Moth (Dragon Triad Duet Book 1), page 12
And they should because the fight is painfully one-sided. The winner reveals himself near instantaneously. Rafe moves like an animal in a graceful shift of muscle to deliver a series of blows that leave Gino hunched over and clutching at his mouth. It’s clearly over.
But Rafe pivots, delivering another blow so violent it brings Gino to his knees in a spray of blood.
“Who’s the bitch now?” he snarls, delivering a kick to his side. The force knocks the other man onto his back, leaving him open for another. And another, which lands with a sickening crunch. “Who’s the fucking bitch now?”
“Fuck,” Gino groans, his eyes rolling. He tries to crawl out of range, but Rafe pins him down, crashing a fist into his lower jaw. Over and over until blood speckles the pavement.
I barely recognize the attacking figure, his hair hanging wild, his eyes gleaming, his teeth bared. He’s grunting with every blow, hunched over Gino’s limp body like a predator. A monster…
“You’re going to kill him, you fucking asshole!” One of Gino’s lackeys finally starts forward, but his face suddenly flashes a peculiar blue. Then red. The wail of sirens fills the air, adding fuel to the already hectic scene.
“Shit.” Rafe stiffens, looking up, and Gino finally moves to shove him off.
“You crazy motherfucker,” he grunts, using the curb to stand.
Rafe staggers to his feet as well, clutching at his upper thigh, too distracted by the new arrivals to keep fighting.
Those who aren’t in the process of running start to bolt as two police cruisers peel around the corner, blocking the nearest intersection. When I look back, the three men have seemingly vanished, leaving Rafe behind. But he’s already standing before me, tilting my face for his inspection. I shiver at the heat imparted by his touch as his eyes bore into mine.
“Are you alright—”
“Hannah!”
I turn to witness Mara pushing through a throng of bystanders, hurrying toward me. By the time she breaks free, Rafe has already let me go.
“Are you okay?” she asks, her bottom lip trembling. “I’m so sorry—”
“Get out of here,” Rafe commands, his gaze fixed on the police officers leaping from their vehicles to scan the crowd. “Shit.”
My heart sinks in grim agreement. One of the officers draws my notice more than the others, tall and dark-haired. Liam.
“Tony!” Rafe flags down a figure racing from the club. “Take her home,” he gently pushes Mara toward him.
“Wait!” She reaches for me. “Hannah—”
“Go,” Rafe snaps. Then he grabs my hand, tugging me down the sidewalk and through an alley that cuts between the club and the adjacent building.
“What are you doing!” I pull at his grip only for him to tighten it, dragging me closer to him.
“Do you really want your boyfriend to see you here?” he hisses without turning around. “Dressed like that?”
My gaze falls to my borrowed dress, its neckline plunging unattended, and I don’t say anything. Together, we move so quickly the streets become a dizzying maze, and his grip is the only thing guiding me forward. We eventually reach a part of the city bustling with nightlife where the foot traffic becomes too thick to run. Forced to slow, he pulls me beside him, throwing his arm around my shoulders.
My initial impulse is to resist, but then I realize how heavily he’s leaning against me. I look up to find him gritting his teeth, his forehead glistening in the glow of a passing streetlamp.
“Rafe…” My nostrils flare, catching a distinct, coppery scent that makes my steps falter. Blood. “You’re hurt.”
“Not here,” he says near my ear. “I’d rather not get arrested, bunny.” He inclines his head in the general direction of his shop, but I doubt he can even make it that far.
With every step, he seems to slow, and I find myself having to support more of him. As we round a corner, a familiar street sign draws my notice, and I realize that one other destination is within just a few blocks. My heart pounds as I wrestle with indecision. Taking him home would be a bridge too far, with or without Branden’s paranoia to contend with.
I shake off the idea, letting him pull me along, but as we descend a curb to cross the road, he groans. “Fuck…”
And something in me breaks. I hook my arm around him, pivoting on my heel. “This way.”
It’s his turn to resist. “You wouldn’t be leading me toward your boyfriend, would you, bunny?”
