“Hold him still.”
He could still smell the chemical crud that’d raced up his throat and tasted like old pennies.
“It’ll be over soon,” someone said, but he hadn’t believed them.
His heart jolted, ricocheting in his ribs as if he were asleep and dreaming, but he was reliving it while wide awake.
He should’ve been exhausted. Instead, something in him continued to rev high and hard, as if his body was an engine that wouldn’t idle down.
His head hurt like a hangover, but he hadn’t drunk anything. Sweat trickled down his temples, but chills rose over his forearms and down his spine.
His body was not his own, his mind was still sharp, but operated as if it’d been rewired.
He smelled things at a higher degree, could hear footsteps passing through the entrance. His veins pulsed like live wires, the muscles in his legs twitched with a need to move, and there was no off switch.
He checked his cheap phone for the time and saw it was two in the morning. He’d been sitting there lost in his thoughts for eight and a half hours.
He tried to push his mind anywhere else, onto anything else, but of course, it still went to the one place he didn’t want it to.
Gage Harrington.
Blind and bruised, but ten times stronger from the enhancements.
He’s fine, he told himself.
Yeah, Gage was soft, protected, and always had someone looking after him on the block, but he’d somehow survived a few months in the joint, so surely he could handle making his way out of a barn in Bumfuck County.
He’s definitely called Roz by now.
That name came with a face he didn’t want to picture.
Roz, the 13th Ward lieutenant who’d taken a liking to Gage, but Scar didn’t know why.
Gage just all of a sudden appeared on the scene, clueless and curious. Amazed and scared. Wanting and needy.
For a while, he thought Roz was fucking Gage. But, over time, he’d learned that was far from the truth.
Roz just liked him. It was as simple as that. And he’d allowed the pretty boy to play thug on the weekends but kept him out of the real dirty work. No gun runs, territory fights, or drug pickups.
Fridays and Saturdays, he’d see Gage rolling with the 13th Ward and wearing their black-and-white colors as if he belonged on the streets.
One Saturday night, Scar followed Gage from a party at Roz’s house to a quaint single-family home in the Oak Park suburbs.
Scar was already disgusted, but he’d camped outside overnight and seen that motherfucker walk out of his front door at eight a.m., wearing loafers and a navy suit, with a matching tie.
His perfect mommy had been clutching his arm as he helped her into the passenger seat like a good little son.
Scar went from repulsed to livid as he followed their Buick to a large brick church on the corner of Randolph and Wicker.
Gage had stood in the doorway to the right of his father, nodding, shaking the men’s hands, kissing old ladies on the cheeks, and smiling politely as they presented their wholesome-looking granddaughters to him.
It was the kind of double life that made Scar bristle with fury.
Why flirt with a life that could chew him up and spit him out?
Scar had lived on the streets since he was twelve years old. He knew real hard times and dog days.
Gage was a fake, pretending to have to survive, all while being fed with a silver spoon.
