Hiding

※※※Cross

The ride back was a blur of pain. The adrenaline that had been holding the worst of it at bay had bled out somewhere in that alley, along with my own blood, leaving a deep, throbbing ache and a dizzying nausea that had nothing to do with the wound. I kept the bike steady through sheer force of habit, my mind a white noise static.

I don’t know why I just walked away.

The thought circled like a vulture. I’d had her. Pinned. Furious, alive, right there. I’d felt the wild beat of her heart through her jacket. I’d seen the fire in her eyes—hatred, yes, but fire. It was the most real she’d been since she came back. And all I wanted to do was to keep kissing her.

But something in me shifted.

It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t even the knife—though the hot, slick feel of my blood was a sobering punctuation. It was the look in her eyes in the second before I turned. Past the fury, past the triumph of having drawn blood... there was a coldness. Was she just performing like she does with him?

And then he’d driven up. Her knight. Her predictable, transparent prince. Ready to swoop in and clean up the mess. The whole scene—the dead end, the blood, the two of us locked in our pathetic, violent ballet—suddenly felt cheap. Tawdry. Like a bad street theatre.

Maybe it was the few drinks I’d had earlier. Maybe it was bone-deep fatigue, the killing, the constant, grinding pressure. Or maybe it was just that the coldness in her eyes finally seeped into me.

I was not in the mood for the drama.

I know I’d thought I needed to stop playing cold, to pull her back before she vanished into his world for good. But standing there, feeling the warmth leak out of me onto the dirt, watching him pull up ready to defend his queen... I just felt lost. Profoundly, utterly lost. The game had no rules, the prize was a ghost, and I was tired of bleeding for it.

I pulled into the secured garage under my compound, the engine’s growl echoing off concrete walls. Getting off the bike was a lesson in fresh agony, a sharp pull in my side that made me see stars. I leant against the cool metal for a second, breathing through it.

The medical bay was in the basement level, sterile and efficient. Mary, the ex-army medic who’d been patching me up for years, was at her desk, reading a medical journal. She looked up as I shuffled in, her eyes immediately going to the hand I had pressed to my side, the dark stain obvious even in the dim garage light.

She didn’t ask. She never asked. She just stood, gestured to the examination table, and started pulling out supplies—a suture kit, antiseptic, and gauze.

“Shirt and jacket off,” she said, her voice neutral.

I gritted my teeth and complied, hissing as the leather peeled away from the clotting wound. It was a clean puncture, about an inch deep, in the fleshy part just above my hip bone. Painful, messy, but not dangerous. She’d seen worse.

Her hands were swift and sure, cleaning the area with a sting that made my muscles jump, then injecting a local anaesthetic. The cold numbness was a relief. I stared at the ceiling tiles as she worked, the tug and pull of the suture needle a distant sensation.

“Need a waterproof bandage,” I muttered. “I need to shower all this blood off.”

She gave a curt nod, finishing the last stitch and taping a neat square of gauze over the site before expertly wrapping a clear, adhesive waterproof seal over it. “Try to keep it dry. Forty-eight hours. Redress then. No heavy lifting.”

“Yeah.”

When I stepped out of the medical bay, Mikey was leaning against the wall in the hallway, a solid, silent presence. His eyes tracked the bloodied jacket in my hand, then my face.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked, his voice a low rumble.

“Fuck no,” I said, the words coming out harsher than I intended. I tossed the ruined jacket into a biohazard bin. “I want to forget all about tonight.” I ran a hand over my face, the fatigue settling into my bones. “Cancel my next two race days. Tell them I’m out. And I’ll be laying low here for a few days. Don’t schedule anything. Don’t let anyone in unless it’s life or death.”

Mikey didn’t question it. He just nodded. “Are you expecting trouble?”

“Not the kind you can shoot.” I paused, the image of her standing in the alley, knife in hand, flashing behind my eyes. “If she... if anyone comes looking for me, you tell them I’m not seeing anyone.”

He understood. “The redhead.”

“Yeah.” I started walking towards the private elevator to my living quarters. “If she really wants this... if she really wants anything,” I said, more to myself than to him, “she’ll have to come to me. I’m done chasing ghosts.”

The elevator doors slid shut, enclosing me in silent, polished steel. I leant back, closing my eyes. The shower would wash away the blood, the sweat, the smell of the fight and the airstrip. But the cold, lost feeling, the hollow echo of my words in that alley—I don’t want to play this game—was going to take a lot longer to scrub clean.

