“No,” I said. “I’m not hit.”
“Sal?”
“Shoulder.” Sal’s voice from the front. Strained but present. “Through and through. I can drive.”
Santo pulled me up from the floor. His hands on my arms, lifting me onto the seat like I weighed nothing. Glass fell from my hair, my shoulders, the black dress. His eyes moved over me—fast, clinical, the threat assessment of a man who needed to confirm with his own eyes what his ears had just been told.
Then his hands were on my face. Both hands. The scarred palms against my cheeks. His forehead against mine.
“Okay,” he said. The word carrying everything. “Okay.”
SalpulledoffatKostner.
An industrial stretch—loading docks, chain-link, the kind of block where nobody looked out windows because there was nothing to see and they preferred it that way. The sedan rolled to a stop behind a warehouse with a rusted sign I couldn’t read. The engine ticked. The wind still came through the missing rear window, carrying glass dust and the smell of gunpowder and the cold November air that didn’t care what had just happened to us.
The silence was enormous.
After the gunfire, after the impact, after the scream of metal on metal and the shriek of the SUV hitting the barrier — the silence was a physical thing.
Sal’s shoulder was dark with blood. I could see it from the backseat—the left side of his shirt soaked through, the fabric clinging to him, the color wrong. Not bright red. Darker. The blood that had been flowing for minutes and was thickening now, the body’s clotting factors doing their work. His face in the rearview was grey. Not the grey of fear — the grey of blood loss, the color the body turns when there isn‘t enough of the essential thing inside it.
His hands were still on the wheel. Ten and two.
“Sal.” Santo’s voice. Low. Clipped. He reached between the seats — the motion careful, the suit jacket pulling tight across his shoulders. His hand found Sal‘s shoulder. Assessed. Pressure. The practiced response of a man who had treated wounds before, in situations that didn’t involve hospitals because hospitals involved questions.
Sal grunted. “It’s clean. Went through.”
“You need—“
“I need to drive you where you’re going. Argue with me later.”
Santo sat back. And that’s when I saw it.
His shirt. The white dress shirt beneath the charcoal jacket. The left side. A bloom of red spreading from the ribs down, the fabric absorbing the blood the way fabric does—slowly at first, then faster, the stain widening with each breath. His stitches. The ones that were reopened after the Bratva fight—the wound that had been healing, that I’d watched him rebandage every morning with the careful attention of a man who treated his own body the way he treated his car: maintenance performed, damage noted, complaints filed nowhere.
The stitches had torn.
“You’re bleeding,” I said.
He looked down. The glance was brief—the dismissal of a man who had categorized his own wound as non-critical and moved on to the next assessment. His eyes came back to me.
“So are you.”
I blinked. My hand went to my face—automatic, the fingers seeking what his eyes had found. My forehead. Above my left eyebrow, near the scar that was already there. Wetness. Warmth. The specific temperature of blood, which was always warmer than you expected because you forgot it came from inside you where everything was warm.
I pulled my hand back. Looked at my fingers.
Red. Bright red. My blood, on my fingers, in a car with no rear window on a side street in an industrial stretch of a city that had been trying to kill me for weeks.
The cut stung. Now that I knew it was there, the nerve endings reported in — the delayed notification of a body that had been too busy surviving to bother with inventory. Glass. A fragment from the window, probably. The same window that had exploded inward while Santo covered me, while his body became the wall between me and the bullets, while his stitches tore because he chose my safety over his own structural integrity.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
Two people. Bleeding.
“We need to take you to a hospital,” I said.
“No.”