I brush off the suspicion. “Trust me.”
My initial impulse was right, and not even ten minutes later, we reach my apartment building.
Rafe eyes the front of it warily, not that he’s in any shape to argue. He sags against me with every step until my knees are buckling beneath his weight, and I have to pry open the heavy front door one-handed. The moment we cross the threshold, my stomach drops through the soles of my borrowed heels. I can’t shake the overwhelming sense that I’ve made a mistake.
Chapter Nine
He doesn’t belong here. Too tall in this narrow space, he’s too imposing, even while bleeding. Thankfully, the hall is nearly deserted, though the sounds of the other tenants drift through the walls like some surreal reminder of what normalcy should be. I can smell food being cooked in the next unit over as we ascend to the third floor. The faint notes of a radio playing echo from up above as does laughter and murmured conversations.
Beneath those deceptively normal sounds, I also hear drops of moisture striking the floor. Ragged, unsteady breathing. The squeak of rubber grating against metal as the figure behind me struggles to keep his balance on the next step of the staircase. I snatch at his clothing, but he shrugs me off.
“Keep going,” he grunts.
There isn’t time to think. I simply inhale as I power myself up the final flight of stairs to my floor and then hurry down the hall to my apartment. He stays upright until we reach my door. Then he grunts, slumping against my back while I fit my key in the lock.
Our combined weight sends the door flying open, and we both stagger in. Cold air tickles the back of my neck as he brushes past me for my gray armchair and collapses onto it.
“Fuck.” His voice is gruff with pain, reinforcing just how much of his blood is all over my floor. I can’t stop staring at the various scarlet puddles. It seems impossible that one person could lose so much blood and still be coherent.
I don’t know what to do. My vision blurs, and the room starts to spin.
Focus, Hannah.
I race into my kitchen for a rag and throw it down. My heels catch on the terry cloth as I use my foot to drag the fabric across the worst of the blood. But there’s too much of it. It’s everywhere. Dripping over the threshold of my apartment. Leading down the hall…
“A-Alcohol.” Rafe grits out the word from between his teeth. When I just stare, he snaps his fingers. “Do you have any alcohol?”
I shake my head. My family doesn’t drink. Not after Mom’s last stint in rehab all those years ago and Dad’s constant insistence on “therapeutic” sobriety. And Branden’s…issues.
“Shit,” he hisses. “Can you get some?” He watches me carefully. I notice that one of his hands is clenched into a fist and presses down hard against his upper left thigh. The blood keeps appearing in random places—all over his hands and the armrests of my comfy chair. It’s even pooling on the floor at his feet.
“Hey!” He snaps his fingers again. “Can. You. Get. Some?” His lips move slowly, each word carefully enunciated.
Get some. I bolt into the hallway, leaving the door to my apartment wide open. My heels slip on a puddle of scarlet, and I barely catch my balance against the nearest wall. Focus!
Somehow, I’m three units down and knocking on a door with peeling red paint and the scent of cigar smoke wafting from underneath it.
“Hi,” I greet the man who answers the door brightly—a stranger I’ve never taken the time to meet before now. He’s wearing a wifebeater stained with what looks like broth, and I can catch the hint of a naughty movie playing across the old-fashioned TV that dominates his living room.
“Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you,” I start in a rush, “but I’m having some friends over, and I forgot to run to the store for some drinks—” I somehow choke out a laugh. “Do you have…any that I could, um, borrow?”
My fingers are shaking. My toes feel sticky, and God, I’m too terrified to glance down and see why.
The man—who I vaguely recall from a few awkward exchanges at the collective mailbox—eyes me for what feels like an eternity. Then he turns without a word and rummages through what sounds like cupboards out of sight. A moment later, he returns with two green bottles. “Enjoy,” he grunts before pressing both into my hands and closing the door in my face.
When I finally re-enter my apartment, Rafe’s still seated on my armchair, but his shirt is off. Most likely the wad of dark fabric he has pressed against his thigh.
“Good.” He nods to the bottles of alcohol. “Bring them here.”
