“Let’s focus on you.” Gritting my teeth, I swam harder, very aware of his life rapidly fading. “Then we’ll focus on her.”

“Christ!” He bowed in my arm-lock. “Shit, it hurts.”

“What hurts?” I couldn’t see if the bullet in his arm was the worst or least of his problems.

“Fucking everything.” He howled at the moon as I crawled the final distance, hoisting him closer, accidentally digging my fingers into a sore spot.

Where the hell is Michaels?

He needed a doctor. Immediately.

I could throw him in the car and screech to the nearest hospital, but what if he didn’t make it? His skin was blue. His lips almost black in the night.

Reaching the wharf, I briefly worried how I’d haul his tux-waterlogged ass from the bay. Whatever injuries he had would hurt like a motherfucker.

But my worries were for nothing.

As my fingers lashed around the emergency stair rung and I took the first climb, Elder’s eyes rolled in the back of his head, and he turned into a pasty cadaver in my embrace.

My heart stopped as I placed my hand under his nose, checking for breath—fearing nothing and begging for something.

When the softest puff of heat revealed he wasn’t dead just merely unconscious, I stopped being so gentle and worked with speed instead.

I hauled his battered body up the stairs. I flopped him onto the wharf like a well caught fish. I landed on my hands and knees beside him, wringing wet and exhausted.

He didn’t wake up. But his heart didn’t stop pumping more and more blood from his body, slowly pooling beneath him, dripping black into the tide.

My job wasn’t finished.

His minutes were almost spent.

Standing, I bent and with a silent apology, somehow managed to manhandle his useless dying form over my shoulder.

I began the long journey toward the gangway, making a deal with Death not to take someone else I cared about.

It took my wife-to-be and unborn child.

It would not take my friend.

Not today, anyway.

Chapter One

______________________________

Elder

PAIN.

Considerable, uncomfortable pain.

My eyes flew open as my lips gasped for breath. Last I remembered, I was drowning. Treading water with blood seeping from gunshot wounds and the growl of a speedboat stealing my woman.

Goddammit, Pim.

Launching upright, I cried out as pain turned to filleting agony, shoving me backward onto the bed.

Where the hell am I?

Blinking fuzzy eyes, I reconned my current hellhole. Sheets smelled like me, walls were familiar, furniture known.

My room.

Wait…the last time I’d been here, I’d been fighting for my life while Pim stood captive by Chinmoku. Thanks to that battle, a fair amount of redecoration had happened.

Struggling to sit up enough to look at the carpet, I steeled myself for the crimson splatters of blood and bloated bodies; for smashed furniture and torn curtains.

However, instead of a crime scene, sterile cleanliness stared back. The stringent whiff of bleach and industrial grade cleaners hung in the air, the carpet darker in places where it remained wet from being washed.

No sign of any struggle or massacre.

Everything righted.

Everything the same.

Did I dream it? Had I smoked a bad batch of weed and believed in a nightmare where Pim was stolen and I was fucking shot by some French asshole who’d singlehandedly destroyed my life?

If I had, why the hell did everything hurt so damn much?

Footsteps came from outside. I glowered at the open door, my muscles locked and ready to defend.

I might be on the Phantom, but everything else was foreign—including my body.

“Ah, you’re awake. About time.” Selix marched in, a tray in his hands with silverware and something steaming in a bowl. “Michaels said you’d be out for a while, but it’s been hours, Prest.”

“Wh—” I coughed; my throat burned with salt.

Had I drowned? Was this purgatory where my soul thought it was alive while my body was nibbled by crustaceans at the bottom of the sea? And if I wasn’t dead, who had found me? How was I alive?

Where the hell is Pim?

My stupid brain tossed question after question at me, demanding to know every minuscule detail immediately.

My heart chugged as stress layered my system. “What happened?” I grimaced as my voice sounded shipwrecked and full of driftwood.

“Chinmoku found you.” Selix stepped toward my bed and set the tray on the table. “Then some French fucker arrived, mowed down the Chinmoku, shot you, and took Pim.”

So it wasn’t a bad joint, after all.

Shit.

“I know all that,” I snapped. “I mean, what’s happened since? Where were you? Have you found Pim? How long have I been out?” Glancing down at my pain-stabbed body, I pried up the blanket and inspected.

Holy shit.

Naked, my skin was no longer the blended western-eastern tan I knew but a multitude of bruises, contusions, and trauma. I looked like Pim did when we first met.

My dragon tattoo hid beneath wrapped bandages, twining their way around my ribs, up and over my shoulder and left bicep. My ring finger on my right hand rested in a splint, my left arm nestled in a sling, and a brace wrapped around my ankle with Velcro.

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