“So you just… What?Hack bad guys?”
“I accept jobs that use my skills.Sometimes those jobs make enemies.”
“Then stop.Just stop doing it.”
“I can’t.”He says it fast, final, slamming a door on my concern.“Drop it.”
“No.”Anger climbs up my throat.“This is our lives.You disappear for a month, and I’m supposed to just wait around—”
“Dove.”
“No!Where were you?What happened?Why did you leave me alone for that long?”
He stands abruptly, the chair scraping against the floor.He paces with his hands locked on top of his head, turning, pacing, and turning again.His shirt rides up with the movement, exposing a strip of his stomach—hard muscle, familiar grooves, and—
A barely-healed, scary-big wound under his rib cage.
My heart stumbles.
“What is that?”I grab his shirt before he can yank it down.“Jag!What is that?”
He reaches for my wrist, but not fast enough.I shove the shirt higher, revealing the full injury, pink and new, the width of a thumb.A wound that can only come from a blade sinking in deep.
“Someone stabbed you,” I whisper.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”My fingers hover near it, afraid to touch.“This is bad.This should’ve killed you.”
He doesn’t deny it.He doesn’t say anything at all.He just lets me hold his shirt in my trembling hands.
The silence between us is too loud, the distance too far.He’s hiding things from me.
The story about the man following me, the jobs he’s doing, the danger we’re in… That’s not all of it.Not even part of it.
“A couple of months ago, a soldier took me out for beers.”I watch his face carefully, the hard set of his jaw.“He was stabbed in a bar fight later that night.”
“Don’t know anything about that.”
“Yeah, you do.”I trail my fingers over the puckered skin.“Did he do this?”
“Fuck, no.He didn’t even get a hit in.”
“So you did kill him.”
“You’re fifteen-fucking-years old!”He bares his teeth, eyes wild.“And he was—”
“Twenty-two.A year younger than you.”I return my attention to his wound, examining the raw skin.
It’s only a few weeks old.Maybe a month.Too fresh to be related to the soldier.
A month…
Thisis why he vanished.Why he left me to fend for myself.Why the streets felt wrong and empty in a way they never have before.
“You were hurt.”I grip his scruffy face, holding it in my hands.“That’s where you’ve been.You weren’t working some job or hiding from the cops or whatever story you were going to feed me.You were dying somewhere.”
His eyes flick away.“Cracker patched me up.”
