Page 5 of The Saint

He reached his hand out and I gripped it tight, letting him pull me until I was sitting up. Pain flashed before it dissipated, my body beginning to feel more normal, though it still hurt to breathe.

“What up, pussy?” Jermaine asked, prodding me with his foot. “Can’t make it with the big boys no more?”

“Shut up, Borges,” Tyrone’s deep voice grumbled from my side. “Man’s got more balls than you could ever hope to have in your life.”

The guys had a heyday with that, their murmuring continuing as I focused on standing up. My shirt slid forward and the quarter-sized pucker of shiny pink skin on my shoulder was exposed. It was no surprise to me that someone spoke up.

“The fuck happened to you, man?” It was Reggie who asked, but that single question was enough to pull everyone’s attention my way.

“Whoa, wicked tat, man!”

“It ain’t a tat, loser. It’s a bullet wound.”

“What happened?”

The last came from Gil, a scrawny little kid who hung out at the courts, hoping to be included.

Tugging my shirt aside, I let the kid get a look at my wound. “I got shot,” I told him, trying to keep a smile from creeping across my lips when he gaped widely.

He rolled his big brown eyes as if he wasn’t affected but returned them quickly to the scar on my chest. “I see that,” the kid said, shoulders rolled back and chest puffed out, like he was trying to be bigger and more knowing than he truly was. “I meant, what happened that you got shot?”

“You hear about the shootout at the shipping yard back in April?” Jamal, one of my closest friends here at the court, asked as he tossed the ball into the hoop.

“Yeah?” came a reply from more than just Gil.

When Jamal didn’t respond, all those gazes swung back to me. I shrugged, snagged the ball from Jamal’s grip and threw it up, banking it off the backboard and right into the hands of Tyrone. A grimace cut my face, less from the poor shot and more for the tight muscles in my chest. I rubbed at the spot, wishing their attention would fade.

Knowing it wouldn’t until they learned some of the truth.

Some, because I could never tell them what really happened.

“I was there,” I said, slapping the ball out of Tyrone’s hand and taking a shot. This one went in, but it wasn’t enough to restart the game. The guys stood, staring, behind the kid who started it all.

And the look in those dark eyes demanded answers I couldn’t give.

“I work at the docks,” I said with a shrug, chasing down the ball that had rolled to the side of the court.

“Thought you worked for your dad,” Reggie shouted as I made the basket from out of bounds.

“My dad’s in imports and exports, but I don’t work for him. I just work at the yard.”

Didn’t need to tell them there was more to it than that. That my father was a lieutenant in Paulo D’Angelo’s syndicate, and it was him, my uncle, whom I really worked for.

Whether I wanted to or not.

But that wasn’t a story these guys would ever learn. And neither was the truth about how I got shot. Not if my uncle had anything to say about it.

There was nothing tying me to him but blood. No stars tattooed on my skin, no paycheck coming in. I was supposed to be legit. Supposed to keep those questions that would inevitably be asked from coming down.

“So, you were saving those girls?” Dion asked, speaking of the women we’d found in the shipping container, dirty and drugged and ready to be shipped overseas.

And while I had been involved with saving those girls, that hadn’t been the reason for my presence there that night. And it also wasn’t the reason I was shot.

That came days later, when I’d gone to check in on my childhood friend, Natalia, and her boyfriend. I’d been blindsided. Shot by the very man we’d gone to the docks to try to find.

It was a miracle I hadn’t died.

Before I could respond, Tyrone jumped in, twisting the narrative. Helping, but not. “Heard it was a spat with your girlfriend,” he said with a laugh.