Narcos…

I had a knot in my gut the whole ride back to what the Knights of Crescentia called ‘The Lair’. It was their clubhouse, but that wasn’t saying much. They didn’t keep anything there. There were no quarters for sleeping and King would have your ass beat if he caught you crashing there. It wasn’t how King rolled. He was careful, cunning, almost always one step ahead of the law ‒ which was why I was here.

It’d taken me a year and some change to get this far with them, and I felt fuckin’ sick at what’d it had taken to earn my colors, at the way Silence, King’s ol’ lady, had looked up at me, pleading with those startling green eyes of hers under the tangled mop of her long auburn hair. I felt a guilt like no other, had no idea how or why King thought it’d been her that’d narced out the last exchange when it’d been all me.

I needed to get a hold of Driller and I needed to find out what the actual fuck. That bust should have never gone down when it did. If they’d only fuckin’ waited…

I couldn’t think about it right now. I had to take my fuckin’ orders even with the fresh set of colors on my back, and get that shit handled, so I could get out there and prevent Silence’s dyin’.

I was sure I was the last man she wanted to see, but I had no way of telling anyone where she was. It was one of those ‘I would know the route if I took it, if I could see it’ places, but those woods were a ways out along old forestry roads, and tough navigating even by bike, which was the only way I could retrieve her. If I took a truck, I’d be stopped by the barriers across the old road; bikes could go around them.

It was an ideal location to pop off rounds with their cache of illegal firearms, mostly fully-automatic shit, some of it, military-grade. The weapons would be just a bonus. I was after their drug trade. Of course, murder trumps all, and I was sure there were some dead bodies with the Knights of Crescentia’s logo stamped on them.

I was also sure that King had just given me a shortcut getting to them.

I don’t know a woman alive that wouldn’t be willing to speak out against an old boyfriend who’d just had her nailed to a tree. Even a woman who didn’t speak.

Of course, on the flip side, I didn’t know a woman alive who would speak to the man who’d done the actual nailing, but here was hoping that saving her life might buy me some currency to bargain with in that exchange.

There were a lot of ‘if’s and a whole lot of hope riding on some useless prayers here, but sometimes all you could do was live on a prayer. I was just prayin’ she would still be alive when I got to her.

I did what King wanted. I ‘got rid’ of her shit, wiping out any evidence of her ever being in his small house in the poorer section at the edge of the city. I took it to a safe place, a storage unit in the heart of the city, and actually rode past Poe at one point. He didn’t even acknowledge me, which is as it should be. Never fuckin’ knew who was watching. On the street, there were eyes and ears everywhere.

When I was sure I was good and there was nothing else that King wanted, I had to wait for nightfall.

My heart was all jammed up with apprehension, the whole ride back out to where we’d been that morning. I carefully guided the bike around the barrier and worked my way up the track of old, cracked blacktop, blanketed in dirt and pine needles mixed with decaying leaf litter.

I was half-afraid I would come up on one of the other Knights, the sovereign motherfuckers, King having put the idea into their heads that rape was on the menu. Silence was a fine-looking piece of ass according to every one of the men in the Knights of Crescentia, and they weren’t lying.

She was a slight and fine-boned bohemian hippy-chick, younger than most of us, but ageless at the same time. I knew she had to be in her twenties, but she sometimes looked like a barely-legal teen, depending on the day and how much makeup she had on, which really depended on King’s mood, from what I gathered.

My headlight swept the trees she was between and my heart damn near seized in my chest. She was still there, but it didn’t look good. Her head was bowed, her long hair hiding her face. I turned off the bike and swung a leg over, grabbing the nail-puller I’d brought out of the inside pocket of my jacket.

Just when I thought I was too late, she dragged her head up weakly, the beam of my headlamp, weaker with the bike shut off, illuminating her pale face, which was rendered paler, my guess, from pain and loss of blood. Truth be told, I was more concerned about the latter than anything; the tree bark below her hands was glittering dark and wet.

“This is gonna hurt, hang in there for me,” I told her, focused on getting her free. I braced the nail-puller against her palm, making sure that the head of the nail was secure in the notch, and torqued it free. She screamed and immediately tried to drag her hand to her chest; the paracord they’d bound her with stopped her.

“Wait!” I hissed and flicked open my knife. “Don’t take it off your wrist,” I told her and cut the line.

“Hang on,” I said over the keening sobs escaping her throat, and I pulled a bandana from my pocket and wrapped it around her hand, tying it securely in on itself. She let me, but it was a little bit of a battle.

I got her other hand free and bandaged, and she knelt, clutching her ruined hands to her chest, bent forward until her forehead nearly touched the earth.

Her weeping was heartrending, but I didn’t have time for that now. I had to get her to Trinity Gen, where she would be safe. I had to get in touch with Driller and get her into his custody. Then, I had to pray I hadn’t somehow blown my cover during all of this mess, which I just had a gut feeling…

“Come on, Si, you’ve gotta ride with me. I gotta get you to the hospital.” She cringed back from me and I understood it, even though it killed me.

“I’m the only ride you’re gonna get out of here. Come on,” I said, and it came out harsh with my frustration.

She flinched, but struggled to her feet, and I reached out to steady her. She sucked in a sharp breath and stumbled back, but I caught her elbow and kept her from going over.

“Easy,” I said and tried to make it come out soothing, but I’m afraid I’m kind of shit at things like that.

I helped her over to the bike and got on. She got on with me and sucked in a breath when she saw my back. I wasn’t wearing Knights of Crescentia colors. For this, I wore my true colors and I had headed out of the city on my bike, my real bike, with my face covered by one of the bandanas now wrapped around her bleeding hands.

“Hang onto me as best you can,” I ordered and she did, miserably.

It was a rough ride to Trinity Gen’s emergency room entrance, rougher on her by far than it was on me. I pulled up just shy of the bright lights and she got off. I looked her in her pale face, into those startling green eyes, the irises edged in an almost bronze or gold, and said, “Go on inside, get yourself taken care of. Some people will come to see you.”

She frowned slightly and I nodded toward the sliding glass doors.

“Go on now,” I said, my voice rough with emotion. The guilt over what I’d done to her rode me, likely a demon I would carry on my back for a while.

She turned and went, her feet shuffling across the too-white cement, patters and droplets of blood falling like tears in her wake. The doors whooshed open and she went through without so much as a backwards glance, and I pulled out my phone.

He picked up on the second ring.

“Yeah, Driller,” I said before he could say anything. “Get your ass down to Trinity Gen ER, mute girl by the nickname of Silence. I don’t know her by anything else. She’s got puncture wounds to her hands. Bad ones. All the way through. You need to get her into protective custody.”

“Slow the fuck down, Narcos, who is she?”

“She was Kingston Prentiss’ ol’ lady, until he had me nail her to a tree this morning.”

Real silence on the other end of the line and finally, “Shit.”

Yeah.

Shit.