It's not a gangster facing a rich guy out of his depth anymore. It's a lost boy in front of a complete psychopath who's not scared of anything. Not even his own death.
When Achilles presses his chest harder against the gun, Bennett drops his hand, taking a step back.
"You know," Achilles chuckles. "Chase squealed like a pig when I slit his throat. I wonder what noise you'll make when I get you alone."
For someone usually so big and threatening, Bennett makes himself ridiculously small as Achilles places his hand at the back of my neck to guide me toward the car. Not a fear in the world that he's turning his back to a criminal holding a gun.
"In you go."
Too shocked to utter a single word, I sit in the passenger seat and watch him as he opens the driver's door.
"One last thing," he calls out to Bennett.
Still outside the car, he reaches for something under his seat, and I'm too slow to comprehend what it is until he's pointing a gun at Bennett.
In a voice so cold the air could freeze around us, he says, "That's for the bruise on her arm."
The shot resonates loudly in the quiet lot, followed within a millisecond by my gasp. In the middle of the day, Achilles Duval shoots the man who hurt me.
But he didn’t kill him.
Bennett’s screeching, holding his left arm to his chest as he curls into a fetal position on the ground.
"Don't move,mon trésor," Achilles says as I watch him walk back to Bennett with wide eyes.
I'm shell-shocked, incapable of moving or saying anything.
Achilles helps him up, and Bennett has no choice but to lean on him as he keeps crying out.
"Fuck, man…fuck…" he whimpers as Achilles puts him in the back seat of his car.
"You'll be fine," Achilles answers simply as he gets in the driver's seat. "I'll take you to a hospital."
"I'm bleeding out," he cries. "Shit! Motherfucker!"
"Tsk. So rude."
I feel like I'm back to my teenage years, when crime would happen all around me, especially at North Shore High, and I’d just try to make myself as small as possible. My thighs are tensing, my legs pressed against each other. I reach for bubblegum in my bag, popping it in my mouth before rubbing my hands together anxiously.
I watched people being beaten up in the hallways of my school. I saw Chase commit more crimes than anyone couldimagine, but most of them were petty. He always kept the more serious things away from me because he didn't trust me. I saw some of my high school friends throw rocks at cops while I was trying to step away and show I wasn't part of this. The only time I did something was when my music teacher was stabbed by a colleague of hers in the middle of our class. Then I tried to stop him. I tried to save her, and I failed. Other than that, every time a crime happened around me on the North Shore, I’d attempt to make myself invisible. Just so I could keep my chances of going to SFU and moving to the South Bank.
Now, I go to SFU. I even have some sort of relationship—whatever that relationship is—with a man from Stoneview, born with a silver spoon in his mouth and who grew up surrounded by other billionaires. Andhe'sthe one who ends up roping me into shady shit? This has to be some cruel joke.
As we all expected, Achilles doesn't drive him to a hospital. The whole time, we don’t exchange a word. I can’t talk, too anxious, and this just seems like a normal day for him anyway. He does grab one of my hands though, stopping me from rubbing them together. His one feels hot, and he cups my cold limb as if trying to warm me up. He stops at one of the many empty warehouses on the North Shore that were abandoned when our town became a practical ghost town years ago. No company wants to have any sort of business from here.
"What are we doing here?" I croak.
In the back seat, Bennett is barely conscious, whimpers escaping him from time to time.
"This is the place I use for one of my inspirations. I killed Chase's direct boss here, took pictures of him, and showed them to him. I thought it’d keep him from doing something stupid, but clearly he needed a one-on-one kind of lesson."
Because that's not fucked up at all. Some men kill, but Achilles Duval calculates how to inflict the most damagepossible far into the future. That’s what differentiates him from the criminals I’m used to. That’s what makes him the scariest out there. And when it came to Chase, he did itto protect me.
I try to keep calm and pretend I'm not affected, because how else are you supposed to react when someone you're in a car with, in the middle of nowhere, tells you this? I don’t think you’re supposed to feel the tinge of thrill I do. That perfect mix of fear–because at any moment, something terrible could happen to me–and excitement that comes with being completely owned and cared for.
I gulp. "Do you… Do you come here often?"
He turns, his eyes roaming over my face. They're shining with exhilaration. "Not since I met you. You're a whole new kind of inspiration. Irreplaceable."
