CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Venezio
I knew the shot wasn’t fatal.
If it were any other situation, I would have run over to him and put another bullet right between his eyes to make sure he was dead. And with the location in the park we were in, no one would see, no one would know; I’d get away with it, no problem.
But this wasn’t just about me.
I’d sent Stephanie away when she was drenched to the bone, pale, frozen.
I didn’t know everything there was to know about hypothermia, but I was pretty sure she was in it.
I had to get to her as quickly as possible, get her warmed up.
For a moment, when I saw her on her knees in the snow, I thought I was too late, that she’d fallen, that she was about to face-plant into the snow, unconscious, possibly in cardiac arrest.
My own damn heart stuttered at the very idea.
But as I ran forward, she didn’t fall. She was just frozen, confused, too cold to think straight.
Her bleeding hands were the least of my worries as I forced her to run with me out of the park and duck into the cab.
I needed to get her out of her wet clothes, to get her under dry blankets, maybe skin-to-skin with me.
But I also needed to get her safe.
If my memory served me, I had roughly an hour and a half to two hours to get her warmed up before mild hypothermia became moderate. And if that happened, she would have to get to a hospital if she was going to survive.
The safe house was thirty minutes away. Twenty-five if the driver was aggressive enough.
I passed him another hundred, telling him there’d be another for him if he got us to the location as quickly as possible.
He pressed down on the gas, wove in and out of traffic, and blew through yellow lights.
All the while, I chafed Steph’s arms and legs, held her body close, kept asking her questions to keep her awake.
She grumbled and whined and even cursed at me at times, but I didn’t care how miserable she was so long as she wasawake.
Just when I didn’t think I could wait another second, the taxi whipped into a parking spot out front of the building.
“Thanks, man,” I said, passing him the money, then gathering Stephanie in my arms and sliding out of the cab.
The safe house was located in one of the rougher neighborhoods in Brooklyn, in a nondescript walk-up above a bodega.
None of us had keys.
But much like Ant’s construction company, we all had a fingerprint on file for easy access if we were in a dangerous situation. And of course, we would be if we ended up in a safe house.
I jiggled Steph’s body as I pushed the door open, finding the apartment had the scent of a long-held breath—dust, old fabric,and something damp beneath it, like time itself had been shut in for far too long.
I kicked the door closed behind me and reached toward the thermostat, turning the ancient thing all the way up before walking through the empty space, the old wooden floors groaning under my step, until I was in the bedroom.
The bed was stripped, the surface covered in a dozen old dryer sheets.
I swept as many as I could to the side, setting her on the edge, then stripping her out of my jacket and her gown.
Her slippers went next.
