Cough
Ten days.
That was how long it had been since the state formally washed its hands of me. On my eighteenth birthday, a tired caseworker had handed me a cardboard box of secondhand clothes, forty crumpled dollar bills, and told me the foster home's front door was locked from the inside out. With nowhere else to go in the brutal chill of November 1924 Chicago, I had dragged myself to the industrial district and broken into the back window of an abandoned textile warehouse.
It wasn't much of a home really just concrete floors, drafts that howled like ghosts, and piles of ruined, moth-eaten bolts of fabric. But it kept the wind off my face for a week.
By day eight, however, the damp cold had settled deep into my bones. A persistent, dry tickle in my throat had rapidly morphed into a heavy, wet rattle, and by tonight by day ten a raging fever was cooking me from the inside out. Every breath felt like inhaling shards of ice mixed with boiling water.
Pneumonia was a silent reaper in the slums, and it was carving its initials right into my lungs.
Drenched in sweat despite the freezing air, and shivering so hard my teeth clicked together, I pulled my cheap, threadbare thrift-store coat tighter around my chest and stumbled down the dark, soot-stained alleyway toward my warehouse squat.
That was when I nearly tripped over a body.
I choked back a gasp, stumbling backward into the slush. Slumped against the brick wall of a loading dock was a man. Even half-collapsed in the shadows, he looked like a monolith a terrifyingly massive, broad-shouldered, and clad in a heavy, blood-soaked wool overcoat. His dark hair was swept back from a face carved from granite, a heavy shadow of stubble darkening his jaw.
A deep, ragged groan slipped from his lips, and a dark, hot pool of crimson was spreading rapidly across the front of his vest where a jagged, horrific tear had ripped through his clothes.
Instinct honed from years of patching up scraped knees and avoiding overcrowded city clinics overrode my terror. I dropped to my knees in the freezing slush beside him. I didn't know what had caused the gash, only that he was bleeding out fast.
"Hey," I rasped, my voice thick, cracked, and rattling horribly with every hitch of my breath. "Hey, mister... stay still."
The giant snapped his head up, his dark amber-flecked eyes locking onto mine with a fierce, predatory intensity that cut right through my fever haze.
"Get back, kid," he rumbled, his voice like grinding millstones, thick with pain. "Not a safe place... for a stroll."
"You're bleeding to death," I panted, pressing a trembling, sweat-slick hand near the ugly, torn wound. "Hold still. I can bind it."
Without waiting for permission, I grabbed the frayed hem of my thin coat and ripped a long, clean strip from the lining. The man watched me closely, his heavy brow furrowing as a sudden spasm of a cough racked my own chest, shaking my frail frame from head to toe.
He caught the sound of my ragged breathing, his sharp eyes narrowing as they took in my flushed skin, my pale lips, and the violent tremor in my hands.
"Jesus Christ," he muttered, his gravelly voice dropping in disbelief as his thick, leather-gloved hand suddenly shot out and locked around my wrist with the unyielding strength of a vice. His palm was radiating an intense, searing heat. "What the hell are you doing out in this weather? Who let you out like this? Look at this thin excuse for a coat—you're practically freezing."
"I'm fine," I lied through chattering teeth, pressing the makeshift bandage hard against his side. "Worry about the gash in your ribs, not my coat."
"You've got a death rattle in your chest, sweetheart," he growled, his thumb anchoring hard against my pulse point, refusing to let me pull away.
Before he could say more, the deep, low rumble of an engine cut through the wind. A classic black Packard rolled into the mouth of the alley, and two men stepped out of the vehicle, standing right in front of us.
Then, I heard a sharp, desperate sob behind me.
I startled, turning completely over in the slush to look. Just behind where Reid and I knelt, a terrified man was dropped down onto his knees in the dirt, weeping and begging for his life to the syndicate bosses who had just arrived in the car right in front of us.
