy’s voice trailed off. Now there was the growing silence of a man who was either unconscious or dying or both.
Benny drove anyway.
His hands were steady on the wheel. They were always steady—had been since he was a kid. The rest of him could fall apart later. His body was on autopilot while his mind raced through worst-case scenarios that were multiplying faster than he could count them.
Dead body, not thinking about it. Blood on the leather, not thinking about it—though the leather was nice, the hitman clearly made good money at the murder business. Getaway driver for a killer whose name he didn’t know. Fine. Cool. Normal workday.
Just drive.
Then the sirens started.
Blue and red in the rearview mirror, flickering between buildings, getting closer. Benny’s heart slammed against his ribs hard enough that he could feel it in his throat. His palms went slick on the steering wheel.
He needed to think. Needed to figure out where the hell he was going, because straight for three blocks had ended two blocks ago and now he was just driving blind.
The Dunham club was outside his usual territory. He’d only taken the temp shift because Easter money was good and school didn’t pay for itself. Now he was lost in a maze of one-way streets with a dying hitman in the back seat.
Right. He needed to go right. Or left? Where was he supposed to go, anyway?!
The sirens were getting louder. Closer. Benny could see the reflection of the lights now, bouncing off storefronts and parked cars. They weren’t on this street yet, but they would be soon.
He made a decision. Sharp left, tires squealing, the hitman’s body shifting in the backseat with a sound that Benny refused to think about. Then an immediate right, into an alley so narrow that the sedan’s mirrors nearly scraped the walls on either side.
He killed the headlights. Cut the engine.
Held his breath.
Silence rushed in. Benny could hear his own heartbeat, could hear the hitman’s labored breathing from the backseat—and under it the distant city sounds that suddenly seemed impossibly loud.
A car horn somewhere, music from an apartment above: the normal sounds of a normal night that had become anything but normal.
The cop car screamed past the mouth of the alley. Lights blazing, siren wailing, not slowing down.
Benny exhaled so hard his chest hurt.
He sat there in the dark for a long moment, hands still gripping the wheel even though they had nowhere to go.
His whole body was starting to shake now—delayed reaction, the accumulated terror of the last twenty minutes finally catching up all at once.
The bunny ears were askew on his head. He could feel them listing to one side, absurd, and he wanted to laugh except he was pretty sure if he started laughing he wouldn’t be able to stop.
From the backseat: nothing. No movement. No sound except that shallow breathing that seemed to be getting weaker.
Benny twisted around to look.
The hitman was slumped against the door, one hand still pressed to his side like he’d been trying to hold himself together even as consciousness slipped away.
Blood had soaked through his shirt, dark and spreading, pooling on the leather seat beneath him.
His face was pale—really pale, the kind of pale that Benny had learned to recognize during his clinical rotations.
The cold intensity from before was gone, replaced by slack vulnerability.
He looked human like this. Breakable. Nothing like the man who’d taken Rick apart in the alley.
And he was going to go on emptying out onto that seat until somebody put a hand on it.
Benny turned back to the wheel. Stared out at the dark alley, at the sliver of street visible at the far end, at the normal world that felt impossibly far away.
He thought about his options.
Option one: hospital. Drop him at an ER and let people with real equipment deal with him. Except a knife wound meant a report, and a report meant cops. The ER would keep him alive exactly long enough to hand the guy over.
Option two: dump the car. Take the money from the hitman’s wallet—there had to be money, right?
—and disappear. Walk until he found a main street, catch a cab, go home to his shitty apartment and wash the blood out of his suit.
The cops would find the car eventually. They’d find the hitman. Maybe he’d make it, maybe he wouldn’t.
Either way, not Benny’s problem. His boss had held him at knifepoint. After a night like this, he’d earned the right to walk away.
But when Rick had held him at knifepoint, the hitman hadn’t shot Benny. He’d taken Rick’s knife across the ribs for it.
That wound? The one that was currently leaking all over the back seat? That was because of Benny. Not his fault, exactly, but for him. Because of him. The hitman had gotten hurt protecting him, and Benny didn’t know what to do with that.
Nobody had ever taken a hit for Benny before. Benny had been taking care of himself for as long as he could remember, because the alternative was waiting for someone else to do it, and that was a game you only lost.
And tonight, a complete stranger had gotten stabbed for him…
Goddammit.
Benny’s throat felt tight. He blinked hard, refusing to let the burning behind his eyes turn into anything more.
He turned back to the wheel.
He could still leave.
He didn’t.
Benny put the car in drive.
He caught the slack face in the rearview. “Stay alive, asshole. I’m going to need a big tip for this one.”
His club—his usual club, not the nightmare Dunham side-gig—was on the other side of the city. Twenty minutes with traffic, fifteen without, and Benny made it in twelve because he ran every light and broke at least six traffic laws.
The drive felt endless anyway. The city blurred past outside the windows. Benny didn’t really see it. The nurse in him had taken over the thinking, leaving the rest of him to panic quietly in the background.
The gash ran along the ribs and not between them, which made it shallow, and the breathing coming out of the back seat was even and dry—no wet rattle, no sucking. Nothing had been through a lung.
The bleeding was the whole problem. A steady welling low in the wound, going at the pace it had held since the alley—no faster, no slower, which meant nothing major and no chance of it quitting on its own. A nicked vessel, then. It wasn’t going to close by itself. He’d need to get a tie around it.
So: doable. Benny had dealt with smaller nicks in worse light. He could fix this. Not perfectly, not the way a trauma bay could. But enough to keep one stubborn hitman breathing till morning.
The hitman made a sound. Low, pained, barely audible.