I manage to get the door closed one-handed and stagger over to him. He snatches one of the bottles, rips off the cap, takes a sip, and then grimaces. “Sake,” he announces after swallowing. His blood streaks the bottle as he settles it between his hip and the gap in the seat cushion. With one hand, he lifts his bloodied shirt, revealing the bleeding gash along the inside of his left thigh.
“He stabbed you,” I hear myself whisper. It’s a nasty wound, unfathomably deep, and I know right away that he’ll need stitches. It isn’t until he reaches out and bats my hands away—causing my phone to fall to the floor—that I realize I was already in the process of dialing 911.
“No,” he growls. “No cops.”
For once, it’s easy to shrug off the voice that rumbles through my skin. “I’m not letting you bleed to death on my La-Z-Boy—”
“You don’t have to.” He grunts and tries to stand, but his knees buckle. I can almost see the color draining from his skin. “I can fix this. Get me a knife.” His voice isn’t so gruff anymore, lacking the spark I’m used to. He sounds exhausted and in pain. Weak.
911 feels like the only option.
“You need stitches,” I insist.
“You’re right.” Surprisingly, he nods. “Do you have a needle?” His calm tone throws me off. “Do you sew?” he adds in response to my blank stare. “Do you—”
“I…I have a sewing kit.” The admission drives me over to the hall closet, where I store my raincoat and umbrella. My fingers shake as I reach for the plastic Hello Kitty lunchbox resting on the topmost shelf and pull it down. Inside it are the remains of my supplies from a brief interest in embroidery a few summers ago. The only thread I have is in three shades of pink. A pincushion, shaped like a rubber duck, holds an array of needles, but my vision is blurring too badly to make out a single one.
“Any luck, bunny?” I sense Rafe watching me from across the room, but I don’t look up when I finally bring the kit over to him and fish out a single sewing needle.
He eyes the strip of metal carefully but doesn’t reach for it because his hands are shaking too badly to even grip the armrests properly. “Thread it,” he prompts rather than admit as much out loud.
“You’re not serious.” I shake my head. “You’re not going to—”
“Thread it.”
I select a spool of pale pink thread, rather than argue—maybe the color choice will convince him more than anything else how insane he’s being?
But it doesn’t. “Hurry up, bunny.”
I lick the end of the thread and attempt to shove it through the needle’s eye. Once I finally do, I hear the cushions protest beneath a shift in his weight, and there’s a sound like that of fabric being torn.
“Look at me…”
I don’t. I can’t. I’m oddly fixated by the process of carefully tying off the length of pink thread. It’s just a simple stitch, Hannah, I tell myself while mentally running through everything I’ve learned about sutures from watching medical dramas on television. Just a simple stitch…
“Hey. Look at me.”
The stench of blood sears the air when I finally gather up the nerve to obey him. Rafe’s legs are spread far enough apart for me to make out the gash. God, it’s about the length of my thumb and dangerously wide. It’s laughable to even hope that a little bit of pink thread will make him whole again.
“H-Here.” My fingers tremble as I attempt to offer him the needle, but he shakes his head.
“I can’t.” With a groan, he manipulates the bottle of sake and pours enough into the wound to make him howl through clenched teeth. “Fuck!” When he catches his breath, his eyes meet mine again, their expression fathomless. “I need you to do it. You can consider this paying me back, bunny.”
He makes it sound so logical. You do it. Like I’m the irrational one for jerking backward, shaking my head furiously. “N-No! I can’t—”
He spits out a single word as if uttering it pains him more than the injury itself. “Please.”
That request alone shouldn’t be enough to erase every trace of logic that warns me to run…but for some reason, I’m on my knees in an instant, crouched between his. The indecency of the position briefly runs through my mind, but by then, my hands are already covered in his blood. I can taste it—the smell is so thick. In the space it took me to grab my kit, he’s torn the sleeve of his pant leg all the way down to reveal the skin around the wound. It’s slippery and cool to the touch as I pinch as much of it closed as I can.
