Huntsman by Cambria Hebert
42
Earth
Consciousness crashed in like a bad dream. The peace of nothingness ruined by the confusion of reality. The room was bright, but everything was blurred. Eventually, my eyesight cleared, and my tongue darted out to wet, rough, cracked lips.
The room was small, sparse, and smelled like antiseptic.
Not at all how I imagined death to be.
“You’re awake.”
Startled, I glanced up at an unknown man who used an unknown voice. I wasn’t afraid, though, because, really, what was left to be afraid of?
“Who are you?”
“No one important.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re just here until you’re strong enough to go.”
My brow creased, confusion mudding my mind. It seemed the answers I wanted would only be found within me, for this person would be of no help. Dull pain in my side made me lift the threadbare blanket and gaze down at the large white bandage.
Everything that happened replayed on fast-forward inside my brain. Shooting Mother. Being chased. Being shot by Hyung and then carried away to be discarded.
“I’m not dead,” I murmured.
“No. You are very much alive.”
Play dead. The words Daeshim whispered echoed in the back of my brain.
The man nearby cleared his throat, and I glanced up. “But no one is to know.”
I frowned.
“You cannot go home. Mal-Chin no longer exists. You must disappear and never return.”
Reaching down, I palmed the wound in my side.
“It’s not a serious wound. He avoided all the organs, just hit you where it would bleed.”
He didn’t want to kill me. He only made it look like he did.
“Everyone assumes you’re dead.” The man held up a yellow envelope. “A passport. A new ID. There’s money but not much. You need to go.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Three days.”
I reached for the envelope, and he let me take it. “Did he…? Did Da—”
“Yes. He risked a lot, so don’t betray him.”
I couldn’t say his name anymore. He wasn’t my brother any longer. I was alone. Set free. I thought he betrayed me, but he didn’t.
“There’s clothes. A meal. Don’t ever come back.”
I killed our mother, and he set me free. Did that mean he forgave me? Or did he just not want my blood on his hands?
Either way, I guessed it didn’t matter because I’d never see him again.
Consciousness cameto me slowly but then all at once. I jolted awake, ignoring the pain in my shoulder to sit up, looking around wildly.
Where is she? Virginia!
“You’re awake!”
Her voice called to me like a siren in the middle of a stormy sea. I rotated toward her, world condensing into a singular person.
Perched in her chair beside my bed, she was rumpled and looked as if she’d been through hell, but the smile on her lips negated it all.
“Sprite.” I breathed out, everything inside me relaxing.
“How are you feeling?”
Wait a minute. Where were we? The last thing I remembered was Mother falling out of the Tower to her death and the building filling with cops.
I glanced around at the sterile room and then down at the IV in my hand. “What the fuck is this?”
“You’re in the hospital. You passed out.”
“I did not,” I argued.
“Did too.”
“One bullet ain’t enough to bring me down.” I scoffed.
“You lost a lot of blood.” Her lower lip wobbled.
Shit.
“All right now, sprite. It’s okay. I’m fine.” I pushed up, ignoring the pain in my shoulder and the tug of the IV in the back of my hand so I could put her in the bed with me.
My legs were barely over the side of the bed when a hand fell onto my arm. I glanced up. Neo’s impenetrable dark gaze met mine.
He pushed a little on my arm, then picked Virginia up and motioned for me to move back onto the mattress. I did, and to my surprise, Neo placed her gingerly beside me.
Lifting my arm, Virginia burrowed beneath it, forearm wrapping across my chest, which was covered in an ugly-ass hospital gown.
“Where the hell are my clothes?” I glowered.
“Ruined from all the blood,” Ivory replied.
I glanced up. Across the room sat my entire family: Beau, Ethan, Fletcher, and Ivory. As I stared, Neo returned to where he’d likely been before, and Ivory plopped down in his lap.
“You’re all here,” I said, dumb.
“Where else would we be?” Fletcher asked.
My eyes moved back to Ivory. “How’s your head?”
“She has a concussion.” Neo glowered. He had a new shiner on his eye that was not courtesy of me.
