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“What do you want?” I snapped, lowering my gun and closing the distance on her.
“Did you hear?” She blinked up at me with weepy eyes, magnified behind her gigantic glasses.
“Hear what?”
“About the boy?”
“What boy?” The muscles in my throat felt like they closed altogether, strangling me from the inside.
“Your boy. The nice boy.”
I wanted to throttle her. Didn’t she realize I didn’t have time for this bullshit? I needed to find Roan and she was dicking around like I had all day. “Stop with the fucking riddles and tell me what happened!”
She swallowed, twisting a handkerchief in her hands before dabbing her nose with it. Had she been crying? When she didn’t curse at me or call me a Moskal, I knew something awful must have happened, but for her to becrying? I was approximately two seconds away from shaking the information out of her.
“They found him in the alley,” she said at last. Pulling a piece of paper out of her pink-flowered house coat, she held it out to me with a shaking hand. “I made them write it down.”
It simply said Northwestern Hospital. It wasn’t the closest hospital — it was the closest Level I trauma center.
Pushing her out of the way, I flew back down the stairs and sprinted to my car.
The next time I saw Misha, I was going to rip his fucking throat out. I didn’t want Sergei’s fucking files in the first place. I would have given it back to him once I knew what Viktor’s agenda was. He didn’t have to hurt Roan to prove his point. Iknewwhat he could do — like me, his reputation preceded him. Preemptively hurting Roan was unnecessarily cruel, even by my standards.
I’d already murdered Misha a dozen different ways in my mind before I made it to the intake desk in the ER.
“Can I help you?” a nurse asked, glancing up from her computer.
“I was told Roan Sinclair was brought here?”
She typed something on the computer and clicked around before looking up again. “He’s in surgery. You might want to take a seat. Someone will come get you when he’s out.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
She shook her head and pointed across the way to a uniformed cop talking with a paramedic. “Try over there.”
A cop? Great. Just what I needed on top of this shitty day. Nevertheless, I made my way to the duo and cleared my throat.
The cop straightened immediately, giving me a once over while his hand casually drifted to his gun. “You need something?”
I ignored him and looked at the paramedic. “Did you bring Roan Sinclair here?”
The medic exchanged glances with the cop before answering. “Yeah, I was there. He a friend of yours?”
I nodded. “Can you tell me what happened?”
The medic grimaced, lowering his voice. “It’s not good. Docs rushed him straight to surgery. We got the bleeding stopped but he lost a lot by the time we got there. He’d been worked over pretty good.”
Sickness swirled in the pit of my stomach. “Who?”
The cop piped up beside me. “That’s whatI’mtrying to figure out, but no one saw nothing, or so they say. You sound like you’re from that neighborhood. Were you with him?”
Guilt hit me like a fucking sledgehammer. I should have been. I should have never left him alone. If I’d been there, Misha’s men would have never gotten to him. “No…”
“His ID says he lives in Highland Park. Do you know what he was doing there? Meeting up with someone, or something? Work? Anything?”
I couldn’t even form words. All I could do was shake my head.
“Well, if you think of anything useful, can you give me a call?” The cop pulled out his business card and handed it to me.
