Then the sound of engines rose through the storm.
Leora froze and dragged him behind the trunk of a fallen pine. Down the slope, through sheets of rain, bright white headlights carved along the drive toward the main estate. Three matte black SUVs. Men spilled out with rifles and tactical lamps.
She watched them flood through the shattered doors.
Leo’s mouth moved close to her ear. “Samuel’s cleanup crew.”
A cold hand closed around Leora’s throat from the inside.
They would find the blood in the foyer. They would track it into the mud. They would follow it here.
“Move,” she whispered, half to him, half to herself.
The next twenty minutes tore the old shape of her life in half.
She lost feeling in both hands. Her foot bled over stone and root. Twice Leo’s knees buckled and she dragged him back up by the lapels of his ruined jacket, screaming at him to stay awake. Once he nearly took them both down a slope of slick pine needles and caught himself on a tree with a grunt that sounded like an animal getting gutted.
At last the cabin appeared through the dark. Small. Sagging. Half eaten by ivy and neglect. A shadow with a roof.
Leora kicked the door until rotten wood split and they fell inside together.
The silence felt unreal after the storm.
Not true silence, exactly. The rain still battered the roof. Wind still worried the walls. But compared to the woods, the cabin felt like the inside of a held breath.
Leo hit the floorboards and did not move.
“Hey.” She slapped his face lightly. “No, no, no, no. Not now.”
No response.
She groped through the dark and found an old storm lantern and matches on a shelf. The first match snapped in her wet fingers. The second flared. Orange light bloomed, thin and trembling, then steadied.
The sight of him in that light turned her stomach.
His shirt was shredded. The shoulder wound had bled heavily but cleanly. The lower wound was worse, much worse, soaking his waistband and the floor beneath him. She had seen enough in hospital waiting rooms and overheard enough nurses’ conversations to know the difference between bad and fatal.
This was trying very hard to become fatal.
Leora stripped off her apron with stiff hands and tore it into strips. On the mantel she found an old hunting knife, rusted but sharp enough. She cut away the rest of his shirt. His abdomen jerked under her fingers. His skin was cold.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
Then she pressed.
Leo came off the floor with a roar, hands flying to her wrists, his face going wild with pain.
“Hold still,” she shouted back, bearing down with all her weight. “You are not dying because you’re dramatic.”
“It burns,” he ground out.
“I am freezing, terrified, and standing in a haunted shack with a bleeding crime prince. We are both having a bad night.”
For a moment he stared at her, breathing hard, his dark eyes unfocused and furious. Then something in her face must have convinced him. Or maybe he simply had no strength left to fight. His grip loosened.
“All right,” he said through clenched teeth. “All right.”
So Leora stayed like that, bent over him in lantern light, pressing a wad of torn cotton into a bullet wound while the storm clawed at the cabin walls.
Minutes dragged. Her shoulders burned. Her palms ached. Her arms began to tremble uncontrollably. She counted his breaths to keep herself from panicking. Forty-seven. Forty-eight. Forty-nine. The bleeding slowly eased from violent spurts to a thick, ugly seep.
When she finally lifted her hands, she almost cried from relief.
She bandaged him as tightly as she dared, wrapping torn cloth around his waist and knotting it with numb fingers. Then she bound the shoulder. Then she sat back against the wall and realized she was shaking so hard her teeth clicked.
Leo looked at her through half-lidded eyes.
“You’re freezing.”
“I had not noticed.”
He turned his head weakly toward the stone fireplace. “Loose stone. Behind the logs.”
It sounded absurd, like a dying man inventing treasure.
Still, she crawled over, shifted the charred logs, and found a loose flagstone. Beneath it sat a waterproof metal box.
Inside were wool blankets, a field trauma kit, two bottles of water, a flask of bourbon, and enough cash to cover her rent for a year.
Leora stared into it and laughed once, bitterly.
“Of course,” she said. “Of course rich criminals keep emergency whiskey in the woods.”
She wrapped him in a military blanket, then another around herself. She cleaned the wounds properly with the trauma kit, using gauze and antiseptic with hands that slowly remembered what she had once hoped to become. A nurse. Maybe even an ICU nurse. Someone who saved people in fluorescent hallways and got to go home without being shot at.
When she brought the bourbon to Leo’s mouth, he drank, coughed, then looked at her with exhausted amusement.
“You do not strike me as the type to steal from your employer.”
“I’m considering broadening my horizons.”
That flicker of humor vanished quickly.
In the softer quiet after the storm’s peak, he told her just enough to make the night heavier.
Samuel Reed had been Dominic Moretti’s right hand for twenty years. He had sold information to the Rossi Syndicate in Chicago, a rival family looking to seize shipping routes along the Eastern Seaboard. Taking Leo out would fracture the Morettis from the inside. Create panic. Invite vultures.
“Why tell me any of this?” Leora asked.
“Because you saved my life.”
“That is not reassuring.”
He turned his face toward her. In the lantern glow he no longer looked invincible. He looked young. Not soft, never soft, but young enough for pain to strip away the costume of power.
“In my world,” he said quietly, “blood repays blood.”
Leora hugged the blanket tighter. “That sounds like a threat.”
“It’s a promise.”
She looked away first.
Hours passed. She changed his bandages. He drifted in and out. Once, in a fevered haze, he called for his mother. Once he gripped her hand and asked what Albany smelled like in October. She told him wet leaves, bus exhaust, and cheap coffee. He said it sounded honest.
By dawn, the storm had exhausted itself into a gray drizzle.
Then the thump of helicopter blades shattered the morning.
Leora lurched to the window and wiped a clear patch in the grime. In the clearing below, a black Sikorsky settled to the ground like a predator. SUVs ringed the trees. Men in tactical gear spread out fast, rifles up, dogs straining at heavy leashes. cook
At their center walked Dominic Moretti.
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