The game was over. The board was empty. And for the first time in a very long time, I had no idea what my next move was, or if I even wanted to make one.

The office was a tomb. I’d been buried in it for days, the numbers on the spreadsheets blurring into a grey haze of profit, loss, and territorial disputes. It was a familiar numbness, a substitute for feeling. Work. Kill. Fight. The holy trinity of forgetting.

Mikey’s knock was a dull thud that barely penetrated the fog. He entered without waiting, his bulk filling the doorway, his expression carefully neutral. “Boss.”

“What?” It wasn’t a question.

“You’ll have to attend the party at Lux on Friday. Marcello called. He wants you there to look after Libby’s party. Doesn’t want your staff handling it. Insisted.”

A cold spike of irritation shot through the numbness. Libby, Marcello’s nineteen-year-old daughter, was having one of her infamous birthday bashes. A circus of trust fund brats, minor celebrities, and hangers-on. And now I had to be the fucking ringmaster.

“Fuck,” I muttered, leaning back in my chair, the leather groaning. “So it’s this Friday? I thought I had more time...”

“More time?” Mikey’s voice was flat. “You haven’t left this house in over a week.”

I shot him a look. “And your point? I can work from here.”

He didn’t flinch. He just waited.

I sighed, the sound ragged. “Fine. Okay. Change the plans. Wristbands for VIP only. Libby and her list move upstairs to the Sky Lounge. No exceptions. Bouncers on every entrance and exit—our guys, not the club’s regulars. If they didn’t buy a bracelet directly from us, no entry. I don’t want any of Monty’s snakes or Genovese cockroaches slipping in to cause a scene or try to move product on our turf.”

I glanced at the heavy clock on the wall. Its ticking was suddenly loud. “This party stays private. Tight. I’ll be watching from my office the whole time. No meetings. No dealing. No socializing. ” I met Mikey’s eyes, letting the steel show. “I’m being fucking serious, Mikey. I want to see no one.”

He gave a slow nod. “Understood.”

“Saturday,” I continued, the plan solidifying as I spoke, a welcome return to the clarity of violence. “Me, you, the crew. We go clean house.”

“Clean house, boss?”

“We’re going to go pay Monty a visit.” The name tasted like bile. Monty “The Eel” Ferraro, a low-level distributor with ambitions bigger than his brain. He’d been skimming, selling cut product, and now he was late on a payment that was substantial enough to be a deliberate insult. “The little snake owes me coke. A lot of it. And money. If he doesn’t cough up my product or my cash by Saturday night...” I let the sentence hang, the implication darker than the shadows in the corner of the room. “His days are numbered.”

“Yes, Boss,” Mikey said, a flicker of something—anticipation, maybe—in his dark eyes. “I’ll set it all up.”

He turned to leave but paused at the door. “You want anything else?”

“No. Just... make sure the protocols at Lux are airtight.”

He left, closing the door softly behind him.

The silence rushed back in, heavier than before. I swiveled my chair to face the big open window that looked out over the city, a glittering tapestry of lies and temptation. I hadn’t left the compound in over a week. Hiding. Like a wounded animal in its den.

I do not want to bump into her.

The thought was a constant, low-grade hum in my skull. A week of self-imposed exile, and she was still the ghost in every room.

She’s not the same girl. This one plays games and hurts when provoked. She’d proven that with cold steel. The smiley-faced, big-eyed girl who looked at me like I stole the world for her... she was gone. Buried under four years of the union’s training and, God knows, other things. I knew that. In my head, I knew it.

But in the quiet, stupid chamber of my heart, I’d hoped. Hoped there was a small part of her left. A shard of the old Lissa, the one who believed in something more than blood and strategy. The hope was a weakness, a raw, tender spot that her knife had found with unerring accuracy.

So I do what I always do. The only thing I know how to do that doesn’t leave me feeling hollowed out and lost.

Work. Kill. And fight.

And let her go.

The party at Lux would be a test. A gauntlet of noise and people and potential glimpses of red hair in the crowd. But I’d be in my office, behind one-way glass, a spectre overseeing his kingdom. And Saturday... Saturday would be a release. The clean, brutal logic of a debt being called in. Monty’s fear would be a tangible thing. His blood would be real. It would be a problem with a solution, not a ghost I couldn’t exorcise.

I turned back to the spreadsheets, the numbers sharpening into focus. This was my world. Concrete, brutal, and manageable. Let her play her games with her Russian prince. I had real snakes to crush.

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