“Stay with me,” Benny said, even though the guy probably couldn’t hear him. “We’re almost there. You hear me, big guy?”
No response. Benny hadn’t really expected one.
His regular club was dark when he pulled up, exactly as he’d expected.
Closed for Easter. Pete—the owner, a generally decent human being who didn’t sexually harass his employees—had taken his family to Florida for the holiday.
The security system was on, but Benny had the code.
He’d closed up alone often enough to have it memorized.
No cameras. No staff. No witnesses. Perfect place to patch up a bleeding hitman.
Or for a bleeding hitman to dump a body. Benny really, really hoped he’d read the guy correctly.
He parked in the back, as close to the service entrance as he could manage.
His legs were unsteady beneath him. The heels didn’t help—five-inch stilettos were not designed for impromptu emergency medical situations.
His whole body felt like it was vibrating at a frequency just below hearing, adrenaline and exhaustion warring for dominance.
He walked around to the back door. Opened it. Looked down at the unconscious man bleeding all over the leather seats.
In the dim light, the hitman didn’t look like someone who’d killed a man an hour ago. Passed out, the hard face had softened—dark lashes against pale skin, the sharp mouth soft and unguarded instead of scowling. Still big, still built, just heavy and helpless now, entirely at Benny’s mercy.
And even half-dead and bleeding, he was annoyingly, objectively hot. Benny decided that was a problem for later. Possibly never.
“Okay,” Benny said out loud, because talking helped him think. “Okay. We’re doing this. You’re going to be really heavy and I’m going to hate you for it, but we’re doing this.”
No way was he hauling two hundred pounds of unconscious hitman across a parking lot in five-inch heels. Benny kicked them off, then he reached in and got his arms under the guy’s shoulders. Benny braced himself. Heaved.
The hitman was solid—muscle packed hard over his back and shoulders, not a soft inch of him anywhere Benny got a grip.
And he was completely dead weight, which made him approximately eight thousand times heavier than he had any right to be.
Benny staggered under the load, his back screaming in protest.
This was going to destroy him. His feet were already ruined from the shift, and now he was carrying a two-hundred-pound murder machine through a parking lot in the middle of the night. His spine was going to file for divorce.
Five grand, he reminded himself, gritting his teeth and taking another step. Plus another five for not letting him bleed out. That’s ten grand. That’s a lot of tuition. You can do this.
He half-carried, half-dragged the hitman to the service entrance. The security panel glowed faintly in the dark, and Benny punched in the code with his elbow because his hands were full of unconscious assassin. The door beeped. Clicked open.
Benny hip-checked it the rest of the way and hauled his cargo inside.
The club was dark and silent, the familiar space transformed into something eerie by the emptiness. He’d never once been in here without music in it.
He made it to the bar. The bar was good.
Better light here, even with the main overheads off—the emergency exit signs cast a glow, and there was a window high on the wall that let in the streetlight from outside.
More importantly, there was a sink. Running water.
And under the counter, tucked behind the garnish trays and extra napkins, the first aid kit.
A good one—because Benny had spent a month last year nagging Pete until he ditched the useless Dollar Tree box for a kit that could actually keep a person alive.
He lowered the hitman to the floor behind the bar. Not gently—he was too heavy for gentle—but as carefully as Benny could manage given that his arms were shaking and his back was one wrong movement away from total rebellion. The guy’s head lolled against the base of the counter with a soft thunk.
Still breathing. Still bleeding.
Benny straightened up, and his entire body protested.
His back and shoulders felt like they’d been wrenched out of their sockets.
His feet—oh god, his feet—were a separate emergency he’d deal with later.
He was covered in blood, still wearing a fucking bunny suit, and he was about to perform emergency first aid on a murderer in a nightclub.
This was not how he’d expected his Easter to go.
He grabbed the kit and crouched down beside the hitman. Let his hands move through the familiar motions of assessment while his brain ticked through the damage.
The shirt had to go first. Benny popped the buttons and peeled the bloodied fabric back off the hitman’s chest.
Which was, distractingly, a very good chest—broad and solid, a scatter of dark hair over muscle.
Benny’s clinical brain ran the checklist: no other wounds, good color everywhere the blood wasn’t.
The rest of him just looked, and resented, a little, that the murderer bleeding on his floor had to be built like that.
Not the time. Benny had a hole in someone to close.
Knife wound to the left side, running along the ribs and not between them. Lucky. An inch deeper and the same stroke would have been a lung.
The gash itself was long and clean-edged, a job for thread and twenty quiet minutes. Benny pulled on gloves. The problem sat at the low end of it—a bright bead that kept refilling as fast as he blotted it away. He pressed a fingertip over the spot. The bleeding stopped under it.
All of this from something he could cover with the tip of one finger. Small, but perfectly capable of killing a man who’d decided to walk it off.
He could work with this.
Antiseptic first, the sharp familiar smell grounding him as he cleared the blood back and got a proper look. Then the bleeder—a tie around it, drawn down snug, and the field stayed dry when he took his fingers away.
Now he could close it.
The work itself was almost soothing—probably a sign of something wrong with him, but Benny had a mile-long list of those and tonight was not the night to add to it. Real healthy, finding your zen knuckle-deep in a stranger’s knife wound. Definitely fine.
But this part he could do half-asleep. This part didn’t ask him to think about the dead man across town, or the bunny tail still pinned to his ass while he played surgeon on a sticky bar floor. Just blood, a needle, and a wound that needed closing. Honest work—the only kind he’d had all night.
Benny threaded the needle. Began to stitch.
He was elbow-deep in antiseptic and suture thread, focused entirely on the careful in-and-out of needle through flesh, when the hitman’s eyes opened.