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I PEELED MYSELF OFF the bed and staggered to the bathroom. Now that I had seen the wound, I could feel the pain radiating all the way through the left side of my body, the shock of it coursing through my veins.
I made it to the mirror, where I pulled up my shirt and saw the edge of the bullet still sticking out of the hole in my side – it was glinting a dull gray, smeared with blood, and I knew I needed to get it out.
No time to get to a doctor. I had to act fast. I couldn’t leave this building; I would have been in even more danger if I had tried to get out. This was on me. And I needed to make sure I didn’t make this worse than it already was.
I dragged myself to the drinks’ cart, reaching around until I found the whisky I was looking for – it was expensive shit, probably not best used for cleaning a wound, but I couldn’t think of anything else right now. I tossed back a few mouthfuls myself, and then ripped open my shirt and poured a splash over the hole in my side.
“Fuck!” I cried out, as the stinging pain coursed through me. There was nobody else in the apartment to hear me complaining, but that didn’t mean I was going to keep quiet. I wracked my brains for something that I could use to get it out – and my mind flashed back to Harry, one of my father’s old bodyguards, boasting to me about the time he had pulled a bullet from his side in the middle of the forest.
“I sterilized some tweezers with a lighter,” he had told me, after a few drinks. “Bit down on my shirt, and pulled the damn thing out.”
Okay. Okay, I could manage that, right? I managed to make it back to my bathroom, where I found a lighter and a set of tweezers – not exactly high-quality medical equipment, but they would have to do for now.
I sat down on the edge of the bath, pulling off my shirt and wrapping it into a loop around my fist so I had something to bite on. Taking the tweezers, I blasted them over the lighter until they were starting to go black – that had to count, didn’t it? I just needed to make sure that I wasn’t jamming anything dirty in there, the last thing I needed was an infection on top of everything else that was going on. Seriously, the shit that this work called for...
My father would have been pissed to see me like this. He had wanted me to go legit, and here I was, digging a bullet out of my side in the bathroom. I didn’t even remember getting hit. I would bet that this was a ricochet given that it hadn’t gotten too deep into me. But damn, it still hurt like a fucking bitch, and I knew I needed to get this thing out of me before it did more damage than it already had.
I took a few deep breaths, and bit down into the shirt hard. I had no idea how long this was going to take or how hard it was going to be, but I needed to act fast. I reached down with the tweezers, and tried to grab hold of the edge of the bullet where it was sticking out of my side.
I groaned loudly into the shirt – fuck, the pain was almost too much for me to take, but I couldn’t stop now. I dug around until I got a hold on the fucking thing. The blood was making it near-impossible to get a handle on pulling it out. I took a few deep breaths once I was sure that I had a good grip, and then, I yanked.
The howl I let out must have been audible even across the street, but I couldn’t stop now. The pain was screaming through my system, almost more than I could take, and I panted as I tried to force myself to keep going. Every fiber of my being was telling me to stop, that this was too much for me to handle, that this was more than I could take, but I forced myself onwards. I needed to get this bullet out of me. I couldn’t rely on anyone else to do it for me.
The tweezers slipped off, and I grunted, trying to find my grip again. I needed to get this over with. The blood was spurting from the wound where I had shifted the bullet, and I could already feel myself getting lightheaded. Whether it was with the blood loss or the shock, I didn’t know, but frankly, I wasn’t willing to wait to find out. I grasped the shiny bullet once more and yanked hard.
This time, it came out in one piece, sending a screaming jolt of pain up my side and a spurt of blood all over the bath. I yelled into the shirt again, but it was out, at least.
I managed to drag myself to my feet and make it back to the drinks’ cart, where I took another few gulps of whisky and then poured it on the wound once more. Okay, that was done, at least – I had no idea if I had done anything close to a good job, but at least this was over.
I crashed down on to the couch, and the pain blinded me. I couldn’t focus on anything else but the agony that was tearing at my body, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t even stand. I could feel the warm blood trickling down my side, and I knew that I needed to do something to stop it, but my brain was far too fuzzy to even think about something like that. I just had to keep conscious, and then I could get help once the danger had passed...
