“He said he wanted this to feel personal.”
That tracks. “Go on.”
“The timeline moved up after the meeting. Marco said I needed to do Lena. Caruso and Bastianich were for you—wait. Where the hell are they? They came in with me?—”
I kick Caruso’s body on the floor. “That’s the squealer. Bastianich is over there.” I point to the man’s slumped form next to my door where he can see. “They stopped breathing a little while ago.”
“Fucking hell, doc.”
“What was supposed to happen with Opal?”
He swallows. His face gets paler by the second. “You remember the O’Learys?”
Something in me sinks. “He was gonna put her up for adoption? New name, all that? She’s five. She knows what happened?—”
“She wasn’t supposed to. No one was. That’s why Marco’s tech guy cut the power and your backup.”
“And if she did know? What was the plan then?”
Guilt creeps over his face.
I don’t know why I asked the question. I already knew the answer. She would have been taken out alongside us.
“And you were going to follow Marco’s instructions, even after pocketing my cash and running your own operation against him.”
Ed’s jaw shifts. He says nothing. He doesn’t need to.
I pull the suture kit toward me and begin laying out instruments in order—needle, thread, forceps, irrigation syringe—with the methodical calm of a man conducting a familiar procedure. “I can close the wound. You go back into the living room, and you tell a story I’m going to give you, something a five-year-old will believe, something that ends the evening cleanly and closes it.”
“What’s that gonna cost me?”
“You’re dying, Ed. What will you pay me to avoid that?”
He gulps. “Go on.”
“Living will cost you loyalty.” I thread the needle. “Alternatively, you decline, in which case I let you bleed out, and I add you to the two men currently on my office floor. Marco wakes up tomorrow to discover that he lost three people and that he pissed me off.”
Ed says nothing.
“You will be useful to me, regardless of your choice. You can be another corpse I made, and anger Marco that way. Or you can become loyal to me, and anger him that way. Make your choice.
Ed looks at his partners for a long moment. A chill works through him. Fear or blood loss, I don’t care. He looks at me. “I’m your guy, doc.”
I get to work.
My hands move independent of where my mind is, which is in the hallway. My beatdown was rough, not gonna lie. But the moment I heard Opal screaming for me, I cut through those men like a warm knife in butter.
And then I saw it. Lena on the floor with a man on top of her and her hands still moving, still fighting, even with that weight bearing down on her. A red, teary-faced Opal in the doorway with her voice going hoarse. Books everywhere. Something ceramic that had shattered against the wall or the attacker’s head.
And then a hand grabbed my ankle, and yanked me back into my office.
Bastianich, that tough fucker. I’d thought he was dead, but there was no time to take a pulse and check. Not after I heard Opal.
He pulled me down on top of him and stabbed. Luckily, he was weakened by blood loss, so the stab wasn’t deep after he used all that energy to crawl to the door and pull me back in.
Knife in my side, I slammed his head on my hardwood floor. Had to get the knife out, though. Made it hard to breathe and get a good slam.
Mostly dead, he dragged himself from me while I jerked the knife out. He had just sat up against the wall when I slit his throat with it.
