Page 66 of Hilarina and the Ogre

“It’s not you I don’t trust.” And he did trust Hilary. From nearly the first moment they’d met, he’d felt he could put himself in the man’s hands, unable to describe just how at ease Hilary made him feel. “I think they want trouble. I’ll call the police, so stay away from them.”

It was something Archie was sure to loathe. The man was fidgety around cops. Well, Trenton couldn’t blame him. His own past didn’t bode well with the law.

“Don’t,” Hilary said. “That’ll only make a bigger mess, and who knows how long it’ll take the cops to show. They’re wrapping up now and will be gone soon, I promise.”

So Trenton let himself be pushed back into the kitchen, but not willingly. He’d finish the Bolognese, and if they weren’t out by then it was cops o’clock, no matter what Hilary said.

But he didn’t finish the Bolognese. He was still plating the lemon cake with the little drizzle of raspberry sauce when he heard the brash laughter that set his hackles rising. This time he traded the ladle for the meat tenderizer. Though only to scare them, he reminded himself. He wasn’t going to do anything except make them leave. But when he got to the dining area, he froze.

The most obnoxious one—the self-styled leader of the band of idiots—had his hand in Hilary’s apron. “I’m saying we want to see the dessert menu.”

It was all Trenton needed to hear. “There’s no dessert.” His own voice sounded strange, almost hollow, as if the room had shrunk down.

The leader turned his way, hand still in the apron. “Oh yeah? So why’d he hand one of those little menus to those old fucks over there?”

The man jerked his head toward the central table where the Densins were looking mighty nervous. Well, Orville was looking nervous. Debra looked ready to show the young rascals a piece of her mind. Trenton found himself shifting, settling into a stance he had no right to take. His memories of the dojo were vague and mixed up, like everything else from his youth was, but his body remembered better than his mind did.

“I should have been clearer,” he reiterated. “There’s no dessert for you. Take your hands off my friend.”

“You’ve angered the fatty,” said another. Probably the Vice-idiot or whatever they called their second in command. “See his chins jiggling?”

The placating smile Hilary had been wearing vanished. In that same instant, the man wrenched at the wrist holding him, forcing it to release. “You’d better leave.”

But a second arm came up around that waist. Some third idiot with an undisclosed place in the hierarchy. Maybe there wasn’t one. Just a loose conglomeration of underdeveloped losers united under the banner of assholery. “What happened to the smile? Is it Lardass? Should we send him away?”

“I get it,” said the leader. “He puts me off my appetite too.”

It was like Trenton’s eyes were glued to that arm. Why was it there? Why would some bastard with an elevated blood alcohol level and philistine taste have his stupid mitts on someone like Hilary?

“I said get your hands—” and his voice dipped, going deep as he stepped into the man’s blind spot and pushed the head of the meat tenderizer into the idiot’s back. “Off my friend.”

Almost he didn’t want them to listen. Almost he was hoping to have a reason. Though it was dawning on him that guys like this didn’t need one. Or rather, that guys like this had so many already you didn’t need to add another. But the guy paused. Something in Trenton’s voice, maybe, or on his face warned the guy’s last functioning brain cells not to make a big deal over some stupid dessert menu. The arm slackened. Not properly—not releasing him—but enough that Hilary could jerk himself free.

The leader looked him over, eyes flickering over the meat tenderizer. “You really do put a man off his meal. I think you’re in the wrong business.”

Trenton unclenched his teeth only enough to spit out the one word. “Leave.”

The leader kept their eyes locked together as he leisurely put on his coat, flipping up the collar as if that was still a thing, stupid wannabe gangster. But the others had gotten their coats on as well. As Hilary had warned, there was no talk of payment, and they’d ordered expensive shit too. Lots of meat. Shrimp. The beautiful portobellos that had come in that morning. Trenton knew he’d have to cover for them. If not for the cost of the meal, then at least the price of the ingredients. Archie wouldn’t insist, but he’d probably expect it. As if he paid him enough to be eating restaurant food. But they were leaving. At least they were leaving, and Hilary was out of their hands. That was the part that mattered.

Trenton relaxed too soon, his stance slackening. Maybe that was what the leader had been waiting for, because as the man turned toward the door, something shifted in his face, a nasty kind of look.

“Oh,” the man said, as if only just noticing the plates on the table, like they’d come to the restaurant for pleasantries and not to rob him of a meal. “We shouldn’t waste food.”

It happened quick—too quick—the positioning for it perfect. And then the remains of the Shrimp Alfredo were shoved with vicious force at Hilary’s face.

It might have blinded him, one of those stubby fingers skating the ring of an eye socket before shoving into Hilary’s mouth, and with it came a flash of something in Trenton’s mind. A flash of others. Of men. Or boys. A group of them as these had been. Trenton saw little else. Not even enough to recognize the overlap. It was just the feeling it brought, one of such clotted rage everything else was subsumed. He didn’t feel his body move. Didn’t see through his eyes. Didn’t even hear the sounds of breaking flesh. Even that one touch—the one that mattered—was drowned in it, hopeless to it, until that piercing—

“Trent!”

He came aware with a dizzying kind of jolt, blinking the world into focus. There was the leader, though he didn’t look like himself, purpling under his grip, veins bulging on the back of Trenton’s hands with all the force he was putting into it. And Hilary. Hilary around him, pulling at him and insisting, “Let go, Trent. Let go.”

It was surprise that did it. The feeling of that thick neck bulging against his palms. His hands opened, and then he was vomiting, the dizziness mixed with revulsion, vision tilting as he made the adjustment back to reality. But Hilary was there, and the hold on his arm wasn’t restraint, but support. “I’m here, Trent. Tell me what you need.”

There were two others he’d gotten during the disappeared time. One was moving for the door, crawling, a bloody hand pressed over his face. The other wasn’t conscious, face down on the floor, as he’d been when—

The pain came without warning. Absent, and then abruptly there, the flare of it like nothing he could compare it to. It was an explosive kind of heat too sharp even to cry out against, the breath stolen away from his lungs as he gripped his arm just below the elbow as if he might rip it free.

“What is it? Where?” Hilary’s voice was urgent, a command to be answered.