CRIMSON STREETS
919 Words
Bella's POV
"This is not a rescue." The words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them. Tommy's jaw tightened but he did not deny it.
"Move," he barked. Two soldiers flanked me immediately. Their hands did not touch me but their presence pressed close enough to make the point. Prisoner, not princess.
"I have a patient..."
"Not anymore." Tommy was already walking, expecting me to follow. Of course I would follow. Good daughters always followed. "The clinic is done. Your little side project ends tonight."
My little side project. Three years of saving lives reduced to words that sounded like I had been playing dress up.
The street outside looked like hell had visited and decided to stay. Cars burned. Windows shattered. Bodies... I made myself not count the bodies. A war had started while I was elbow deep in a stranger's blood, and somehow I had missed the opening shots.
"Get in." Tommy yanked open the door of an armored SUV. Black, of course. Everything in my family came in black or blood red.
I climbed in because the alternative was being thrown in. The leather seats smelled like fear sweat and gun oil. Home sweet home.
"Where's my father?"
"Busy staying alive." Tommy slammed my door and jogged around to the other side. Through the window, I watched my clinic burning. Someone had made sure it would not survive the night. "Which is more than you were doing. Christ, Bella, you knew the rules. When the emergency codes go out..."
"I was in surgery!"
"You were playing Mother Teresa while the Volkovs declared war!" He twisted in his seat to glare at me. "Do you know how many men died trying to find you? Do you know what your father..."
A bullet punched through his window. Just the driver's window. The glass held but spider webbed into a pretty pattern. The driver made a sound. Wet. Surprised. Then his head dropped forward and the wheel went loose in his dead hands.
Everything happened fast and slow at the same time. The SUV veered left. Tommy lunged for the wheel. I saw the sniper's second shot spark off our roof. My hands moved without permission, shoving between the seats, grabbing for control.
"Move!" I screamed at the dead driver but he was past listening. Tommy and I fought to steer from terrible angles while bullets played drums on our armor.
"Push him out!" Tommy's voice cracked. "I need that seat!"
"I've got it!" My hands found the wheel. Slippery. The driver's blood had made everything slippery. "Guide my turns!"
"You can't..."
"I said I've got it!"
The city blurred past. I drove half blind, following Tommy's barked directions. Left here. Right there. Straight through the intersection where two gangs had decided to settle old scores with new bullets. Our tires screamed. Or maybe that was me. Hard to tell over the thunder in my chest.
"Compound's ahead," Tommy gasped. He had gone pale. A new wetness spread across his shirt. "Gates are... they're holding but..."
I saw what he meant. Our fortress home looked like a castle under siege. Muzzle flashes from the walls. Explosions blooming orange against stone. My father had built those walls to withstand anything. Tonight, anything had come to test them.
The gates opened just wide enough to swallow us. We skidded through on momentum and prayers. Guards swarmed the vehicle before we fully stopped. Someone dragged the driver's body out. Someone else tried to drag me.
"Don't touch her!" Tommy's roar still had power even leaking blood. "She walks on her own or I'll kill you myself."
I walked. What else could I do? Through corridors I had played in as a child. Past paintings of dead Rossinis who watched my shame with oil paint eyes. The war room door loomed ahead like the gates of judgment.
Inside, my father stood before a wall of screens. Don Lorenzo Rossini. The Devil of New York, some called him. Daddy, I used to call him, back when I believed his bedtime stories about honor and family.
He did not turn when I entered. "Isabella."
"Papa..."
"Seventeen minutes." His voice was winter. "You ignored seventeen minutes of emergency codes."
"I was saving someone."
"You were endangering everyone." Now he turned. His face... I had seen my father angry. I had seen him cold. I had never seen him afraid. "Someone leaked your clinic location to the Volkovs. Someone who knew exactly where to find you. Exactly when you would be alone."
The screens behind him flickered to life. Security footage from the past weeks. Me, entering the clinic. Me, leaving. Me, unaware that death had been stalking my routine.
"But you weren't alone." He touched a button. The footage changed. Shadows moving where shadows should not move. Bodies falling in alleys I had walked through minutes later. Threats I never knew existed, ended by someone I never saw coming.
"Papa, what..."
"Watch." His finger traced a figure on the screen. Barely visible. A ghost that moved like violence given form. "Three weeks ago. Volkov assassin waiting in your parking structure. Dead before you arrived." Another screen. "Two weeks ago. Kidnapping team outside your favorite coffee shop. Eliminated." Screen after screen. Death after death. All with one thing connecting them.
Me.
I had been hunted. And I had been protected.
"You've had a guardian angel, principessa." My father's words wrapped around my throat like cold fingers. "One who's been keeping very careful watch.”
- Writer
