Page 1 of Unforgivable Ties

Stephanie

Iknew I shouldn’t take this shortcut, but I always did. My apartment building was randomly nestled in a warehouse district that was by the docks. There were no other residential buildings around to speak of. And, I didn’t have a car, so getting to the nearest trolley or subway on foot took forever.

When I needed to take the green line, I would cut through the docks. They were mostly abandoned, and I hadn’t run into anyone else in all the times I had taken it. Was it sketchy? Yes. Did it save a lot of time? Also yes.

The docks were piled high with shipping containers, creating an eerie labyrinth of rusting iron and peeling paint. The salty sea air heavily hung around, tangling with the smells of oil and metal. Lonely calls of distant seagulls echoed in the distance, only adding to the bleak isolation of the place.

Tonight, as the last act of a dying sun painted the sky with streaks of orange and crimson, I once again wove between the towering stacks of containers. Out of nowhere, the solitude I had grown accustomed to was shattered by the sound of gunshots.

I froze, my heart pounding like a drum in my chest. The gunshots were too close for comfort, echoing within the confines of the metal maze around me. I needed to hide. Pressing myself up against a shipping container, I looked around for options.

There was a building that was presumably used to store equipment a couple hundred feet away from me. Like the rest of the docks, it was old and worn down.

I darted across the open space, trying to keep as low as possible while more gunshots echoed in the air. How far away were they from me? And why hadn’t they stopped? For a normal crime in NYC, the assailant would usually shoot their target and leave. But this sounded like a shootout.

I was completely out of breath by the time I reached the back door of the storage building. My hand flew to the doorknob, twisting it in desperate hope. It was unlocked. I quickly slipped into the dark room, letting out a breath I didn’t even know I had been holding.

Inside, the odor of old oil and rubber filled my nostrils, but it seemed safe—I would just hide here until the cops arrived. Nestling myself behind a shelf filled with buckets and rusty tools, I tried to steady my breathing. I fumbled in my bag and desperately tried to fish out my phone to dial 911. Finally, I found it amongst the mess and swiped open the lock screen.

There was no service.

“What?!” I whispered to myself.

As my heart pounded in my chest, I tried to reason with myself that it really wasn’t that bad. I was hidden here, and wasn’t part of whatever what was going on outside. Just as I was feeling a semblance of relief, a noise echoed through the hushed room: the creaking of the front door. I choked back a gasp, my eyes wide, frozen in fear.

A man let out a pained groan as he stumbled into the building, the door slamming behind him. He didn’t make it but a few stepsbefore I heard him stumble to the floor with a bone-jarring thud. His labored breathing filled the room, echoing off the steel walls. I remained still, my heart battering against my rib cage like a wild bird desperate to escape its cage.

I could hear the faint sound of his clothes shifting, followed by a loud curse. The man had probably just discovered we had no cell service. Curiosity got the better of me. I was well hidden behind a mop bucket, but I peeked my head up to catch a glance of him.

The flickering fluorescent lights illuminated him sparingly, but I could tell one thing: this man was a giant. He was easily over six and a half feet tall, with a body built solely of muscle. A bullet had pierced the steel of his muscle, and blood was blooming from his ribcage down his t-shirt, leaking onto the gun holstered on his hip.

I couldn’t help but gasp at the sight. He turned his head in my direction, his dark eyes reflecting in the light. His face was covered in grime and sweat, but there was a commanding quality that made it impossible to look away.

As I tried to curl back behind the mop bucket, my phone clattered to the floor.

“Who the fuck is there?” he asked.

Silently, I pleaded for him to change his mind and think I was an inanimate object that had simply fallen to the floor.

“If you don’t come out, I’ll shoot.”

I swallowed loudly, my throat dry and constricting in fear. His voice was as menacing as the gunshot wound he himself was nursing. With a shaky hand, I reached for the mop handle and used it to steady myself as I rose to my feet. I rolled the mop bucket away and slowly revealed myself from behind the shadows.

“Who are you working with?” he narrowed his eyes on me and put his finger on the trigger. “The Bratva?”

“I-I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong person. I don’t know what a Bratva is,” I said, my words a hurried, jumbled mess. “Please don’t shoot me.” As I said the words, I cringed away from him, bracing for a blast that didn’t come.

His face remained impassive, his eyes intensely focused on me. He held the gun steady, but didn’t pull the trigger. The silence stretched out between us, broken only by his haggard breaths and the hum of the overhead light.

“You’re a civilian,” he stated, more to himself than me. He seemed to relax, lowering his gun slightly, but his eyes remained harsh and watchful. “What’re you doing here?”

“I use this route as a shortcut,” I launched into an unnecessarily long explanation of how I ended up here.

“Tch,” he responded, narrowing his eyes at me again. “Don’t do that again. It’s dangerous.”

Now that my heart had mostly stopped racing from fear, I couldn’t help but notice how attractive this man was. He had long, black hair that was pulled back into a ponytail. With his hair pulled back, it was impossible to miss the intricate tattoos that adorned every inch of his body.

Normally, I wouldn’t look twice at a man like him. But something about him was...magnetic.

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