“Why aren’t you in bed?” I demanded.
“Because I’m in here instead,” she retorted.
Virginia stole all my attention when her chin tipped up and those gold-flecked brown eyes focused on me. “Does it hurt very bad?”
“Feels much better now,” I whispered, pressing a kiss to her forehead. The moment of relief I felt holding her was short-lived.
Pulling back, I stared down at her, scrutinizing her from every angle. “Are you hurt? How long have I been in here? Why are you covered in blood?”
“Told you to clean up,” Neo muttered.
Virginia made a face. “It’s only been a couple hours. I haven’t had time to clean up.”
“She refused to leave your side,” Fletcher put in.
“You haven’t even been looked at by a doctor?” I bellowed.
“Ethan called one in here so she didn’t have to leave.” Fletcher volunteered more information.
“And?” I worried, grasping her chin lightly to take in her swollen lower lip and neck filled with purple splotches. Rage swept through me all over again. “Did I kill him?” I asked the room.
Everyone knew I meant the man who put those marks on V.
“Yes,” Beau replied.
“Good,” I muttered, lightly fingering the blemishes. Feeling Virginia’s eyes, I met them. “You saw that too?”
“My eyes were open the whole time,” she confirmed.
“You’re still here,” I murmured, leaning in to kiss the tip of her nose.
I have a thing for her nose.
Tell no one.
“Where else would I be?” she whispered, her hand grasping my wrist.
“It wouldn’t matter. I’d find you.”
“I know.”
“You sure you’re okay?” I slid my hand over the back of her head, trailing my fingers through her hair, and then felt a ripple of surprise when my fingers met air too soon.
Oh, right. I’d kinda chopped it all off.
“Besides that hack job of a haircut, she’s fine,” Ivory informed me. “What is it with you and cutting hair?”
I ignored her.
“Sweetheart?”
She nuzzled into my chest. “I’m okay.”
“I didn’t put her in bed with you to become nauseated.” Neo glowered. “Stop being so gross.”
“At least me and Ethan do that in private.” Fletcher agreed.
“You do not,” literally everyone replied.
Fletcher blushed.
Tucking V a little closer against my side, I asked, “What happened?”
“The police and firefighters came, arrested the guys with the guns, and brought everyone else to the hospital.”
“And… her?”
“She’s dead.” Beau confirmed.
“Why aren’t the police here? Why hasn’t Fig handcuffed me to this bed?”
“He would not!” Virginia declared.
I patted her head and pushed her back into my chest. She was cute.
“We told them what happened,” Fletcher explained.
I glanced at Ethan, lifting a brow.
“The police questioned us. We told them what we could, that we were attacked and held at gunpoint and the woman attacked us before falling out a window.”
Still, the police should be in here demanding answers.
Beau cleared his throat. “The Black Rose is a new Asian gang recently formed in the city and trying to gain a foothold. They’ve been committing crimes and making a name for themselves by leaving a black rose everywhere. When they got wind that the cops questioned you about the tattoo on the dead guy, they came looking for you. Figured since you were Asian with a bad reputation, they could pin a lot of their crimes on you. So they trashed your bar, luring you into that alley where you were attacked. When you killed one of their guys, they decided to get some revenge.”
Beau looked at Virginia still curled into my side.
“Hey,” I whispered in her hair. “You comfortable? You need me to adjust you?”
She shook her head against me.
I felt Neo’s stare, and I briefly met it before Beau started talking again.
“So they lit the Tower on fire to empty out the building and went after Virginia and Ivory. They didn’t plan on all of us showing up to fight back.”
They didn’t think I’d have a new family.
I was quiet a long while. It was a neat and tidy story. So clean it almost seemed believable. But everyone in this room knew better.
“And the men I killed?” I finally asked.
“Self-defense,” Ethan replied easily.
“How is pushing a woman out a window self-defense?”
