"I'm not busy now."
The air in the room changes. The smell of blood and dust fades, replaced by the sharp, electric tension that always seems to spark when we touch.
Alessandro looks at my wound. He looks at my face.
"You're bleeding," he says.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
He leans forward. He rests his forehead against mine. We breathe the same air.
"We are going to find Seamus," he says softly. "We are going to find everyone involved in this. And we are going to burn them down."
"Yeah," I say. "We are."
"But first," he says, pulling back slightly, "you are going to drink water. And you are going to sleep. And if you try to move from this spot, I will shoot you myself."
I almost smile.
"Understood," I say.
He stands up. He walks to the kitchen to get water.
I watch him go.
The pain in my side is a dull throb now. The cold is receding.
I am lying on the floor of a dusty, abandoned house with a bullet wound in my side and a war waiting outside the door.
But I am not alone.
For the first time in my life, I am not fighting alone.
And that is worth bleeding for.
Chapter Fifteen
ALESSANDRO
The wound is ugly.
It is a four-inch laceration along his left flank, running diagonally from the tenth rib toward the iliac crest. The edges are ragged—not the clean, surgical incision of a blade or the precise puncture of a direct hit, but the messy, chewing damage of a secondary projectile. A piece of the Volvo’s door frame, maybe, or a fragment of the bullet itself that shattered on impact and tumbled through the air before it found him.
It’s bleeding sluggishly. The blood is dark red, almost black in the dim light of the safehouse kitchen. It pools on the dusty floorboards, soaking into the denim of his jeans, turning the fabric heavy and stiff.
Killian is unconscious.
He slumped against the wall the moment the adrenaline left his system, his head lolling back, his face grey and slick with a cold, clammy sweat. He looks younger like this. The aggression is gone. The "Reaper" mask has been stripped awayby hypovolemia, leaving just the exhausted face of a man who has been fighting a war since he was ten years old.
I press two fingers to his carotid artery. The pulse is there—rapid, thready, fluttering against my fingertips like a moth trapped in a jar. He’s going into shock. His body is shunting blood to the core, sacrificing the extremities to keep the heart and brain alive.
I have maybe thirty minutes before the compensation fails. Maybe less.
I snap the white plastic first aid kit open. It’s military surplus—Rory’s work. I recognize the layout immediately. Suture kits, QuickClot hemostatic gauze, a vial of injectable lidocaine, curved needles, saline irrigation pouches. The brother knows what kind of life Killian leads. He didn't pack Band-Aids; he packed a trauma center.
I grab the trauma shears.
