The skin of his flank is tough. I have to use force to punch the needle through the dermis. I pull the thread through, tying a surgeon’s knot, pulling the ragged edges of the skin together.
One stitch.
I remember the Catskills. My father called it a "camping trip." Yosef called it "field medicine." I was sixteen. He gave me a pig carcass that he had cut open with a hunting knife and told me to fix it. I spent three days in a tent, stitching cold, dead skin until my fingers bled and my back seized. I hated him for it. I hated the blood under my fingernails.
I am grateful for it now.
Two stitches. Three.
I work methodically. I match the skin edges perfectly. I tie the knots with the same precision I use to tie my ties.
Killian shifts. His breathing hitches. The pain is cutting through the lidocaine.
"Easy," I say. I place my free hand on his hip, anchoring him. "Almost done."
Twelve stitches.
A neat, black line of thread closing the red mouth of the wound.
I tie off the last one. Snip the thread with the shears. I cover the work with a sterile pad and tape it down tight, applying pressure.
I sit back on my heels. I exhale, a long, shuddering breath that I didn't know I was holding.
My hands are covered in his blood. It’s drying, sticky and dark, caught in the fine lines of my palms.
I look at his face.
The bruise above his eyebrow is purple and angry. His lip is split. There is dirt in his hair. He looks wrecked.
He ran into a sniper’s fire for me. He stepped in front of six guns for me.
Why?
The question circles in my head, unanswerable. We are enemies. We are a business arrangement. We are two men who have done nothing but hurt each other since the moment we met. He threatened to kill me. I threatened to ruin him.
And yet, here we are. In a house that doesn't exist, bound by blood and silence.
I need to move him. The floor is hard and cold, and the draft from the door is cutting through the room.
I stand up. My knees crack. I walk into the living room. It’s sparse. A table, two chairs, and a couch that looks like it’s been here since the seventies. It’s sagging, covered in a faded plaid fabric that smells of dust and mildew.
It will have to do.
I go back to the kitchen. I hook my arms under Killian’s shoulders. He is heavy—dead weight, dense muscle and bone. I grunt, bracing my legs, and pull.
He drags across the floorboards. His boots scuff the wood. I haul him through the doorway and over to the couch.
I lift his upper body onto the cushions. Then I lift his legs. He is too long for the couch; his feet hang off the end. I unlace his boots. My fingers fumble with the knots, slick with blood. I pull the heavy boots off and set them on the floor.
His socks are black cotton. There is a hole in the toe of the left one.
The detail ruins me. It’s so mundane. So devastatingly human. The Reaper, the monster, has a hole in his sock.
I find a wool blanket draped over the back of the chair. I shake the dust off it. I cover him, tucking the rough fabric around his shoulders, careful of the wound.
The vigil begins.
I pull one of the wooden chairs over to the couch. I sit down. I place the Beretta on my knee. I place the Škorpion on the floor by my feet.
