38. Tank
Tank
Itell myself the hospital workers are staring because I'm a giant gangster covered in blood and wearing a mask, and not because they know what's under the mask. It doesn't help much, but even the staring isn't bothering me as much as it usually would.
All I can think about is the fact that Kade has been in surgery for two hours and thirty-six minutes, and even though we have every man we can spare guarding the hospital, Todd is still out there somewhere.
I've waited in juvie cells for hearings that felt shorter.
Every minute that Kade spends on the other side of those double doors, whatever they're doing in there to fix the ribs that splintered and whatever other damage those assholes did to him, is another minute I have to sit here instead of putting my fist through the wall.
Ellie is sitting beside me in the surgical waiting room.
Her legs are pulled up underneath her on the plastic chair and she's got my phone in her lap, since hers doesn't have the encrypted channels, watching the screen intently.
Every ten or twenty minutes, a message pings from Jinx.
Location updates and status checks mostly.
They're out hunting Todd.
Or they were, as of the last message. Cyrus and Jinx, out in the dark with guns and whatever version of a plan Cyrus assembled now that Kade is totally out of commission.
I should be out there. Every cell in my body screams to be on my bike, tearing through the streets and finding Todd before he finds us.
My hands know what they'd do if I got within arm's reach of the bastard.
They've rehearsed it every night in the garage while I worked on shit I didn't need to fix just to keep from snapping.
But Kade is behind those doors and Ellie is sitting next to me, and if Todd sends Southside to finish what we started tonight, someone has to be here. Someone has to be the mountain they break against before they get to her.
So I sit and I count the minutes. I see why Ellie finds this comforting, I guess.
"Tank?"
I tap her knee once to let her know I'm listening.
"Do you think Cy and Jinx are okay?" She chews the inside of her cheek, a habit I've seen her pick up in the last week that replaced the pill-popping, which is definitely an improvement. "They haven't texted in a while."
I reach over and take the phone gently from her hands. Set it face-down on the armrest between us and sign.
Cyrus and Jinx are professionals. Believe it or not.
"That's not comforting. Your version of 'professional' is getting shot at."
I snort. More shooting than getting shot.
She rolls her eyes, but the worry stays in them.
She leans sideways until her head finds my shoulder, and she settles her slight weight against me. Her hand slips into mine and our fingers lace together, hers small and cold, mine too big and too warm, and neither of us mentions how badly we're both shaking.
The double doors finally open.
We're both on our feet before the surgeon clears the threshold. She's a tall woman in green scrubs with tired eyes. Her gaze sweeps me, but to her credit, it doesn't linger. Doctors in emergency rooms have seen worse. Probably not much worse, but worse.
"Family of—" She checks her clipboard. "Mr. Kade Gallagher?"
Ellie steps forward. "That's us. How is he?"
"Stable. The internal bleeding was contained to the left thoracic cavity.
One rib had fractured inward and nicked the pleural lining, which was our primary concern, but we repaired the damage and he's responding well.
CT shows compound concussions, but he got lucky and there's no reason to expect any lasting damage.
His liver and kidneys look clean." She pauses in a way I'm too damn used to when it comes to Kade. "He's already awake."
"Already?" Ellie's voice cracks.
"Awake and loud." The surgeon's mouth twitches. As exhausted as she looks, I think her expression might be amused. Her gaze shifts to Ellie. "He's asking for you, I presume. Quite insistently. The nurses would appreciate it if you could convince him to stop trying to pull out his IV."
The laugh that comes out of Ellie is half-sob, and when she turns to me, the relief on her face hits me harder than anything Southside threw tonight.
Go, I sign. I'm right behind you.
She goes and I follow, like always, as the surgeon leads us through the corridors to a recovery room that's barely big enough for the equipment, the monitors, and the bed Kade is somehow still confined to. I check to see if he's restrained and am shocked when he isn't.
He looks like shit. Which is a vast improvement on the shit he looked like three hours ago, so I'll take it.
His face is still swollen, and his eye is still sealed shut.
The split in his lip has been stitched tight and clean by someone who's clearly done it a few hundred times.
There's a tube feeding oxygen into his nose, an IV drip in his good arm, and so many wrappings on his chest, he looks like a fucking mummy.
But his good eye is open, fixed on Ellie like she's the only reason those monitors are still beeping.
"Took you long enough," he rasps.
Ellie crosses the room in three steps and kisses him gently. Just the corner of his mouth where the stitches aren't, and his hand comes up to find the back of her head.
When I look up, the doctor is gone. I don't think Ellie or Kade have noticed.
"You look exhausted," he tells her, which is such a profoundly Kade thing to say to the woman who just pulled him out of a Southside torture room that I almost laugh.
Ellie smirks. "Yeah, well, you look like shit."
His good eye finds me over her shoulder. "You brought her," he reminds me, because there's no way he's letting that go.
I nod.
"To a Southside warehouse," he adds.
I bring my hands up to sign. You couldn't even control her with your dumbass contract, and you expect me to?
Kade scoffs, rather than admit I have a point. Ellie is not ours to control, and she never has been. She is ours, though. Somehow.
The door opens again and my hand is halfway to my gun when Cyrus slides through it. He's changed clothes and he's wearing a jacket without any blood on it, so if he took the time to get cleaned up, Jinx is okay, too.
Ellie launches off the bed and into his arms before he can get a word out. He catches her, stiffening for just a fraction of a second the way Cyrus always does when human contact surprises him, and then his arms close around her and his chin drops to the top of her head.
"You're okay," she breathes into his chest. Then she pulls back. "Wait. Aren't you supposed to be hunting Todd? Did you find him? Where's Jinx?"
