Page 128 of Intent to Kill
“You can’t,” Paul said. “You’ve gotta go back to the club and pretend like these past few weeks you’ve just been away with a bad flu.”
“Paul, that’s the most fucking stu–”
“Tia will cover you.”
“No!” Mercedes huffed back a step. “I won’t let you.”
“Don’t argue,” Paul spat, eyeing her down until she relaxed her stance. “And Dan and Carlos... They have to show their faces to Blake to prove their pledge was real.”
“Pledge? What the fuc–” Mercedes started before Dan interrupted.
Fuck. Yeah, explaining this to her was going to be difficult.
Dan rose in a swift, grunting movement. “More proof of our fucking loyalty? I don’t actually want to work for Dorian Blake.”
“You don’t have a choice now,” Paul said. Dan sat down slowly. “I can take Adam on the drive.”
Mercedes winced, looking at the door Brooke had come in through, where Adam probably laid dying behind it.
“We’ll be okay,” Paul said, a warm smile on his lips. “I’ll take good care of him, I promise.”
She glanced between all of them and the door an unfathomable amount of times before her eyes softened. She hung her head, her chest heaving in a way that it was obvious she was using all her effort just to breathe.
“Okay.” Mercedes finally nodded. “Okay.”
Following Mercedes’s lead, Paul pushed through the door and into the surgery room with Dan and Carlos behind him.
Adam laid on the table. An oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth, and his arms were full of IVs. Empty medication packets and tiny glass bottles were smashed on the floor all around him. A collection of saturated bloody gauze sat in a pile by the sink.
Mercedes stroked a gentle hand through his hair, and Paul drew comforting circles along her back as she cried over her lover.
“I love you,” she said as she laid a quivering kiss on his forehead.
Brooke once again released the stops on the table’s wheels, and with help from Dan, Carlos, and Paul, wheeled him outside.
Paul watched Mercedes closely, her eyes locked on Adam like she was afraid she’d never see him again.
Perhaps she had a point.
It was the last time she saw him for five years.
* * *
MAY 1991
“What is it?” Dorian said. “I really don’t have time for this today.”
“You’re gonna wanna see this,” T.B. said.
His last remaining second-in-charge had called him down to one of their offices in the city. Dorian’s plans for that day completely derailed with the rude intrusion. Whatever T.B. had to show him, it had better have been damn important because Dorian’s patience was low.
“Follow me,” T.B. said.
T.B. started down a long, gray hallway lined with doors on either side. Dorian followed, stomping after him like a petulant child. They rounded two corners before T.B. finally stopped at a door and knocked three times in a pattern that sounded rehearsed.
The room that opened before him was pitch black, save for deep maroon lights on either wall. Cramped and smelling of sweat and days’ old to-go food. Judging from the containers littering the floor, that was certainly the culprit.
Two men sat at a small work desk with towers of CCTV monitors lining the wall and playing loops on repeat.
