Page 15 of Refrain

I’m shouting. I’m screaming. “Get them off! Get them off—”

“Calm down.” He’s closer.

I smell him now. Mint and cigarettes. Did he pick the habit up from Piotr?

“Look!” He pulls a key from his pocket and holds it up to the light. “You lost a lot of blood. I didn’t want you to reopen the…Shit.”

I follow the direction of his gaze, wincing with every shift of muscle. My other arm is still attached to the edge of a narrow cot. Unlike the naked, industrial setup I’m used to, someone draped this mattress in red sheets—sheets that used to be white.

Vlad delivered his parting gift well. Rent flesh forms a gash from my shoulder down to my forearm—or so I gauge from the blood trail seeping through a white towel someone wadded around the limb. Had he a larger knife, good ol’ Vlad would have lived up to the little nickname Piotr bestowed upon him—The Butcher.

“There.”

The pressure on my wrist loosens, but the loss of support throws me forward. I hit the floor hard, my vision blinking in and out of focus.

“Okay? Just take it easy.”

I have to brace one hand flat against the floor to hoist myself onto my knees.

“Are you fucking listening to me? You want to bleed out all over the fucking floor?” He’s shouting, the baby-faced angel.

That’s not what leaves me reeling. His voice breaks with an emotion I’m not used to hearing in another person. Not genuinely, at least. Worry.

The same emotion makes my heart hammer against my ribcage as my knees buckle, and his arm encircles my shoulders to keep me upright.

“If you don’t let me help you, you’re going to bleed to death. You want that? Huh?”

I don’t like how he phrased the question. Coldly. Definitively. As if he’d really leave me to my fate.

I should say yes…

“Lean on me.” The surprising note of authority springs my body into action. “Can you stand up?”

With his shoulder for support, I manage to. Once on my feet, I scan the room. It’s smaller than I thought. There’s a tiny closet near the back corner, its door opened to reveal the meager contents within. A small array of T-shirts and a few ratty pairs of jeans hang from hooks. So this isn’t a dungeon, but a bedroom. His?

“Can you walk?” The gritted tone drags my attention back to him. He’s eyeing the arm sandwiched between us, held at an awkward angle. “Try to move. Come on. One foot in front of the other.”

I try. He winds up supporting most of my weight, but we eventually make it into a larger room. He must live here. Though what would serve as a living room in any conventional residence acts as storage for large, white squares. My brain sluggishly tries to put a name to them. Canvas. Some are blank, while others sport splotches of paint. Reds. Yellows. Oranges.

An inferno of color.

“All right, here we go…” He lowers me onto a gray couch that’s seen better days, and he has to nudge a stack of canvases out of the way to clear enough space for me. “Fuck.” Muttering under his breath, he darts to another corner of the room.

There’s a kitchen there—a small one, anyway—composed of a dingy fridge, a sink, and a single row of cabinets. He snatches something from the top of the fridge and then turns to the sink. Water runs. His shoulders move. He’s assembling something.Another syringe? I wince; the throbbing in my inner arm is too distracting to focus for long.

“You injected me with something… Didn’t you?”

Guilt laces his tension, stiffening his shoulders. He doesn’t answer, and by the time he returns to my side, I can’t remember why the question even matters.

“Let’s sit you up.” His voice deepens as he crouches in front of me.

He has a boxy object tucked under his arm and a wad of wet rags in his fist. He sets the rags aside and lifts the lid of the box. It’s plastic, with compartments inside that separate what appears to be a makeshift first aid kit—gauze, scissors, and vials of liquid.

Liquid potentially potent enough to cause the disorientation disrupting my senses.

“What did you give me?” I muster up enough strength to grab his shoulder. “What did you inject me with?”

He shrugs me off in order to hunt through the case. “A tetanus shot,” he finally grumbles.

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