“Don’t take off the mask,” I say, turning to search his eyes, a kaleidoscope of green and gold. “Promise?”
“We’re going to have to cut you out of some of that,” Lennox says, gesturing with the needle toward my clothes. “We’ll leave the mask.”
“Okay,” I say, gulping down my nerves and allowing the two brothers to help me onto the table.
“This is just a local numbing agent,” Lennox says, pinching the skin on my side before easing the needle in. “You’ll be lucid the whole time.”
After the shot, he moves back and Hemingway scoots in and gently tugs my hand away. She has no reaction whatsoever to the injury, so I can’t tell how bad it is. She has me hold a towel to it while she cuts away some of the suit I wear for fighting.
“You’ll have to get a new suit, but you can grab something to cover up on the way out,” she says, nodding to a set of hooks where a half dozen flannel shirts hang. “Guys leave shirts all the time.”
She picks up a needle and starts stitching while Lennox swabs blood for her.
“The good news is, you were right, Monty Python,” the girl says announces. “It’s just a flesh wound. You’ll have a cool, gnarly scar, and I’d lay off the fights for a while. She didn’t get any organs, but she did nick your iliacus. That’s going to hurt while it heals. I’ll use all dissolvable stitches, so you don’t have to come back. Not that you can’t, if you want me to check on them. Or just visit. I’m sure my dad would love for me to have some more badass female role models.”
I snort at that. “I’m hardly a role model.”
“To him you are,” she says. “He’s always saying the girls in our family are too soft.”
I almost say something about Annabel Lee being the opposite of soft, but I quickly shut my mouth before that slips out. They’d wonder how I know her.
“Hemingway,” I say, trying to ignore the gross feeling of the needle poking through pain-dead skin. “That’s an interesting name.”
“Oh yeah,” she says. “My mom’s an English teacher. She got to name the girls in the family. So I’m named after Ernest Hemingway. Every time I curse the name they gave me, I remember that it could be worse. I could be named Ernest. Or Ernesta. That’s what my brothers call me when they want to piss me off.”
“Sounds about right,” I say, but my heart is twisting at the picture she’s painting. A normal family, with brothers who love her the right way, who tease her in a way Saint will never tease me again.
“My oldest sister is named for Edgar Allan Poe, but they also spared her, and she’s not named Edgar, in case you were wondering,” she goes on, oblivious to my inner torment. “She’s a musician. Very talented. Most of us are more… Visual artists. We got that from our uncle.”
She smiles at Lennox, and he changes out the towel deftly, his blood-soaked gloves glistening, his intense concentration never wavering. I watch him, looking for traces of Angel in him, for anything to link the man I love to the man who made him. It’s unfair to try to get to know Angel’s family behind his back, when they don’t even know who I am. Still, I’ve never had the chance before. Angel kept us separate from this part of his life as much as my parents did.
Lennox has the North look, but he’s not bulky like Angel. He’s muscular but trim, more like a runner than a boxer, and objectively, he’s better looking—so good-looking its disconcerting. He has a quiet dignity about him, a solemnity that his son is missing entirely. Maybe it comes from years of being in a gang, seeing injuries like this and worse every day, and probably a fair amount of death. I marvel at how long Angel was able to keep his family from us. At how naïve I’ve been to his life. He’s so sweet with me, it’s easy to think their lives aren’t so much different than mine. I wish I’d known what kind of stress he goes through, if this is such an ordinary thing to him that his cousin learned how to stitch up knife wounds before herquinceañera.
“I can’t believe I’m stitching a famous person,” Hemingway says after a few minutes of leaning over her work. “Can I put my signature stitch at the end? You won’t notice. It’s like… An artist signature.”
“I’m not famous.”
“Um, yeah, you are,” she says. “You’re Merciless. Everyone knows who you are.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Even my uncle knows, and he’s basically a hermit,” she says. “Don’t you, Uncle Lenny?”
“Of course,” he says calmly. “Your moniker suits you. You’re merciless with your opponents. It makes for a great show. You’re a North family favorite.”
“Thanks?” I squeak.
“My kids all talked about you so much I had to check you out. Now we watch almost every fight. Even my wife loves you. You don’t think I’d play nurse to just anyone, do you?”
I don’t answer, because my mind is spinning.
His wife.
Angel’s mom, who used to let us get our own sodas from the fountain but would probably drop cyanide tablets in my glass if I came in today, is his wife. I close my eyes and try not to panic. A racing heart will probably lead to more blood loss. I tell myself I’m fine, that they promised not to remove my hood. And they definitely don’t know who I am, or he wouldn’t be praising me.
“Fuck,” Maverick says from over near the door, where he and Mad Dog are frowning over something on his phone.
“What is it?” Lennox asks, tossing the bloody towels and replacing them with the other hand in the same motion.