“You didn’t push her. The beast did,” Neo stated. “We all saw him. Some men brought in Emogen and dumped her on the floor. It clearly set him off, and he reacted.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Down the hall,” Virginia told me. “Emogen has a concussion and a few stitches in her head. Those men must have hit her hard. The beast wasn’t hurt, but he needed oxygen from smoke inhalation. They are both going to be staying the night.”
“In the same room?”
“That dude is wild when she’s not in his sight,” Beau said. “He wouldn’t calm down unless they put them together.”
Interesting.
Virginia tapped on my chest, and I glanced down. Her eyes were wide and clear despite the dark circles beneath them. “Do you think Emogen is safe with him? That man is kind of scary.”
“He’s no scarier than I am.” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “She’ll be fine.”
“The cops had no issue believing he’s the one who shoved her after the way he acted earlier,” Beau said of the man we only knew as Beast.
“Will he get in trouble?” Virginia worried.
“Considering they were there because they started a fire and tried to kill us? It will likely be considered self-defense as well,” Beau told her.
“You sure have all this worked out,” I observed.
“Not all of us needed a nap,” he retorted.
Gasping, Virginia pushed up on my chest to glare at Beau. “He was shot! He jumped in front of a bullet for me! It was hardly a nap!”
Beau held up his hands in surrender. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re covering for me,” I said at last, eyes sweeping the room. “All of you.”
“You took a bullet for my sister,” Neo said.
“Nobody would have been shooting at her if it weren’t for me.”
Offended, Virginia glanced up. “You are hardly responsible for other people’s foul deeds.”
I made a face. “Which one of you taught her to talk like a richie?” I said, dividing my gaze between Ivory and Ethan.
Ethan beamed with pride.
Figures.
“But I am responsible.” I reminded the room. “And everyone knows it.”
“You’re our family,” Fletcher said.
“Even after everything you all saw today?” I pressed. It was scary how much I wanted them to accept me, foul deeds and all.
“Well, it would really be nice if you stopped killing people. I mean, eventually, we will run out of plausible alibis for you,” Fletcher said almost cheerfully.
Muffled laughter across the room made me stiffen.
Holding on to V protectively, I glanced at the curtain dividing the room. A curtain I hadn’t even noticed. Grim, I looked at my family across the room, partly incredulous they would have a conversation, knowing we weren’t alone.
Before I could do anything, a hand closed around the edge of the curtain and yanked it back.
Daeshim stood there wearing a set of blue scrub pants but no shirt. Behind him was the bed he’d clearly been occupying.
“Hyung,” I said, emotion welling in my chest. All this emotion stuff was hella annoying. “I thought you…”
“I’m harder to kill than that.”
His arm was in a sling, his entire shoulder and upper arm bandaged. There were cuts and bruises on his face, a scrape on his forehead, and what looked like a bite mark on his collarbone.
“Did someone bite you?” I wondered.
He grimaced. “That guy really is a beast.”
There was an IV in the back of his hand, and his black hair was wild around his face and neck. The black rose tattoo on his chest made me suddenly very aware of the same tattoo I had on my hip. The doctors probably saw it. Without thinking, my hand slid toward the area, wanting to rub it like I could make it disappear.
Beau cleared his throat, and I glanced up. A very slight shake of his head stopped my progress. My arm went back around V.
I shared a look with Beau for long seconds, but then Daeshim spoke again.
“Thanks, ah, for getting me to the hospital.”
“You’re Earth’s brother! Of course we would,” Fletcher declared. Then he turned to me. “How come you never told us you had a brother?”
“It’s complicated,” I murmured.
“Don’t you think we’ve earned the right to your secrets?” A slight edge crept into Neo’s voice. “Haven’t we earned your trust?”
He glanced pointedly at my sister before his eyes settled back on mine.
He was right. The entire family deserved an explanation. They covered for me. Protected me. Became accomplices for me. They’d even run into danger for me.
Running a hand over Virginia’s head, I gazed down at her. “What do you think, sprite? You wanna know too?”
She nodded.
And so I told them. I told them a tale that was actually the truth about a boy who was born into a powerful and iconic Korean mafia, the second-born son of a man who was brutally murdered when people turned against him. About my mother who stepped up to the helm and ended up far more ruthless and colder than my father ever was.
