Page 16 of Refrain

“What else?”

He meets my gaze, appearing as if he’s trying to decide how much he can get away with hiding from me. In the end, he shrugs. “A sedative.”

Shock doesn’t have time to finish racing through my system before he rears back on his knees, his expression grim.

“Look, I don’t know if you remember or not, but you weren’t exactly jumping at the chance to have me help you.” He tugs on his collar, revealing a jagged scratch stretching toward his shoulder, and my nails throb as if in guilt. “You were going to either scream loudly enough that someone called the cops or bleed out. I couldn’t let that happen—”

“So you drugged me?”

“Yeah. I did.” He holds my gaze without flinching.

There’s no gray with him. Just black and white.Either I inject you with an unknown substance, or you die.

“I need to stitch you up.” He rummages within his case and withdraws a black satchel, scissors, and a packet of surgical thread. The sort of stuff the average gangster wouldn’t keep above their freezer.

“Stitch me?” My words run together, thick and garbled. “You do this often?”

“It’s going to hurt,” he says rather than answering my question. “It’s going to hurtbad. I don’t have any lidocaine. I used the last bit of my narcs on you too, not that it seems to be helping with the pain.”

Only now do I realize how heavily I’m breathing. Sweat coats my skin. I blink, and there’s suddenly two of him.

“I could get you some whiskey…”

“No.” I shake my head. That was Ksenia’s old vice. These days, I barely think about the bottle anymore. “Just…just do it.”

He rises to his feet, and I can’t help the way I stiffen when he lowers himself beside me. Up close, I’m assaulted by his conflicting smell. He’s darkness. Smoke. Unknown. Clean. Too many different scents to pinpoint.

Then he touches the makeshift bandage and deciphering him takes a back seat to breathing. He wasn’t lying. With every sickening tug on the damp towel, blinding agony descends in full force. Gritted teeth can’t silence my cry.

“Jesus Christ—”

“Whiskey it is.” Without hesitating, he heads for the fridge.

I watch through blurred vision as he fishes a bottle from inside it and pours a small amount into a shot glass snatched from a nearby counter. He brings both back over to the couch and sets the bottle on the floor between my feet.

“Here.”

My fingers tremble as they accept the glass he’s shoved into my hand. I take a sip as the bastard uses the distraction to pour some of the liquid from the bottle directly onto my wound.

Liquid sprays from my mouth, along with a stream of curses I can’t even make out, though he calmly acknowledges each one.

“I know. I know.” With a suspicious sense of practice, he lays his tools out beside us while the alcohol sears its way through torn flesh and muscle. “All right,” he grunts out by way of warning. “Here we go.”

I can’t watch, so I stare at the wall and count the millions of ways my body succumbs to the whiskey along with whatever else he injected me with. Whether it’s due to delirium or the alcohol, I don’t feel a damn thing. Just the sickening push and pull of rent skin being sewn back together, stitch by stitch by stitch.

“It doesn’t hurt as much if you don’t focus on it. My brother taught me that. Once I busted my knee open jumping off the monkey bars, and he had to rush me to the ER, carrying me on his back the whole damn time.” He laughs.

The sound chimes through the dulled mush of my brain. It’s beautiful. Men shouldn’t sound beautiful.

“I had to get ten stitches,” he says grimly. “Before they even got the needles, I started to wail like a fucking baby, but Dante… He tried to tell me a story to take my mind off it all. He was fucking terrible at telling stories. I think this one was about a duck or something?” He trails off as he racks his mind for the memory. “I can’t remember, but it barely made any sense, and he finished it off with, ‘Fuck, that’s it. The end.’” He laughs—more softly this time, but I don’t miss the broken edge to the sound. It’s pained, shattering the beauty. “I was too busy laughing that I barely even noticed when the doctor finished up.”

He worked the entire time he spoke, gently manipulating the wound despite the prosthetics.

“You’ve done this before.” The words cling to my tongue as I blink more rapidly, fighting to maintain my view of a dingy, beige ceiling.

Focus. Don’t go under…

I think he’ll ignore me, but after four more tugs, he sighs.

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