Chapter 4

I crumpled the paper just as my heartbeat increased in a thousand folds, those fools are gonna pay for this. I swear it on Nicole’s innocent head. 

“Let’s get out of here.” I said to Lucas without turning around as I stepped over the still alive but drugged up or injured bodies lying around on the cold tiled floor.

“Hey! What about me? What are you guys anyways? Y’all are assassins? Oh! You were supposed to capture the kid with the white hair and I dunno, kill him maybe? Holy shit...” The injured man continued to list out more absurd things he felt we came into the gym to do, but he was the least of my problems at the moment.

I waved my index finger twice at Lucas and immediately, Lucas cocked his gun and aimed it at the man’s head. 

“Holy shit, what do you wanna do? You wanna kill me? Fuck, please no! I won’t say a thing, I swear to you. I only want you to help me up, nothing more.”

Seems like the man wasn’t that dumb, but too bad and he already knows what I look and sound like, he has to die.

I turned back around and went outside when I felt two hands grab my feet. The fuck?

“Let go of my fucking legs, I don’t have time for this. Are you nuts?” I shook my right foot hard to get the stupid man off my feet but he held on hard, tears streaming down his almost white face. I glanced towards his leg, it was still bleeding badly, I wonder how he’s still conscious after losing so much blood. Seems like he isn’t so weak after all.

“Please don’t shoot me, please sir, I’ll do anything.”

“Not like you have a choice.” I mutter under my breath.

“Do you have a family?” I demanded, already sure Tristan was going to throw a fit for what I was already stupidly planning on doing

“No, I don’t. Just a baby sister, and she’s staying with our aunt in Mexico.” The man breathed hard after replying to my question, his face seemed to have gotten whiter.

“Lucas, bring him with us.” I ordered as I pulled my legs away from his grasp and made my way back towards the car.

Lucas and the almost unconscious dude were out in a few minutes and we were zooming out of the gym premises with the now unconscious guy.

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   Standing beside the window facing the busy streets of America at some minutes after seven, I swirled the  melting ice cubes around in my glass before taking another sip. The hard whisky burned my throat a little as it slid down my throat. 

“Auden,” Tristan’s voice called out to me. I glanced behind me and sighted him alighting the stairs and walking towards me. He stopped beside me and leaned his head against the cold glass of the window, his hair falling into his eyes.

Tristan and I were almost the same height, he was 6’3 while I was standing at 6’5. We shared so many similarities together which includes our hair colors. Our hair was dark at night. Tristan prefers his short while I wear mine to my shoulders. We looked so alike just as we looked so different. The shape of our face was almost the same thing, except for our eyes. He got Mum’s coffee brown eyes while I got gifted with dad’s ocean blue eyes. Our nose and lips were shaped the same way. We both have piercings on our ears. I have a few tattoos, while he had none - but we were not so similar when it comes to emotions, we were similar, yet so different.

“How’s Nicole?” I decided to break the silence with that question. Tristan barely glanced up as he replied.

“She’s asleep at the moment, her drip just got changed.”

“And the gunshot wound?” I inquired, my face turning into a grimace and a scowl at the same time. Just imagining the kind of pain Nicole had to go through today made my hand itch badly. She was just fucking sixteen years old and a girl. Who the hell hurt innocent girls? The fucking Xobra gang and their bunch of dumb people working for them.

“The bullet has been removed. Thankfully, it wasn't somewhere too critical, but a spot beside her right shoulder. It’s been stitched and bandaged, but she lost a lot of blood, hence her still unconscious state.”

Lord, the Xobra gang are going to fucking pay for this.

“Also, the dude you brought home is stitched up but still unconscious,” Tristan threw in just as he lifted his head away from the window, giving me a sidelong look.

Oh, the stranger from the gym.

“He can’t do anything to us, so relax. He doesn’t have any family either.” I tried reassuring Tristan’s unspoken questions. Growing up with Tristan had made me better at reading his facial expression.

“You shouldn’t have brought him back home still, you didn’t fucking shoot him, so why?” Tristan demanded.

“I dunno, I just feel bad about ending his life when he didn’t do a thing. And he helped with some information concerning Nicolas, remember?”

Tristan sighed beside me but didn’t say a thing again, I know he wasn’t cool about the fact that I brought a stranger home but because he’s always respected my decisions, he had no choice but to go along with whatever my plan was.

“Do you think Nicolas is still alive?” Tristan asked quietly after some time, his head back resting on the glass of the window.

“Of course he’s still alive. The Xobra are still fucking afraid of me, remember? And killing him is like signing their own death wish. They’re tricky but not dumb.” I reminded Tristan, knowing he needed all the reassurances he could get at this point. 

We’ve been avoiding talking about Nicolas since I came back from the gym with the crumpled up paper  deep in my pocket. The fuckers didn’t bother sending up a text message because they knew I was gonna track wherever the text came from, that was why they left a freaking hand written message.

The fuckers.