Chapter Twenty A Man Born of Flesh
Chapter Twenty
A Man Born of Flesh
Hasan woke to the sound of his mother shouting. He cracked one eyelid open slowly, staring at the white ceiling above him. Where am I?
“So stupid!” his mother railed. “You had one job. . . .”
His throat was tight, his tongue parched. “Water,” he said—or tried to. It came out as an incoherent rasp, no louder than a wheeze. His mother’s ranting overshadowed his voice.
“Bring your brother back, not lose the other . . .”
“Ma,” he croaked, lifting his left hand feebly. A spasm of pain ran down into his shoulder blade.
“Ma,” came Zeyar’s voice, interrupting her tirade. “Ma, Hasan is awake.”
The yelling stopped immediately. Rohini’s face appeared over Hasan, the wrinkles in her skin creased deeply. “Zeyar, get your brother a glass of water.”
To Hasan’s right, he could hear water being poured from a pitcher.
Together, Zeyar and their ma lifted him into an upright position.
Hasan accepted the water. Little ripples formed in the surface as his hand trembled, but he managed to take a sip without spilling it.
Once he had drunk his fill, he passed the glass back to his mother.
“How—” he began, but Zeyar spoke first.
“We were ambushed. Montrose and his men got the jump on us. We made it out—you, me, Harithi, Poppy. We’re in the Sanivali safe house now.”
Slowly, the memories returned to him. He stiffened, his grip tightening around the glass. “What about Samina? Vinay? Raman? Jay—”
“We don’t know,” Zeyar said. “I’m making calls, Hasan. We’ll find out. You need to rest.”
“Your brother speaks sense at last.” Their ma scowled at Zeyar, then switched her gaze back to Hasan. “You were shot in the shoulder. The bone looks fine, and I’ve gotten the bullet out, but you lost a lot of blood.”
He vaguely remembered Poppy, her face smeared with a streak of blood—his? hers?—leaning over him in the car, her knee jammed into his shoulder as she tried to stop him from bleeding out. She had surprised him yet again. First she had broken his nose, then she had refused to go to Richard—
The memory drew him up short. “Where’s Poppy?”
Zeyar and their ma exchanged a look. “She’s upstairs, resting,” Rohini said. “We’ve locked her door from the outside. What do you want with her?”
“I need to talk to her,” he said. “There’s something wrong between her and Montrose. She resisted going back at the museum, and right before he walked in, she was going to tell me something.”
“Tell you what?” Zeyar asked.
“I don’t know!” Hasan threw his hands up, wincing as the gesture pulled on his stitches. “Montrose interrupted. He still has Paranjay. We need to attack the precinct, get him out now.”
“Hasan, we haven’t heard anything from Marnapur,” Zeyar said. “We have no idea if Paranjay has since been moved. Plus, Montrose has locked down the city. We’d be going in blind. Attacking the precinct is a suicide mission.”
“But Poppy didn’t want to go back to Montrose,” Hasan repeated.
The more he thought about it, the more her earlier behavior made sense—her touchiness whenever he mentioned Montrose, her lack of enthusiasm when he’d come to prepare her to return, the way she hadn’t called out or run to her fiancé in the museum.
“He seemed to want her back just fine.” Zeyar shrugged, unfeeling. “How she reacted to him has nothing to do with how willing Montrose is to work with us.”
“He’s. Not. Willing. To. Work. With. Us,” Hasan bit out. “Paranjay wasn’t even at the museum. Montrose set us up from the beginning. If we’re depending on his response, then we’ll never get Paranjay back.”
Silence fell in the room.
“He will respond,” their ma stated, calm and matter-of-fact. “Once we send him his fiancée’s thumb in a box, he’ll start taking the threat to her seriously. A finger for each day, we’ll say. He won’t waste any time. A bride without a ring finger will be an eternal reminder of his failure.”
Hasan had grown up with his mother’s violent ideas.
She, along with their father and grandfather, had started their gang, decades ago.
People had targeted Rohini Devar because she was a woman, because they thought they could press her and she would fold.
She’d been underestimated at every turn, forced to be twice as bloodthirsty to earn the same amount of respect as the men.
But this plan turned Hasan’s stomach. He’d tortured men in the past, left scars far worse than severed fingers, but this was different.
Holding Poppy captive was one thing, but mutilation was another beast entirely, especially since she had not done anything to justify her involvement in this scheme, aside from having the misfortune of being engaged to Richard.
Moreover, she had saved his life last night—twice.
