He knelt beside the guy, prepped it, and jabbed it into his thigh through his jeans. "If this doesn't work—"
"It'll work." Hair stuck to his forehead, damp with sweat. Freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks. The medical bracelet was too small for the zip tie marks around his wrist, red and raw where the plastic had cut in.
"Aleksi." Gregori stood up. "We don't know who this is. Could be a plant. Could be bait. Could be anybody."
I pulled out my knife and cut through the zip tie. His arm dropped limp. "Get him to the car. We're taking him."
"Boss—"
"He was left here to die, Gregori. Same as those two downstairs." The empty office, the bare walls, the stripped filingcabinets. "The Italians left him here for a reason. I want to know why."
"What if he doesn't know anything?"
"He was in a room full of their operation. He knows something."
Gregori shook his head, but he didn't argue. He knew better. "Where are we taking him?"
"Safe house on Livingston. Get Collins there with her full kit. If he wakes up, you call me immediately. Keep him quiet. Tell him nothing."
"And if the Italians come looking?"
"Then you handle it." I headed for the door. "But keep him breathing. He's the only thing we got out of this mess."
I opened my eyesand squinted at a white ceiling. A fluorescent light buzzed somewhere nearby, the cheap kind that never shut off. I tried to lift my hand to block it, and my wrist caught hard on something that bit into the bone.
It was a handcuff. Steel, proper steel, not the shite toy kind you'd buy on the Royal Mile for a hen night. It was bolted to a metal bed frame and locked tight enough around my right wrist that my pulse thudded against the cuff. I turned my other wrist over. The medical bracelet was still there, warm against my skin. So whoever had me either knew what it meant or hadn't bothered to strip me down. I'd take either.
My stomach rolled. The room tilted when I moved my head, and the shaking was already there, deep tremors that started in my bones and worked outward. I was on the tail end of a crash, nauseous and weak, a metallic taste coating my tongue like I'd been sucking on pennies. I'd been through it before. I knew the shape of it.
I just didn't know where I was.
The room was small and clean: white walls, white ceiling, white everywhere I looked. A chair by the door held a man with his arms folded, big lad, watching me like I was a problem he'd been assigned. He had the look. Broad shoulders crammed into a jacket that didn't fit him, too tight across the chest, off-the-rack and straining at the seams. The shoes were good leather, but he'd never touched them with polish. You could always tell.
I tried to sit up, and the room lurched. My stomach clenched, and I swallowed hard and waited for it to pass. The big lad stayed put.
"Last time I woke up in a situation like this," I said, "they bought me dinner first."
He gave me nothing. He just stared.
"Aye, all right. Strong silent type." I tugged the handcuff, and the bed frame rattled. "Any chance ye could tell me where I am? Or who ye are? Or maybe just get me a glass of water before I boak all over this lovely bed?"
He pulled out his phone and typed something.
"Brilliant. Ye're texting. That's grand. Tell whoever's in charge I'm gonnae need insulin within the hour, or this whole situation gets a lot messier for everybody."
He stood up without a word and left the room. The door stayed open, showing a hallway and another door, nothing useful. My head swam. I was too weak to do much more than lie there and take inventory. The last thing I remembered was the warehouse. The zip tie on my wrists. The Italians packing up around me, hauling boxes, shouting at each other in a language I'd stopped trying to understand months ago. They'd left me cuffed to the radiator like I was part of the furniture they couldn't be arsed to move. I'd been going low. The world had gone soft at the edges, and my thoughts had turned to soup.
Then nothing, and now this.
I pulled against the cuff, and the frame didn't budge. The steel was solid, bolted to the floor. Whoever owned this place had done this before. The mattress was decent, though. Better than the warehouse floor. Better than the radiator. I was developing a ranking system for the places people chained me up, and that was a thought I'd examine later, when I wasn't dying.
The big lad came back with another man. This one was shorter, leaner, with a medical kit in one hand and an expression that said he'd rather be anywhere else. He set the kit on the bed and opened it without looking at me.
"Insulin," I said. "Aye? Please tell me that's insulin."
He pulled a vial and a syringe from the kit. He grabbed my free arm and shoved my sleeve up, pinching the skin like he was about to jab it right there in the forearm.
"That's no how ye do it, pal. It goes in the belly or the thigh, no the arm. Have ye ever actually done this before?"
