Page 4 of In the Shadows

I’m out of my seat before I can think better of it. A person at your front door is never a good thing. It’s usually a threat, and my heart pumps harder at the thought the boring holiday season might finally be over. It is the middle of January, surely those motherfuckers should be back at work by now. Kovu and Kaos went out on a job earlier, but taking care of broken contracts isn’t really my thing. I’m more of a negotiator, and De Marco was past that.

I make my way through the maze of corridors and down a set of stairs. It’s a good thing I decided to come into the office despite not having much to do. I couldn’t handle another day sitting staring at the walls, waiting for someone to threaten someone’s territory or for a shipment of drugs to go missing.

I push through the side door, and the cold winter air whips around me. I’ve always liked the cold, but New York winters even test me sometimes. I look around and spot the body a few feet away. At least it’s not snowing. Dealing with dead bodies in the snow is not how I feel like spending my day, no matter how bored I am.

Reaching into the back of my pants, I check that my gun is in place. I don’t think this is a trap, but you can never be too careful. A trap would of course mean anyone in the city knows where our home base is, which they thankfully do not, but my father would kill me if he thought I was making rash decisions.

As I approach the body, a few things flicker through my mind. They’re small. Way smaller than any man I would expect to find on our doorstep. They’re not moving, but there is the faintest rise and fall of their chest, which means they’re alive. And when I’m almost on top of the body, I realize it’s not a man at all. It’s a woman, and she’s bloody and bruised. Her sweats are torn, her face is swollen, and I’m pretty sure her arm is broken from the angle it’s in.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

I quickly look around the alley to make sure no one’s waiting for me to let my guard down before squatting down beside the woman’s head. Fuck, she’s young. But just how young is she? That’s a thought for later. Right now, I need to get her seen by a doctor.

My father has always accused me of bringing home strays, hell, that’s how Kovu joined our little pack of misfits turned underworld royalty, but looking down at this woman, her dark hair matted to her bloody cheeks, her body broken and alone, it tugs at the abyss my heart once inhabited, and the thought of leaving her here isn’t one I can even begin to consider.

I check her pulse despite the fact she’s breathing. It’s weak and barely there beneath my fingers. It occurs to me that I should call for help to move her inside, but I’m not entirely sure she has that long, so I scoop her up and quickly walk her to the side door I came out of.

She’s tiny in my arms, but there’s something about holding her, something about her in general, that settles something deep inside me that’s always pacing. Always looking for our next opponent. Always anticipating the moves of our enemies. And perhaps that’s the first sign I should take her right back where I found her and leave her for dead.

But I’m not going to do that. Not when she feels so fucking right where she is.

My feet move of their own accord, like I’m moving on autopilot, as my eyes flick across her beaten features. There’s something familiar about her, but I can’t quite put my finger on how I know her, or even if I do at all.

Rogers, our doctor on duty, is sitting behind his desk when I stroll into our medical suite. The line of work we’re in means we often need urgent medical attention, and we have three doctors on our payroll who alternate, although Rogers is as close to a full-time employee as we have.

“Bishop,” he greets me, his gray brows pulling together when he sees the bundle in my arms. “What do we have here?”

“I found her out behind the garage,” I tell him as I place her down on the table in the middle of the room. “It looks like she’s been beaten to a fucking pulp.”

He stands and approaches us, his eyes moving over her mottled flesh. “Fuck,” he breathes. “You assholes bring me some pretty fucked-up things, but this might be up there.”

“We didn’t fucking do this to her,” I snap. Out of our doctors, Rogers is the most likely to speak out of turn and get away with it. But I’m barely holding myself together. The sight of this woman hurt is making it difficult to grasp on to the carefully guarded exterior I show the world and not allow the beast so alike to Kovu and Kaos’s to wreak havoc like it so craves.

He raises his hazel gaze to me and assesses me for a moment. We will always take credit for the shit we do, so he’s barking up the wrong fucking tree if he thinks we’re the ones that did this. We also have an absolute policy. One that would see our deaths if we broke it. We don’t hurt women or children. It’s against our code, if that’s what you want to call it.

“Very well.” His eyes return to the woman in front of us, and he looks her over for a few moments before turning his back on me and reaching for a pair of gloves. “She’s in a bad way.”

“No fucking shit,” I snap. My tolerance levels are dropping with each passing second he’s not making sure she’s going to be okay. Why the fuck isn’t he doing anything?

“Strip her out of the sweats while I get a few things ready.” He ignores my attitude and crosses the room to a large cabinet where he keeps the bandages and casts. “Her arm is broken, I’ll do an x-ray, but if she needs surgery to set it, I can’t do that here, and you know it.”

What he’s not saying is that it’s not part of his contract. Yes, people like us still do shit by the book, especially when it comes to this kind of thing. Rogers knows that if he fucks it up without a contract, we’d kill him. But if he fucks something up that’s outside what he’s agreed to do by law, there isn’t shit we can do, no matter how much we might want to. The only difference between a normal contract and the ones we’ve entered into with our doctors is that rather than going to court for settlement if one party breaks it, there’s a failsafe in place. He breaks it, he dies. We break it, all the shit he knows about us, all the shit he’s seen, is all released to the public the moment his heart stops beating. Although that wouldn’t hurt us as it would most people, Crew would still fucking kill me if I were the reason all our dirty little secrets were released to the world.

I look down at the task at hand and hesitate. I’ve never stripped an unconscious woman before, or at least not one I didn’t know intimately or have some kind of agreement with. But this is a stranger. I don’t even know her name.

Before I can think too much about it, I tug her black sweats down her shapely legs and feel my cock stir behind my zipper. You’d think it’s been years since I’ve seen a naked woman the way my dick is acting, but it’s only been a couple of months. I play at the Scarlet Lounge when I start to grow restless, but I have no desire for anything permanent. None of us do. Not after her.

I don’t allow myself to spiral on that thought and get back to the job at hand. I carefully tug the muddy tennis shoes that were once white from her feet and discard them across the room, closely followed by her pants. There are a few things that strike me as odd as I’m pulling her arms from her sweater, making sure to be especially careful with the arm we think may be broken. Her clothes, every stitch she’s wearing, is designer, which means whoever this girl is, she comes from money. Just another reason my father is going to slit my fucking throat for bringing her here.

The more bruised skin I uncover, the more anger pulses through my veins. How could someone hurt her like this? What could she possibly have done to deserve this? Even bloody and covered in purple blotches, she’s still arguably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.

By the time Rogers makes his way back to us, I have her down to just her lacy panties and matching bra. I fucking hate the way his eyes move over her curves, and the urge to cover her almost overwhelms me. She’s small, both in height and size, but she’s not stick thin. Her full tits spill out over the top of her bra, and I catch the smallest glimpse of a rosy pink nipple peeking out from above the lace.

Rogers doesn’t say another word as he picks up the arm we’re certain is broken. Even if I wasn’t the one who found her and saw how it was positioned, it’s since blown up like a balloon. He pulls the portable x-ray machine toward us and looks up at me. “Any chance she’s pregnant?” he deadpans.

“How the fuck would I know?” I growl. I’m usually the calm, levelheaded one. I’m the one they send when a situation calls for diplomacy, but right now I’m feeling anything but diplomatic. One more dumb ass question out of this asshole’s mouth, and I’m going to tear his throat out, to hell with the consequences.

“What do we have here?” A deep voice by the door drags my attention away from the broken woman in front of me. Kovu leans against the doorframe, covered in blood, and his wild blue eyes are focused on the table in front of me.

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