First, when she pulled him out of the way of Richard’s first bullet, and second, when she had staunched his bleeding until they’d reached Sanivali.
For him to harm her after that would be a violation of his debt to her.
It also didn’t help that he could still recall the feeling of her hand in his perfectly, her fingers long and delicate in those white lace gloves.
“We can’t—” Zeyar protested, at the same time Hasan began, “Ma, that’s not fair to—”
“Is it fair that I am going to lose my second son because the other two are too soft to get him back?” she demanded, her gaze blistering.
Zeyar lowered his head. “No.”
Hasan flinched, shame and righteousness warring in his chest. He couldn’t argue with his ma’s statement.
Paranjay was still in police custody because he and Zeyar had failed him.
This is about family, Paranjay had said.
We do this so we can take care of each other.
Hasan’s duty was to his brother first, and Poppy second.
He fought back his uneasiness as he said, “We’ll do it, Ma. ”
“Do it now,” she ordered. “If we send the first finger today, it will reach him before sunset.”
· · ·
The blood under Poppy’s nails tethered her to reality.
The Jackal’s brother had allowed her a bath last night before locking her in a spare bedroom, but even half an hour of scrubbing couldn’t purge those dark crescents trapped under her nails.
In a way, they comforted her, proof that last night had been real.
Pieces came back to her in flashes, out of order and at random: the thick smoke that had filled the air as the museum burned, the groans of dying men as they escaped from the building, the fountain of blood that had erupted from the hostage’s throat when Samina had shot him.
Poppy recalled how Samina had thrown herself on Richard, a man who likely weighed twice as much as she did.
A lump welled in her throat as she remembered that he had emerged from the room, bloodied and battered, but triumphant.
She desperately hoped that her childhood friend was still alive, even though the odds were near zero.
She wondered how the Jackal was faring. She hadn’t seen him since last night.
When they’d arrived, a small group of women in white had rushed out to their car, headed by a loud, intimidating matron barking orders in Virian.
Poppy hadn’t understood half of the words she said, but when the woman looked at Zeyar, she recognized three:
My foolish son.
She was Zeyar’s mother—Hasan’s mother. Poppy didn’t know what she had expected Hasan’s mother to look like.
If she was being entirely honest, she hadn’t imagined him as the kind of man who had a mother at all.
Men like him were born from the same shadows they haunted, reared by the same roads they prowled.
They didn’t have mothers, especially not mothers who berated them while checking for injuries.
But Hasan had a mother, and a brother, and a handful of sisters or cousins—Poppy wasn’t sure what exactly his relation was to the women in white who had helped her bathe and lent her a spare set of white salwar kameez. No. She recalled Richard’s words in the museum. Not just one brother. Two.
She had been asking the wrong question all this time—what the Jackal wanted, when she should have been asking whom.
She had carelessly assumed that Hasan wanted money or weapons, never guessing for a second that he may have been negotiating on behalf of someone he loved—because she had never imagined him as capable of love.
She tried to picture what the third brother would be like. Was he as cool and collected as Zeyar? Or was he as intense and unpredictable as Hasan?
Hasan. Her fingers crawled to her throat, where her knife wound had scabbed over.
Hasan’s mother had given it a cursory check, deeming it too shallow for stitches, but the wound of her terror ran so much deeper.
She’d been manhandled by Hasan before, but it was nothing like the way he had caged her in the museum, cutting her throat as though it were no harder than slicing through an envelope with a letter opener.
Poppy had only ever wielded blunt knives, meant for cutting through tender, cooked meats.
She’d never thought about the butcher’s knife, never imagined the animals’ terror before the cold kiss of steel drained years of their lives away in seconds.
She had been hunted by Richard, and trapped by Hasan, but she was not truly prey until the moment the Jackal’s pointed claws rested at her throat.
She knew without a doubt, if Richard had asked him to drive the blade into her artery in exchange for his brother, he would have done it, no hesitation.
That kind of devotion was terrifying. But it was terrifying because it was powerful, and if Poppy could harness that power, then she had a decent chance at fighting back against Richard.
Though Hasan had tried to work with him, Richard was still their common enemy.
Hasan would be just as eager to see her fiancé fall as she.
She wondered where Hasan was now—if he had made it through the night.
If someone had asked her yesterday, she’d have been certain that he’d bounce back immediately.
Shadows couldn’t die. But Hasan was made of flesh and blood, and his soul could be severed from his body just as easily as the soul of anyone else.