Page 3 of The Rook’s Obsession

My hand moves slowly, the way you’d reach for a wild animal that might bite. I only want to touch her. Just once. Just to prove to myself this is real.

Her eyes widen. For one endless moment, I think she might let me.

Until the gun cracks and fire rips through my left thigh.

One knee hits the carpet when I go down. Then the other. I’m gripping my leg with both hands while blood seeps through my fingers. I’ve been shot before—it sort of comes with the territory—but it never gets easier. The pain is white-hot, wrapping itself around me, consuming me.

“Son of a bitch!” My jaw aches as I grit my teeth against the pain. When I look up, she’s already moving toward the door, tucking the gun into the back of her waistband. She’s so quick and easy about it. Practiced. My stomach turns, not because it scares me, but because that simple gesture tells me exactly what they turned her into.

She pauses in the doorway but doesn’t look back. “Leave the city. Tonight. Next time, I’ll aim higher than your leg.”

The door closes behind her. She’s gone.

I don’t know how long I sit on the floor, bleeding onto carpet that was already questionable in the first place. It’s long enough for the initial shock to fade. It turns into a deep, throbbing ache, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. I’m here long enough to confirm the bullet went clean through, in and out of my outer thigh. It missed the bone and, if I’m lucky, the femoral artery. If I’m unlucky, I’ll bleed to death on this floor, and no one will find me for days.

Wouldn’t that be ironic? After years of surviving everything I’ve survived, dying in a hotel room because the love of my life shot me in the leg.

I press my forehead against my fist and breathe through it. In and out. Slow and controlled. The way Liam taught me back when we were barely more than kids ourselves, learning how to take a hit and keep moving. Pain is temporary. Stop the bleeding. Assess the damage, then move forward.

I drag myself to the bathroom, which means leaving a trail of red on the beige carpet. I’m going to have to pay for that, I know it. The mini bar along the way has a couple of those tiny bottles of vodka that taste like paint thinner. I crack one open and down half of it in a gulp. The other I open and pour over the wound, then nearly black out from the searing agony. But that’s a good thing. It means the nerves are still intact.

There’s a first-aid kit on the sink. Nothing fancy. Just gauze and tape and a suture kit I brought along because, after all, this isn’t exactly a vacation. I’ve stitched myself up before. You learn to do a lot of things when you can’t risk strolling into an emergency room and explaining how you came to have a bullet hole in your body.

With my pants cut open, I sit on the edge of the bathtub and thread a needle with hands that are steadier than they have any right to be. My mind, though? That’s a different story. My mind is a war zone.

She’s alive. Actually alive. I’ve seen her with my own eyes before she pointed a gun at me and pulled the trigger without a second thought.

I knew, going in, she wouldn’t remember me. Gabriel was clear about that. Amnesia after the explosion. Raised by Vincenzo Russo’s people. Trained, reshaped into someone new. I told myself I was prepared for it. I told myself it wouldn’t matter, that I would find her and bring her back. That everything would work itself out eventually.

What a fucking idiot I am.

Nothing could’ve prepared me for how it would feel when she looked at me like I was a stranger. Worse than a stranger. A threat. Something to be neutralized. I’ve seen that look before on people who kill for a living. The look of someone who’s been taught to turn off their humanity like they’re flipping a light switch. Flip it, do the job, walk away.

They did that to her. They took a fifteen-year-old girl and turned her into this. A weapon with a name that isn’t hers.

I have to bite down on a washcloth as I pull the first stitch through. The pain is a distraction, anyway. It keeps me in my body when my mind wants to spiral into places I can’t afford to go. Not yet. Later, there will be time for rage, the kind that burns slow and steady and doesn’t stop until someone pays.

Not now. Now, I need to think.

She said she was rescued. Rescued from a bad situation. They made themselves the good guys. She had to accept it as the truth because she had no memories to contradict them. For twelve years, it’s been her only truth.

I pull another stitch. It’s tighter than it should be, but the conditions aren’t exactly ideal here. The vodka I swallowed is already wearing off, and every nerve in my thigh is screaming.

That’s nothing compared to the pain I’ve been carrying with me for twelve years. I didn’t fall apart where anyone could see. I just stopped being the person I was before. I kept moving and functioning because I had to, because it was all I knew how to do, but I’ve been empty inside for years.

Liam never talked about it, really. That’s how he is. He lost his sister, I lost the girl I loved, and we both shoved it down deep and kept going because the alternative was to stop, and stopping meant death.

It doesn’t mean I ever stopped thinking about her.

After tying off the last stitch and cutting the thread, I press a thick square of gauze over the wound and tape it down. Not my best work, but it’ll hold. I chase two painkillers with what’s left of the second bottle of vodka and sit on the floor, my back against the wall, my eyes closed.

Behind my eyelids, I see her. Sitting on the hood of my shitty car in the parking lot behind the diner with her legs swinging, laughing at something I said. She always laughed like she meant it. She threw her whole body into it, head tipped back, eyes squeezed shut.

I was absolutely fucking gone for her. I didn’t stand a chance.

Not even when Liam found out about us. All it took was seeing us sitting together watching TV. Something completely innocent. A single look, and he saw what was really happening between us.

He didn’t say a word. He just walked in, sized up the situation, and took a swing at me.