Seeing such a small woman handle a bag of grain nearly as heavy as her might have struck him as comical if the horror of what she was doing didn’t eclipse anything else he might have felt.
“Go without me!” he wheezed. “Order…that’s an order.”
“Okay, you’re obviously in bad shape, so I suggest you save your breath and hold still while I try to get you out of this shackle,” she answered.
He didn’t notice the object in her hand—what appeared to be a bra’s underwire—until she stood on top of the bag and stretched on her tiptoes to get to the shackles above his head.
“Awesome, these are old, too…just got to put enough pressure on the lock, and you’ll be free—there!”
His right hand suddenly fell free, which allowed his other hand to come down from the hook as well and introduce much needed relief to his arms.
But his freedom came at a great price. The chains rattled. Loud enough to echo throughout the warehouse.
There came a beat of dangerous silence. Then the Reyes leader asked, “What was that?”
At the same time, the MC said, “Da fuck?”
Right before the unmistakable sound of guns being cocked and aimed filled the warehouse.
27
HAN
“Run! Jasmine, run!”
Han woke on a gasp, but then…
The image of him and Jasmine stuck in a warehouse cleared to reveal concrete walls. An unfinished basement—he pieced that together based on the gray walls and the still, cave-like temperature. And he was lying almost upright in a hospital bed.
His body ached but in a dim kind of way that felt more like a suggestion than reality. He was on something, something that not only alleviated the pain but fuzzed out his mind.
Somebody had tended to his wounds, wrapped his torso in elastic bandages, and taped pieces of fabric over the cuts on his arms.
As crude as the set-up was, there was an IV in his right hand, letting him know where the drugs were coming from and possibly other fluids to keep him hydrated while he recovered from his injuries.
He wondered about his face, which had taken quite a few hits. But when he tried to raise his non-IVed hand to check it, he found it too heavy to lift.
No…not too heavy… somebody was lying on top of it, someone with a dark head of loose curls that she usually kept tied back in a ponytail.
A smile spread across his face, and his battered body filled with sunshine.
“Jasmine,” he whispered.
She came awake like a fairytale princess, blinking into a new day.
Her eyes widened, and a smile spread across her face when she found him looking down at her. “You’re awake. They said you’d wake up eventually, but I was scared. So scared. I’m sorry that I didn’t believe you about K Diamond. Obviously, he and his dad are monsters if they did this. And your car….”
Her eyes filled up with tears, and his heart filled up with questions. How long had she been lying here at the side of his bed? Holding his hand? Waiting for him to awaken?
“It’s OK. I don’t care about the car. I am only glad to see you alive.”
He took back his hand, but only so he could wipe her tears away as he added, “Who is ‘they?’”
As if in answer to his question, the door swung open to reveal the Ant, the DE Reyes’s leader. And to Han’s further surprise, Phantom walked right in behind him.
“Look at that. He’s awake, right on time for your visit,” Ant said to Phantom.
Phantom scanned Han over. “Your sister did a good job patching him up. IV too.”
“I told you she’s the best,” Ant answered. “Best street doctor on the East Coast. I keep telling her she needs to leave her nursing day job and come work for me full time. Plus, she gave him some of that good shit for the pain from my private supply. How you feeling, Han?”
Han nodded. “I agree. She did an excellent job. Please thank her for me.”
“If you really want to thank her, tell your girl she’s got to go upstairs to get those cuts patched and a check over. Mi hermana’s been trying to get her stitched up since we got you in here, but she wouldn’t let go of you. It’s like she’s trying to catch a infection.”
Han had been so busy soaking in Jasmine’s sunshine, he hadn’t noticed the cuts and scrapes all over her arms until Ant brought it up.
“Go see his sister,” Han immediately told Jasmine.
“But—”
“That’s an order,” he commanded before she could get out the rest of her protest.
Jasmine’s eyes flashed with the defiance he’d gotten to know so well over the last few months. But in the end, she did as he said, letting go of his hand and storming toward the door.
“My sis’s room is up the stairs, two doors down the right,” Ant called after her.
