Page 88 of Last Hand
“Tell her that,” I mutter, knowing how hormonal she is. I’m not game enough to tell the woman no, afraid of the water works and feral cat lady energy she could give off. Her hormones lately are giving me whiplash; one minute she is crying, the next she is ripping our clothes off and demanding our cocks like they no longer belong to us and are purely for her use.
We reach the door. She stands there, waiting, patient as ever, one hand resting protectively on her belly.
Leone sighs and unlocks it with a heavyclick. “How much longer are you going to keep him alive?” he asks. “Why not just end it?”
Fallon doesn’t answer. She just steps through the door, bowl in hand.
We descend together. The air shifts the lower we get, damp, metallic, and sharp. Like torture lives here. Which it does.
Leone flips the light switch.
Igor sits in his chair, or what’s left of a chair after his thrashing. He’s slumped, shirtless, bandaged stumps resting limp at his sides. There’s a rusted chain wrapped around his torso and fixed to a bolt in the wall. The chain jerks andclanksas he lunges forward the second he sees us, snarling something guttural in Russian.
The bolt holds.
He gets yanked back hard, landing against the wall with a thud that shakes dust from the ceiling. He screams again, curses—his voice hoarse, throat ragged from screaming. He spits, drool dripping down his chin.
Fallon doesn’t flinch. Not even a blink.
Her coldness toward him scares me more than what I did to him. And I’m the one who took his goddamn arms.
She drags her metal chair forward same one every day. She sets the bowl down on the little table and sits across from him like she’s visiting an old friend in a retirement home.
Leone steps forward, blade already drawn. Igor tries to kick him. Leone moves too fast. He grabs Igor’s leg, yanks the ankle cuff tight, then the other. Then he gives the chain at Igor’s waist a hard pull, winding it tight against the bolt in the wall.
“Sit down,” Leone growls.
Igor snarls something else in Russian. We don’t need a translation. We know hate when we hear it.
Then Fallon calmly scoops a spoonful of porridge and shoves it into his mouth. He chokes, growls, gags. She waits until he swallows.
“We found out we’re having a boy,” she says, voice light, almost conversational. “His name’s undecided. Leone likes Luca. Milo hasn’t weighed in.” He opens his mouth to scream some profanity at her and gets a mouthful of breakfast instead.
“We also finally painted the nursery,” she continues. “Light gray with little stars. Milo found this old rocking chair, it creaks, and Leone reckons it will wake the baby, but I like it.”
She smiles faintly at that, it’s not joy. It’s something darker. A look I don’t like on her face, it’s almost mocking.
Igor glares at her. There’s blood in his teeth from where the spoon clanged against them a little too hard. He spits it to the side and mutters something that sounds likeyou bitch,or maybe it was Russian—his words are too mangled to translate.
Another spoonful.
“Doctor says he’s healthy. Kicks like hell. Last night, I swear he decided to sleep on my bladder; I think I peed thirty times.” She turns her head slightly.
Igor gurgles a protest. She shuts it down with more food.
This is what she does.
Every. Single. Morning.
She talks to him like he’s family, and tortures him by not giving him what he really wants which is death, dignity, or perhaps an explanation.
We don’t get it.
She never tells us why.
She’s never missed a day.
And me? I’m starting to feel something I didn’t think I’d ever feel for the bastard.