“It’s all right,” he coaxes, brushing my forearm with sweat-soaked fingers. “It’s okay. Pick up the needle. That’s it. Good girl.”
I struggle to control the needle with my free hand, lowering it…
Doubt descends, scattering my thoughts as the insanity of this entire situation sinks in. I can’t…
“Do it!”
My hand jerks, plunging the tip of the needle through flesh. I’ll never forget the sound he makes. It’s unrestrained and savage, despite being smothered beneath his fist. He bites his knuckles, sinking his teeth into the flesh. “Don’t look at me!” he chokes out once he notices me staring.
I glance down and find that the needle is still in his skin. Almost robotically, I grab it and pull. Again. Again. After a while, the simple motions become monotonous. Stitch. Stitch. Inhale. Stitch. Stitch…
On the fifth one, he shifts, and suddenly, his hand is on my shoulder. The fingers squeeze, their nails gingerly raking my skin.
The next stitch comes out lopsided as a result, and I have to make another just to get the flesh to line up properly. Eventually, the surge of my own pulse drowns out the sounds he makes. The groans. The grunts.
I don’t even realize my fingers are shaking until I finally tie off the last stitch and cut the thread with my teeth.
“Holy…shit.” He mutters a few more words that are barely coherent. His eyes are unfocused, dancing around the room. “You did good, bunny.”
The compliment feels hollow, all things considered. Almost on autopilot, I drop the needle onto the lid of my makeshift sewing kit and then carry the entire case into the kitchen. Streaks of blood splatter the basin of the sink as I methodically wash my hands beneath a stream of hot water. Then the needle. It’s almost laughable how easily the blood washes off.
But the same can’t be said for the floor. Or my armchair. Or…
I inhale sharply and fish a bottle of cleaner from underneath my sink, along with a bucket. Then I fetch my mop from the gap between my fridge and the wall.
It takes me nearly ten minutes to wipe every trace of blood from the hallway. My heart pounds, but the overwhelming need to just clean erases even the fear that someone might stumble upon me. With single-minded determination, I follow the blood trail until it ends just near the entryway. By the time I finally return to my apartment, Rafe is already on his feet, hobbling across the living room.
“You’ll rip your stitches open,” I tell him while resting the mop and bucket against the wall. For some reason, my fingers don’t want to let go of that bottle of cleaner, and I clutch it like a child might cling to a teddy bear. “Sit down!”
“You’ve proven lucky, rabbit,” he says hoarsely, though he doesn’t sound very happy about that. “If I were a betting man, I’d assume you’d let me die.”
“You will, if you bleed out all over my floor,” I reply. Common sense or should haves or what-ifs don’t matter anymore. Everything I’ve ever known about myself is falling to pieces as I cross over to my bedroom door and hold it open.
“Just…you’ve got to lie down.” I swallow hard and manage to regain some control over my voice. “I need to clean up the blood.”
I nod in the general direction of my bed, but he doesn’t budge.
“No can do, rabbit.” His eyes dare me to challenge him, and the smart thing to do would be not to. Any other day, letting him go would have been an easy concession to make, but for some reason, I really don’t want him to bleed out in my living room.
I don’t want to descend the stairs in the morning to find his lifeless body at the bottom of them. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it…
I just don’t.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood.” I try reasoning with him, but my voice cracks, negating the effect.
He shrugs. “It’s fine.” The stubbornness in his gaze only intensifies as he draws himself upright. “I’ll live.”
He takes a step forward as if he means to blow past me for the door. He nearly makes it halfway before he staggers into my coffee table and knocks it off balance. I’m beside him in a heartbeat, and I throw one of my arms around his back, guiding him across the room while bearing most of his weight.
He lets me take him all the way to my bedroom door before he realizes just where we’re headed.
“No.” He tries to pull away, but for once, I’m stronger. It’s easy to drag him inside and over to my bed, considering he seems incapable of holding himself upright. Somehow, I manage to get him close to the edge of the mattress before his legs give out completely, and he falls across it widthwise.
