The Mafia's Nurse

Bloody Breadcrumbs

 Ace's weight is on me, not all of it thankfully, but enough that keeps me pressed between the asphalt and the side of a brick building in the grimy alleyway. A green and black dumpster hides us from whoever is attacking but it amplifies the gun fire as it ricochets or imbeds into the mental. 

I watch as Ace pulls out a Glock from somewhere beneath his suit jacket and with the stealth of a sleek panther has it aimed around the metal wall protecting us. Without so much as flinching he fires 3 shots with one hand as the other arm keeps me locked into him. The sound is louder and more impactful than I remember, and I jolt reaching to cover my ears, but with his hard frame crushing into mine I can't slide my hands close enough. 

So instead, I tuck into him. My face burying into his chest and curl as tightly as I can and focus on him- his heartbeat as it thunders- and watch as Ace fires into the darkness while still laying atop me. More men try to file into the alley from the back door we just came out of, but the bullets fly at them.

"Stay in!" Ace barks from across the way, he must have shoved us across the alley to duck behind the dumpster.

Surprisingly, fear isn't what I feel, I suppose that's not normal, but I can't bring myself to fear the bullets or the noise-even if it is ear drum reputing.

I hate how familiar I feel in this hail of bullet, how it reminds me of the ignorance of my past life. This was all around me and I chose to ignore it, allowing my father to shield me. But secretly I always expected this to one day happen. I knew my sheltered life having lived in a monster's shadow would catch up to me and I could find myself at the end of a gun eventually. 

But after running away and still winding up back in the criminal underbelly I wonder if I was just always meant to be in the life.

My eyes snap open at the sound of a painful cry from around our dumpster.  Ace's bullets have found its target. 

Ace doesn't seem to feel much from the cries and continues to empty his mag. It makes me question what he feels when he takes a man's life or inflicts irrevocable damage. I am not too foolish enough to think it keeps him up at night, but what life has he lived for that not to haunt him? Then again maybe it does. I have seen the many masks he wears for the people around him. How he molds to the things they need.

An arranged marriage? Me?

Those words should not be my focus right now but suddenly I cannot hear past it- not the bullets or the shouting. 

They want him to marry for this organization and that hits too close to home. This organization who has yet to give me more than a few strange companions and enough memories to fuel years of nightmares. Yet I am sure all I will recall of this ordeal if I ever live past it, is him. Him with his strange softness, with the sly smirks when he thinks I'm amusing, the way he cares deeply for those around him, and those devastating moments where he touched me as if he wasn't supposed to and it felt like lightening.

"Ace," I whisper not sure if he heard me over the longest two minutes of my life. 

He tenses and it's at the second that I hear the empty click of his trigger. No more bullets. But the sound of fire doesn't stop.

"We gotta move," He mumbles, and my eyes fly to the open door across from us with Dom and some other men handing off of it to shield them as they fire across the alley. 

I realize we can't make it to them, not unless we want to risk getting shot in the process. 

"Where?" I doubt I could make a coherent sentence if I wanted to, and Ace spares me the reticule of that by following my lead with a short command.

"Back."

Behind us leads to an even darker and more foreboding row of dirty asphalt. 

Right. We need to run away but to where?

"We'll cover you," Domonic says but doesn't spare us a glance as he signals to a few men inside who crouch low while slithering further into the restaurant hopefully to another back door to ambush these guys. 

Ace's hand finds the back of my neck and squeezes making my look up at him as he skillfully tucks his gun back into a hidden holster under the suit jacket. I notice the black charcoal stains and oily grease that now stains the once pristine suit, and it feels like days from when he was the well-kept man that greeted me this morning.  

"Theo," His voice finally grounds me and I realize he must have called my name a few times. 

"Yeah," I breath out, "yeah we gotta move."

He nods, "I need you to stay low and close. We run on three."

If he wasn't holding my neck so tight, I might have tilted it in question at the way he was looking. Pain- he looks in pain. 

"One."

I can do this. I mean I am an expert at running. Running away from home, from the devastation of losing patients, from any man who I could ever feel something for. 

Yes, running is good for me. 

"Two."

Holding that dark blue sea gaze, I see that look again. Pain. It is then that the oily stain on his suit jacket is tinted a bright crimson and spreading fast. 

"Three."

And we are running low and quick away from the gun fire and shouting and oncoming sirens. We push further into the slums of the alleyways and as far back as we can go before we take sharp unorganized turns. 

He is trying to lose anyone who might be tailing us, but I found that to be absolutely ridiculous seeing that we have steady trail of blood dripping onto the ground from his left side that couldn't be more obvious if it was breadcrumbs. 

Bloody breadcrumbs.