I roll my eyes. It’s getting difficult to walk. I lean against the brick wall next to us, trying to make it look casual. My breath is heavy.
“Y-you’re doing a great job at that, are you not? Showing up after a fight has already started. After the bullet’s already in my leg,” I say, waving a hand. A blood covered hand.
“Oh, fuck you,” Soren says and grabs me by the arm. “You showed up here without telling anyone. You knew it was trouble; you came to start it.”
“If you’re watching me, then you know where I am. You could have stopped me before I walked in,” I accuse him as he drags me through the alley. I’m too weak now to stop him, and I don’t want to.
If anyone is going to give me less of a hard time, it’s him. If my own family were here…I’d be ass deep in consequences by now. I don’t need that.
As annoying as Soren is, something about the way he nudges me into his car and brushes my hair out of my face makes me want to be with him more than anyone else right now.
“Oh no, you don’t get to claim anything, ass,” Soren swears at me and then his fingers brush along my jawline. “You came here all on your own.”
“Did I?” I ask, looking up at him through blurry vision. He stares back at me for a second and then shuts the door nearly on my face. I flinch back away from it and then relax back against the backseat.
“Didn’t want your front seat g-getting…dirty?” I ask him with shaky breath as he’s sliding into the driver seat. I see the car the guards came in speeding away, headlights in the distance.
Siren’s blare behind us.
I don’t hear Soren’s response. I just go tumbling over in the back seat as he drives toward and down two different side roads before heading to a run-down neighborhood in his uncle’s domain.
“Just take me home,” I order. “They can patch m-me up there.” I ignore the fact that I am not even remotely intimidating with my face pressed against the worn leather of the car and my eyes half open. I can just barely see Soren in the rearview mirror when I glance up, and I notice his eyes glance over as well. Meeting mine briefly.
“We’re closer to my place,” he says just before pulling into a lot that’s so dimly lit the moon is brighter than the street lamps.
Several of those lamps flicker, and I hear shouting from across the street.
“Safe?” I ask with a weak chuckle. “In the slums?”
Soren turns the engine off and gets out, pulling my door open, and I groan as he grabs me by the arm and yanks me up into a sitting position.
“Please, it’s safer here than in your own house. Folk here ain’t got much to lose, so they protect what they do got. We got so much to lose that we’re reckless with it.”
I hiss as I stand on my bad leg and Soren puts his shoulder under my arm to help me stand up and walk toward the stout brick building with small iron balcony’s every floor.
“I’ve been here, I remember,” I sneer in response. “You ever lived in a rat-infested building before, Fiorelli?”
Soren snorts and uses a key to open what appears to be a side door into the building, but is actually a side door into the basement. The stairs are too narrow for both of us to walk down, so he locks the door and then shuffles around me.
I walk behind him, feeling the stairs sway underneath me. I feel more and more uneasy as I go on. My leg is starting to feel like I’m walking on bone. I know I’m not, but the pain makes my eyes sting and I’m gritting my teeth trying not to let those tears drip down.
“I know for a fact you haven’t,” Soren tells me once we’re at the bottom. “Both of us might’ve been here short term, but we get to go home at the end of the night, they don’t.”
12
SOREN
“You don’t know what my childhood was like.” Carmine is bitching at me from across the room. I’d managed to get him set up on an old ratty recliner in the basement of the safehouse apartment building my uncle owns. Getting him to shut up is another story. I have to admit, hearing the sound of his voice and knowing that he’s alive does bring me a sense of… joy? Is that what this throbbing in my heart and groin is?
At least a part of it. Another part of me, even the dark and bloody part, is racked with guilt. I shouldn’t feel guilty for what I did. It’s my job after all. Just a job.
Except it isn’t just a job; that much is clear now. I’ve gotten wrapped up in something with Carmine Dresvanni and now I’m standing here in a dingy safehouse practically begging him to let me patch him up.
The exact opposite of what I’m supposed to be doing right now.
“I’m sure it was full of trauma just like mine,” I finally say as I bring over several tools I’ve disinfected with alcohol and some gauze.
“Ow, son of a fucking bitch, could you at least warn me before you grab my leg like that?” Carmine hisses out in pain. I’d grabbed his leg to roll his blood-soaked jeans away from the wound.