And that was the last thing that crossed my mind before the darkness swirled up to take me, and I dipped out of existence for a while.
When I came to, it was to the feeling of hands gripping my arms, and the rough shaking that Mauro was giving me to wake up.
“Andreas! Andreas, come on!”
My eyes fluttered open, and I managed to focus on the man in front of me. I frowned at him, trying to work out what he was doing shaking me like I was late for school.
“Mauro, what the fuck are you—”
“Oh, thank goodness,” he sighed, and he slumped down on to the couch beside me. “I thought – I thought you were....”
He trailed off, put his head in his hands, and I instantly felt bad for putting him through this. I lifted my head, saw the streaks of blood over my body and the couch, dripping from the bathroom all the way to where I was sitting now, and winced. I couldn’t exactly blame him for thinking something bad had happened.
“I’m okay,” I told him, grimacing as I pulled myself upright.
“What happened?”
“I got caught by a stray bullet,” I explained. “I wanted to get it out.”
“And why did you do it yourself?” Mauro demanded, shaking his head. “Do you know how dangerous that is? How much trouble you could have gotten yourself into?”
“I didn’t want to leave this place,” I muttered, flinching as I looked him in the eye. “I wasn’t sure if I was still in danger—”
“You could have put yourself in far more danger doing something as stupid as that,” he muttered, and he looked down at the wound that I had left behind – it seemed to have clotted now, stopped bleeding, much to my relief, and I was feeling a whole lot less woozy than I had before. Maybe that was just the alcohol starting to wear off, or maybe I was beginning to come back down to Earth after the shock of everything that had happened.
The pain was still there, but it seemed to have dulled to a throbbing ache rather than the sharp, screaming agony that had been there before. Somehow, even though I had never done anything like that before in my life, it seemed like I had gotten away without causing myself too much trouble. I didn’t know how I had pulled that off, but I would sure as fuck take it.
“You should have waited for the doctor.”
“I don’t know if I can trust him,” I muttered. Mauro frowned at me.
“What are you talking about?”
“Look at what he let happen with Nadia’s father,” I pointed out. “How can we trust him when he just let him get away like that?”
Mauro’s face darkened. I could tell at once there was something he didn’t want to tell me – something he wished he could avoid putting into words, but he knew he had no choice but to admit to. I eyed him for a long moment, trying to work out what it might be, but I already had a sneaking suspicion that I knew.
“What is it?” I demanded. If there was one thing I was fucking sick off in all of this, it was feeling as though I didn’t know what the hell was going on in my life. I was meant to be the one in charge here, so why did it feel like everything was constantly spinning out of my control?
“We need to get you to the doctor, make sure that you’re not infected or anything—”
“That can wait,” I told him firmly. He was meant to be the one person who I could trust in all of this, but the way that he was acting, it was telling me that I should have been more careful than I had been – that I should have played it closer to my chest. Mauro was the person I turned to in the midst of the worst times in my life, but what if he was holding something back from me? What if he was lying to me about something? And what if I couldn’t get the damn truth out of him?
“You need to tell me what you’re hiding,” I ordered him. I expected him to dismiss me at once as paranoid, tell me that I had no idea what I was talking about right now and that I needed to drop this before it went any further. But instead, slowly, he lifted his gaze to meet mine, and I knew I was right. I knew there was something he had been keeping from me.
“I don’t know if you’re ready to hear it.”
“Mauro,” I replied, keeping my voice firm. I couldn’t handle it any longer, being left out of the loop. I needed to know what was going on inside his head right now. I needed to know what he was keeping from me. I needed to know why he had been hiding so much, and I needed to know it now.
Mauro lowered his gaze for a moment, clearly gathering himself. And then, slowly, he looked back up at me, and I could finally see the scales had dropped from his eyes.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Andreas,” he confessed. I propped myself up on the couch, and listened to exactly what it was he had to tell me.
