AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Now that I am out of immediate danger, my body is starting to ache. Bruises are forming across my arms and legs and deep muscle aches are starting to make themselves known. I can already tell that it will be excruciating by the morning.
“I guess you are dying to tell me you were right,” I say. “That it was pointless to fight against the Cartel. That I should have just gone along with their rules and done my best to get out of the inn.”
Kari doesn’t answer me for so long that I think she must not have heard me. She snips the black thread coming out of Luka’s leg and then runs an IV.
I don’t want to think about the many different ways this operation could be unsanitary. I don’t want to consider the possibility that Luka could survive a gunfight only to die of an infection. I have to trust that Kari knows what she is doing.
She rolls over a metal stand with little arms and hangs a blood bag from it. I look away as she begins the transfusion. When she is finished, she turns to her table and begins organizing her supplies, shifting things around. Finally, she crosses the room and stands in front of me.
I look up and see that she is holding something out to me. A scalpel.
“What is—”
Kari presses the blade into my hand and folds my fingers around it. “End them, Eve.”
It takes me a minute to realize who she’s talking about.
The Cartel. She wants me to take them down.
I shake my head. “I don’t understand. You told me you’ve been here for years, that it would be better to just go along with them. What about our sorry state has made you change your mind?”
“Love,” Kari says, rolling her eyes. “It sounds corny, but I have never seen two people more willing to fight for each other than the two of you. Edgar told me the truth about who you are to one another before I came in here. If you’d told me you were husband and wife from the start, I might have started supporting you sooner.”
“I wish I’d known that,” I say.
She shrugs. “After everything I’ve been through, I’ve learned to keep my expectations low, but after you survived a beating at the hands of Edgar and Luka was willing to take on every single Cartel guard to save you—well, there is a glimmer of hope.”
I take the scalpel and lay it on the bed next to my thigh.
A girl and her scalpel versus the world. What could go wrong?
20
Luka
There is pain, but mostly there is darkness.
Tiny blips of light make it through to me, but they are lost in another wave of nightmares and pain.
I see Eve and Milaya waving to me. I don’t know where I am or where they are. As I walk towards them, they don’t get any closer. I begin to run, but they remain out of reach. When I call out their names, begging Eve to walk towards me, my voice is swallowed up like I’m in the vacuum of space.
The only sound is my ragged breathing.
In and out.
In.
Out.
I sound like an old car chugging up a hill. Or a half-broken washing machine during a spin cycle.
There is a mechanical whirring noise that seems out of place, and no matter how hard I try to scream, nothing can drown out the sound.
Except the shots.
Gunfire cracks through the air, and I hit the ground, ducking from the shots.
I call out for Eve and Milaya, but again, they can’t hear me.
