I slid down the far side of the building, boots silent on wet steel. I cut through a laundry yard that smelled like bleach and diesel, then slipped into a maintenance tunnel where the city keeps its bones. The tunnel spat me out a block from the bike. I listened. Sirens to the west. Radio chatter ghosting from open windows. A dog barked once and then thought better of it.
I rolled the bike from shadow without starting it, coasting down the incline until the street noise could swallow the ignition. The engine turned over like a held breath. I kept my head down, visor low, body small. The unmarked at the corner held position. I turned away from it as if I belonged to the night more than to myself.
Streets blurred into watercolor. My shoulder burned. My hands shook. Adrenaline guttered and left the cold.
I ditched the bike in the hidden garage and stumbled toward the carriage house bathroom. My reflection in the cracked mirror looked like a stranger. Mud and blood streaked across my face. Pupils blown wide. Hair plastered to my skull.
I stripped off the gear with shaking hands, hissing when fabricpulled at the graze on my shoulder. Blood welled up fresh, running down my arm in thin rivulets. Not deep enough to need stitches. Just enough to scar.
I cleaned up quickly, mechanically. Cold water and harsh soap. Watching pink swirl down the drain and pretend it mattered.
I pulled on clean clothes I kept stashed here. Jeans. Dark sweater. Nothing that screamed I'd just come from slaughtering twelve men in a cathedral.
The walk back through the tunnels felt longer. Each step echoed like guilt. Like confession. Like all the prayers I'd stopped saying the night my mother died.
I emerged into my quarters just as dawn started to pale the sky. The palace was still quiet. Still sleeping. Nobody had noticed I'd gone.
Nobody ever noticed.
I locked the door behind me and collapsed on the floor beside my bed, back pressed to the wall, staring at nothing. My shoulder throbbed in time with my heartbeat. My hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Apollo padded over, pressing his warm body against my side. I buried my fingers in his fur and tried to remember how to breathe.
“Still breathing,” I whispered to the empty air. To the ghosts. To whatever was listening. “Still damned.”
The first light of morning touched the cut on my shoulder through my sweater. Blood had seeped through the fabric, dark and damning.
A crimson halo.
I closed my eyes and saw faces. The men I'd killed tonight. The ones from the warehouse. All the bodies I'd left in my wake over the years, convinced I was making the city safer.
Convinced I was different from the men who'd killed my mother.
But sitting there in the dawn light, blood on my clothes and exhaustion in my bones, I couldn't remember the difference anymore.
9
DOCTOR'S HANDS
SEBASTIAN
Pain woke me.
Not the sharp kind. The deep, grinding ache that meant I'd fucked myself up properly. My ribs felt like broken glass grinding together with every breath. My shoulder throbbed in time with my heartbeat. Something wet and sticky had dried on my temple.
I was on the floor beside my bed. Again.
Hadn't even made it onto the mattress before exhaustion dropped me like a stone. The bow lay across the duvet where I'd dropped it, still strung, still ready. Like a weapon left at an altar.
Rain tapped against the balcony glass. Dawn light filtered through in pale gray streams that made everything look washed out. Ghostly.
I tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. My ribs screamed. Something pulled in my shoulder, wet and wrong. I pressed my hand to it and it came away sticky with blood.
Still bleeding. Hours later. Still bleeding.
The room smelled like iron and rain and the ghost of gunpowder that probably only existed in my head. My clothes were stiff with dried blood. Mud crusted my boots. Glass from the cathedral window glittered in the carpet.
I forced myself upright, using the bed frame for leverage. Everymovement felt like someone was driving knives between my ribs. My calf burned where the bullet had grazed muscle. My throat was bruised from where that bastard had tried to choke me out.
