Chapter One Hundred and Forty-One
Cole
Cole knelt beside him and listened for breath like his life depended on it.
Because maybe not his, but Ahmet’s did.
Ahmet’s chest lifted shallowly, unevenly, like the body hadn’t yet decided whether to stay or go. Blood seeped through his fingers where he pressed down, slick and impossible and warm in a way that made Cole’s gut turn.
"Don’t be stubborn now," he muttered under his breath, though he didn’t know who he was speaking to.
He tore fabric from his own shirt and packed it against the wound, hard enough to make Ahmet gasp weakly. It was the first sound he’d made since he fell, and it tore through Cole like proof of life.
"Yeah," Cole said hoarsely. "Do that. Say something. Make a sound at least."
Getting him up took more strength than Cole had prepared for. Ahmet was dead weight and iron at once, his arm slung uselessly across Cole’s shoulders as they staggered toward the exit, boots dragging against concrete. Each step smeared blood across the floor in a trail that felt like a confession.
The night air hit them hard when they got outside. Cole half-carried, half-dragged him to his own car, abandoning Ahmet’s gleaming machine where it sat like a monument to bad decisions.
He wrestled him into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut with shaking hands before rounding the hood and getting in himself.
The engine roared too loudly in the quiet.
Cole drove fast. Too fast. The city lights stretched into streaks as the warehouses fell away behind them and his hands clenched the wheel like he was trying to bend the road itself into submission.
"Stay with me," he told Ahmet, glancing sideways. His face was ashen, sweat slicking his skin. Blood bloomed dark through Cole’s makeshift bandage with frightening speed.
Death didn’t scare Cole. What scared him was the idea that a man like Ahmet could end like this. They didn’t die in silence on cracked leather seats
Ahmet didn’t answer and Cole didn’t slow.
He didn’t go to a hospital.
He went where names didn’t matter. It was a small house at the edge of the city that no one with sense would trust with a dying man, much less a king of the underworld. The paint was tired, the gate crooked, the porch light flickering like it had been considering giving up for years. Nothing about the place whispered money or influence or safety.
It belonged to a man who had never worn silk or signed a death order. A man whose hands had learned tenderness instead of violence. And somehow, years ago, those same hands had been forced to learn how to keep him alive.
Cole remembered the first time he had dragged himself there.
He had been bleeding badly that night, staggering down an unfamiliar street with his vision tunneling and his pistol heavy in his grip. He had passed the building without noticing it at first. It was the glow of a single bulb inside that had caught his eye. Then the sign. It was a small and plain veterinary clinic. Unimportant but safe-looking in the way nothing really ever was.
Cole had gone in out of spite as much as desperation.
The man inside had been thin and startled, smelling faintly of antiseptic and animals and fear. Cole hadn’t said a word to him. He had only reached for the picture frame on the counter and lifted it, studied it slowly. It was a woman and two children. They were smiling in a way Cole found uncomfortable.
Then he had placed the gun beside the frame.
He remembered the way the man’s hands shook when he understood.
"Fix me," Cole had said quietly, pressing his fingers into his own torn side so blood bloomed darker through his shirt. "Or they pay for it."
The man had stitched him together that night in a back room that smelled of dogs and disinfectant. His hands had steadied once fear finished settling into something colder. The needle had gone in clean. The cuts had closed properly. The bleeding had stopped.
Cole had walked out when it was finished without a single word of gratitude.
And yet, instead of disappearing like most people who crossed him, the man had remained exactly where he was. Same house. Same flickering light. Same portrait on the counter.
So Cole had returned.
Once after a knife wound. Then after a bullet graze. Then after a night that should have killed him.
And now, years later, here he was again... dragging a legend through the same narrow doorway.
Only this time, the monster in his arms wasn’t himself.
Cole didn’t knock as usual.
He kicked the door in.
"I need you," he said into the quiet house. "Now."
Lights snapped on and a shape moved. A curse rang out.


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