"At the hospital back home watching your mom, just in case Todd shows up there." Cyrus adjusts his glasses. "I decided on a different approach."
Kade's good eye sharpens despite the morphine. "Different how?"
Cyrus pulls the chair from the corner, and pulls Ellie into his lap.
"I've been building the case against Todd for weeks.
" He pauses, slipping a hand into Ellie's hair.
"Tonight, I sent all of it, anonymous and encrypted with source documents attached, to four journalists at three different news outlets, two of which are investigative units with Pulitzer nominations.
I packaged it with the only narrative anyone's going to believe once the morning cycle picks it up. "
The room is quiet except for the monitors.
"Corrupt senator bankrolls street gang through shell companies and a compromised DA," Cyrus continues.
"Campaign finance violations, obstruction of justice, and a paper trail that leads from his office to every dime Southside has moved through those docks in the last eighteen months.
" His lips thin into a wicked smile. "I may have fabricated a few supplementary details to smooth the narrative.
Nothing that contradicts the existing evidence, though. "
"Since when," Kade says slowly, his voice dangerous even when it's barely above a whisper, "do you call the shots?"
"Since you were under general anesthesia." Cyrus doesn't blink. "Someone had to make the call, and you were busy having your ribs wired back together."
Kade grunts. I can tell he wants to argue, but Cy's plan is as sound as any we have right now. Kade getting captured kind of forced our hand.
Ellie's fingers are pressed together in her lap. Counting. I watch her stop herself in a conscious effort, her hand flattening against her thigh.
"Doesn't this mean Todd's going to go nuclear?" she asks. "When he sees the news?"
"He was already coming after us." Cyrus keeps stroking her hair, his other hand resting on her hip.
"With Southside at his disposal and Kade's cover blown, we had to preempt him.
Kade escaped his custody, so Todd knows he's got an enemy out there who knows about the Southside pipeline.
" He glances at me, then at Kade. "The press angle takes his power away before he can use it against us and puts him on the defensive.
By tomorrow morning, every connection he has is going to be running damage control or distancing themselves from his campaign.
Rosman will flip in a day, maybe less, and then the Southside operation will scatter to pick up a less risky source of funding. "
"So fight fire with paper," Kade mutters. "Boring, but smart."
"We've already tried the fire route," Cyrus says flatly. "It ended up with you in here."
Kade flips him off, but Cyrus has a point about that, too, and we all know it.
"And Todd?" Ellie asks.
"If he has any sense left, he'll use whatever connections that haven't burned yet to get the hell out of the country. Likely somewhere without an extradition treaty." Cyrus's jaw tightens. "A cornered animal runs."
"And then we hunt him down like the dog he is," Kade says.
Cyrus nods. "Exactly."
Ellie looks between them. "Prison is a bit cleaner than murder," she mutters.
The three of us look at each other.
"Oh, we're still killing the son of a bitch, Princess." Kade's crooked, stitched-together smile has an edge to it. "There just won't be anything left of his legacy by the time he's in the ground."
"You're all insane," she says, but she leans into Cyrus's hand where it rests on her hip. Her eyes are dry, and the tremor that's been in her fingers for weeks is, for the first time I can remember, absent.
Cyrus clears his throat. "So," he says carefully, "the letter. I take it you told him?"
"She told me," Kade says in a dangerous tone. "All the more reason to make it slow when we get our hands on that fucker. As for the contract… consider it nullified. Same with the collar. Hope you don't mind, since you're apparently the one calling the shots now."
Cyrus rolls his eyes at Kade's bitter snark. "About fucking time."
"I wouldn't mind a new one, though," Ellie says slowly. "With some modifications."
Kade grins, or tries to, wincing when the stitches pull. "Our Princess is a kinky little psycho."
"I could have told you that," Cyrus agrees, the faintest color rising along the tops of his ears.
"Not as kinky as the weird little roleplay you and Jinx have going on," Kade blurts out.
What the fuck?
The morphine. It has to be the morphine, because Kade Gallagher, sober and operational, would never have said those words out loud in front of Ellie and me. But Kade Gallagher, post-surgery and pumped full of enough opioids to sedate a draft horse, apparently has no filter.
The room's gone so quiet, I can hear a tray of equipment drop from all the way across the ward.
Cyrus's face goes through approximately twenty stages of processing in the span of two seconds. His ears go from pink to scarlet.
Ellie's mouth falls open and she stares at Kade, then at Cyrus.
"What?" she demands, even though her face says she already has an idea.
She looks at me, like I might deny it, and I hold both my hands up because I am not touching this one.
I have nothing to do with whatever goes on between those two behind closed doors, even if I've heard some weird shit here and there, and I intend to keep it that way. "More than just you two fucking?"
Oh. So that definitely is a thing then. I didn't imagine it.
Kade, either oblivious to the detonation he's just triggered or enjoying it through a narcotic haze, closes his good eye and settles deeper into the pillow with a look of supreme, drugged satisfaction.
"We'll talk about it later," Cyrus mumbles. "Jinx should probably explain."
"Leave me out of it," Kade grumbles, half-asleep. "I don't wanna know what you weirdos get up to. And before you say shit, I don't give a fuck if you're bi. It's you personally I find offputting."
"Thanks, Kade," Cyrus says dryly. "I appreciate the support."
"I'm an ally," Kade says, waving his hand lazily in the air before it drops back down. I don't know if he thinks that's an ally thing or he's just stoned off his ass.
"Well, I want to know," Ellie says with a wicked glimmer in her eyes, her arms wrapped around Cyrus's neck. "Maybe it'll take my mind off the fact that the whole city is going to be chaos tomorrow and Todd's still out there somewhere."
"For now," Cyrus mutters.
Yeah. For now.