I was expected to kill. I was expected to steal, threaten, and intimidate. Drugs, money laundering… human trafficking. I was expected to embrace it all and then eventually rule under Daeshim, our mother’s namesake.
I learned to fight the moment I learned to walk. I learned to never trust, and I was taught how to lie.
It grew too much, because long before I became the Huntsman, I’d been a boy. A boy who was too soft for drugs and killing. Who stumbled into a shed where sex slaves were chained up and had nightmares for weeks. A boy who’d seen photos of his father’s dismembered body and a boy who was only bred by his mother to be the head of an army and never a son.
Daeshim had been the only thing to stand between me and being broken. A boy five years my senior who took on far more than he had to because I was too weak.
“One night, I snapped,” I said, voice hoarse from talking for so long. It felt good, though, to pour all this out. I’d never known how hard it was, how much energy it took to keep it all in.
“I snuck into Mother’s office and saw a folder of pictures. Girls and boys I went to school with, people I thought of as friends. They were listed to be taken, drugged, and sold to the highest bidder.”
I still remember the sick feeling that twisted my gut when I saw those photos of smiling young students and envisioned them chained up in the shed like those others I’d seen before.
“I’d had enough. I was young and stupid… ruled by emotion. Without thinking, I confronted her, the almighty Black Rose. I gave her an ultimatum: to stop or I’d tell. She locked me in a cell for three days until I attacked a guard and escaped. They chased. I shot her. I thought she was dead.”
My voice fell quiet. The emotion from all those years ago resurfaced inside me like the swell of an overfull sea.
“The Black Rose demands an eye for an eye,” I heard Daeshim explain, picking up where I left off, perhaps sensing I couldn’t keep going. “So as heir to the organization, I said I would remove him. No one questioned my loyalty. I’d already proved it many times. So I shot him and took his body to dump it… except I made sure he wasn’t dead. I took him to a friend who cared for him until he was able to flee the country.”
“Why didn’t you just kill me?” I asked, unable to keep the question in.
“Because you’re my brother and because you were the only one strong enough to try and stop her.”
“But I couldn’t.”
“No, but you got out, and that was enough for me,” Daeshim replied quietly.
But he didn’t. I could only imagine the things he had to say and do.
“But she came here. She knew where you were,” Virginia said. “How did she know you were alive?”
I glanced at Daeshim, wondering if he knew the answer.
He shrugged. “An anonymous call came in. It was a woman. She gave Mother your name and location. Mother had it checked out, and then she knew.”
He fell silent, but it was a charged silence, a silence filled with truth.
“She punished you for not killing me.”
“Yes.”
Before I could ask more, he continued. “She was haunted by that night. After you shot her and she almost died, she was never quite the same. Some say she suffered PTSD. Some say she just went nuts. Maybe it was a little of both. She would wake up screaming. She had panic attacks during the day. She hated guns, but she continued to use them anyway because she refused to admit weakness.”
“And Kwan?”
Daeshim snorted. “They got together after she woke from her coma. I don’t know if he cared about her or just her power, but he did help keep her calm.”
“She was calm when we saw her?” Fletcher wondered, awe in his tone.
Daeshim chuckled. “You’re kinda cute.”
A hard look crossed Ethan’s face, and he reached for Fletcher, pulling him into his lap. “He’s mine. Don’t even think about it.”
Daeshim rolled his eyes.
“Are you gay?” I asked, shock rippling through me.
“Of course not,” he said. “Mother would never allow that.”
“So you escaped from your family and came here, lived on the street as a pickpocket until my father helped you,” Ivory surmised, glancing at me.
“Yes.”
Fletcher frowned. “You escaped because you didn’t want to be a killer… but then you became one anyway.”
Wasn’t that just the crux of it all?
Was I a villain by birth or by my own making?
Perhaps both.
Either way, it was irrefutable proof that there was nowhere a man can go if it wasn’t meant to be. It didn’t really matter how I got here because the destination was the same.