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Isaiah nods then whispers, “Pain meds?”
“No.” I’m already not thinking clearly, and I don’t need to be completely incapacitated with him. “Has it been days? Since I was shot?”
“Hours,” he answers. No wonder I feel like shit.
Isaiah leans his back in the door frame to my room and crosses his arms over his chest. The glare he gives down the hall is scary enough that the hair on my arms stands on end. A few seconds later Linus walks in, attempting to stare Isaiah down the entire time.
Isaiah doesn’t cower, neither does Linus. Two warriors on opposing ends of a battlefield. When Linus is far enough into the room, he turns his back to Isaiah and Isaiah steps out. If I know him, he’s right by the door.
Linus has dirty-blond hair, the coldest blue eyes on the face of the planet, and he moves like a predator. My father took him under his wing when Linus turned eighteen. Within a year, Linus was a prince to a king.
“If you carried a gun last night would have turned out different,” he says like we’re discussing a bad grade on an English paper.
“If I carried a gun, I’d be the killer.”
Linus turns the IV machine as if he’s interested in my heartbeat and recent blood pressure numbers. “Better the killer than dead.”
“I’m alive.”
“You’re soft,” he snaps.
Against every protesting muscle, I straighten in bed. “People fear me.”
Linus assesses me out of the corner of his eye. “Normal people fear you. Most on the streets fear you because of your father’s ghost or because of Ricky’s protection. People should shiver at your name because you’re death on wheels.”
I roll my eyes. “I stabbed whoever shot me. I should have gone lower. Cut off his dick.”
That causes his always black rain cloud of an expression to lighten to a drizzle. “Should’ve. He probably wouldn’t have gotten a shot off then. In the end, good move with the blade. Hitting a running target is hard to do. That probably saved your life. Know what would save your life next time?”
“Aliens?” I ask.
His frozen expression mocks me, a reminder that he never finds me amusing. “A gun.”
“I make the money.” I dismiss his gun with a princess wave of my hand. “You enforce the rules. There’s a reason for the system. My clients would wet their pants at the sight of you.”
“I hear they wet their pants at the sight of you, too.”
I’m too tired to decide if he means that as dirty or not. “It takes more than one chess piece for checkmate.”
Linus eases into a chair near the wall and I spot that ghost lift of his lips that I sometimes mistake as a smile. “Rule number eight.”
My body trembles from the exhaustion of being upright and I collapse back to the bed. Rule number eight.
“Everyone else on our side make it out okay?”
“Yeah. Tommy took a hit, but he’s good.”
Tommy, the guy watching my back in the bar. He’s Linus’s equivalent to a best friend, or would be if Linus did friends. He doesn’t and often refers to Tommy as his trusted protégé. Best friend, not a friend, protégé—doesn’t matter. I grant Linus a few seconds to dwell on the fact that Tommy got hurt.
“We’ve got problems,” Linus announces.
My eyelids grow heavy, but the pain in my upper left shoulder helps me stay awake. “Eric has problems. That was pretty close to point blank and one of his people didn’t make the kill.”
“They were rushed and you sliced him better than you think. I saw the blood on your knife. Which I have, along with your phone.” Linus extracts his bouncy ball from his pocket. We’re both trained by my father. “Our side was moving in fast and we have better kill shots. But we might be the one that has the problem.”
That grabs my attention. “How’s that?”
Linus tosses the ball off the wall, it hits the floor, and he leans to the left to catch it. “Did you get a look at who shot you?”