The tall, immaculate man in the charcoal pinstripe suit didn't flinch. With unhurried, terrifying accuracy, he raised a heavy pistol, leveled it right at the kneeling man's forehead, and pulled the trigger.
BANG.
The deafening explosion of the gunshot shattered the quiet night, echoing off the brick walls like thunder. The body hit the cobblestones right beside us with a wet, heavy thud.
Panic hot, blinding, and absolute short-circuited every rational thought in my head. I ripped my wrist out of the giant's loosened grip, scrambled backward through the snow, and bolted.
"Wait—!" the giant shouted behind me, his voice booming down the brick-lined corridor, but I was already gone.
I tore around the corner, my lungs screaming in agony as the bitter air clawed at my chest, sprinting blindly through the labyrinth of alleys until I slammed into the heavy iron door of my warehouse, locking the world out in the dark.
My chest felt like it was filled with broken glass.
Every panicked breath rattled through my lungs, drawing sharp, burning stabs of agony across my ribs. Panic was the only thing keeping my legs moving as I slammed into the pitch-black cavern of the warehouse, dropping the heavy iron latch into place with a resounding, rusty clank.
I didn't stop there.
"Move," I choked out, coughing so hard my body folded in half, a wet, violent spatter hitting the back of my gloved hand. "Move... gotta block it..."
If those men followed my footprints in the snow...if the giant told his cold-blooded friends which way I had bolted that rusted deadbolt wouldn't hold them for five seconds.
Working on sheer adrenaline and blind terror, I dragged my weak, trembling body toward a stack of heavy wooden crates near the entrance. I jammed my shoulder against the splintered pine and shoved with everything I had. The wood groaned against the concrete, scraping forward inch by inch until the crate slammed against the iron doorframe. Next came a rusted iron dolly, wedged tightly under the door handle like a brace.
By the time I slid the last heavy pallet into place, my heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against my chest, and my legs finally gave out.
I collapsed onto the freezing concrete, gasping for air that felt like liquid fire.
The heat was instantaneous, washing over me in suffocating waves. A moment ago, the wind had felt like needles against my face, but now my skin was boiling. Sweat plastered my damp hair to my forehead, dripping down my neck and making my threadbare coat stick to my fever-flushed skin. I ripped off my wet thrift-store coat, my hands shaking so violently I nearly tore the button off.
Then came the bone-deep chill.
Within seconds, the heat plummeted into a shivering fit so intense my teeth rattled together like die in a cup. The warehouse draft snaked through the cracks in the floorboards, biting right through my thin cotton blouse. I was trapped in an agonizing loop boiling on the inside, freezing to death on the outside.
"So cold..." I whimpered, my voice small and thin in the vast, empty dark.
I crawled on hands and knees through the gloom, heading for the corner where the old textile looms used to sit. Piled in the shadows was my only treasure: bolts of coarse, abandoned wool and heavy flannel fabric that had been left behind to rot when the factory shuttered five years ago.
They smelled of damp earth, motor oil, and moths, but right now, they were life.
I pulled down three heavy, dusty lengths of dark grey wool, dragging them over my shaking shoulders like a cocoon. I collapsed back against the brick wall, burying myself deep beneath the moth-eaten layers, pulling the stiff fabric tight around my chin.
The silence inside the warehouse was deafening, save for the wet, unsteady rhythm of my breathing and the relentless howl of the blizzard outside.
I closed my eyes, clutching the dusty wool to my chest. Every time I tried to drift off, the image of that cold, aristocratic man in the pinstripe suit flashed behind my eyelids the effortless, terrifying calm with which he had raised his gun, and the heavy, sickening thud of the body hitting the cobblestones.
And then there were the amber eyes of the wounded giant, his burning, leather-gloved grip still feeling ghost-hot against my wrist.
He's alive because of me, I thought numbly, shivering under the moth-eaten cloth. He knows what I sound like. He knows I saw them.
I pressed my back harder into the corner, praying the darkness would swallow me whole.
