I started to pick at a couple of pads from Jon’s chest before I pulled his oxygen mask away from his face and let it rest on the top of his head. “Let’s deprive that brain of a bit more oxygen, shall we?”
There was something fascinating about watching a man go wild with only his eyes.
I imagined a feral animal that looked like Jon’s youth, scratching at the walls of his mind, punching, and kicking and screaming to be unleashed so it could get to me, all of it being silenced bymyconfident grin andhiscomplete and utter helplessness.
“Rest in Hell,” I told him with a pat to his cheek, and then Eric and I walked out of the room, knowing our time was almost up.
We made it back outside with little fuss, just Gilly rushing behind us to make sure we were in the clear. When we got to the fresh air, she exhaled like she hadn’t taken a breath the whole time we’d been in there.
“You’ll need to go to him soon,” I told her. “Don’t let him die. I want him to suffer.”
“Get out of here,” she practically hissed, looking back over her shoulder.
“We’ll be back,” Eric told her. “To see Clint, yeah?”
She nodded furiously. “I’ll get in touch with Howardas soon as he’s ready to talk. I need to get the prison guards away, though. He’s in a bad way, so they aren’t too concerned with him escaping anytime soon. It’s more who gets in.”
“We can crawl through vents if that helps.” I smirked.
Her eyes met mine with nothing but seriousness. “It might be the only way. Now go.”
“Lead the way,” Eric said, gesturing to our bikes.
“You sure you wanna stick with me?”
Eric smirked. “Partner in crime, remember?”
“I remember. I just don’t understand it. All those years gone, and now you’re willing to take the fall for me.”
“If we’re together every time you do something fucking crazy, there’s only one of us that needs to go down for it.”
I scowled every time he’d said that to me since the first time he caught me running away from my responsibilities to go make someone bleed. “Nobody back at The Hut would believe this shit. You know they all think you’re a snake since you came back.”
“My actions will show everyone who I am in time.”
“Like I said, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Now lead the goddamn way, king.”
And I did. I led the way, taking us far out of town to an underground boxing ring where I could spend an hour or two with a man who wasn’t going to ask me how I was holding up. He wasn’t going to look at me with pity. He wasn’t going to ask me if I was doing the right thing. He wasn’t going to judge or tell me to stay on track. We didn’t talk about the past. We didn’t talk about why he left or what shit he was still keeping from me. We didn’t discuss anything. We were cold together. Angry.
We were a reflection of one another, going round for round and taking pound for pound.
Eric was a machine as much as I was.
He knew the life of the king. He knew that sometimes, especially when grief struck, the only thing to beat the numbness was relentless violence.
He allowed me that.
I took everything he had to offer.
I beat on him, and he beat on me for two hours in a dark and dingy warehouse filled with battered rings and dodgy ropes. I let the sweat pour down my back and over my eyes, all of my aggression hitting the target over and over and over and over.
I had to hand it to the old man; he sure knew how to fucking fight, which was a good job, because as soon as we were out of that warehouse, we had another job to do—a job that would take us into the middle of the night and involve more blood.
There was a long list of people who had to pay for Harry’s death.
We had a lot of names to strike out.