Mia POV
The rain doesn't care that I've been on my feet for fourteen hours.
It comes down hard and cold, soaking through my jacket before I even make it past the corner. My shoes squeak with every step. My back aches in that deep, specific way that only comes from carrying plates and fake smiles for too long. I count the steps to my building the way I always do when I'm this tired a stupid habit my mom taught me when I was little. Count the steps, Mia. Makes the walk shorter.
Sixty-two steps from the corner.
I'm on step forty-seven when I see him.
At first I think it's a trash bag. One of those big black ones the building super never puts out properly. But trash bags don't have hands. And this one does one arm stretched out toward the drain like whoever it belongs to was trying to crawl somewhere before they ran out of fight.
I stop.
My brain says: keep walking.
My feet do not move.
He's face-down in the alley beside my building, soaked through, completely still except for I have to look twice the shallow rise of his back. Barely. But there.
Breathing. He's breathing.
I look up and down the street. It's 3 a.m. on a Tuesday and this part of the city doesn't do witnesses. There's no one. Just rain and yellow streetlight and me standing on the sidewalk staring at a man who might be dying six feet away.
I pull out my phone.
Nine. One.
I stare at the screen. My thumb hovers.
Call it in, Mia. Walk away. This is not your problem. You don't even know this man. He could be dangerous. He could be
I crouch down beside him.
I don't know why. I genuinely do not know why. Something in my chest just moves. Like a hand reaching out before the brain catches up.
I press two fingers to his neck the way the first-aid course at the community center taught me four years ago. His skin is ice cold.
But there's a pulse. Faint and stuttery, like a phone on its last two percent but there.
He's been shot. I can see it now two wounds, one in his left shoulder, one lower on his right side, both still seeping dark red into the rain. No phone in his jacket pockets. No wallet. Nothing that tells me who he is or why someone put bullets in him and left him here like garbage.
I look at my phone again.
And I think about the last time I called for help. My mom, two years ago, and the way the phone rang and rang before anyone answered, and how by the time they came it was already too late. I think about how the system works for some people and not for others, and how this man on this pavement in this rain does not look like the kind of person the system was built for.
He'll be dead before they get here.
I put my phone in my pocket.
"Okay," I say out loud, to no one, to myself, to the rain. "Okay. Come on."
Getting him upstairs almost kills me.
He's dead weight all muscle and height and absolutely zero cooperation. I get him upright against the wall first, then figure out how to take most of his weight across my shoulders. He makes a sound when I move him. Not words. Just pain, raw and involuntary. It means he's still in there somewhere.
"I've got you," I tell him, which is probably the most insane thing I've ever said. I don't have him. He's twice my size and bleeding on my jacket and we have four flights of stairs ahead of us.
It takes twenty minutes. I stop twice. My legs shake. I talk the whole way up stupid, nervous babbling about nothing, just to fill the silence, just to keep moving. By the third floor I'm crying a little, though I couldn't tell you if it's from the effort or from something else entirely.
I get him through my door and onto the couch and I stand there for a full minute just breathing.
Then I go to work.
I learned basic wound care from a book. My mom kept a first-aid manual in the kitchen drawer like other people keep takeout menus. I thought it was embarrassing when I was twelve. Right now I would kiss that book.
I cut his shirt away from the wounds the fabric is soaked and sticking and there's no gentle way to do it. Clean towels. Pressure. I check both entry points. The bleeding is slow now, not arterial. The shoulder wound is bad but manageable. The side wound scares me more. I press down hard and he flinches, a sharp inhale, but still doesn't wake up.
His fever is already building under my hands. His skin is going from cold to burning and I know that's not good.
I get the first-aid kit from under the sink. Butterfly strips. Gauze. I do what I can do and try not to think about what I can't.
It takes an hour. By the end my hands are steady in the way they get when I've gone past fear into just doing the same way I feel during a bad rush at the diner when three tables need things at once and panicking isn't an option.
When it's done, I sit back on my heels and look at him properly for the first time.
He's I notice this against my will very clearly not ordinary. Even unconscious, even damaged, there's something about the way he's built that speaks to a life lived in controlled, deliberate danger. Strong jaw. Dark hair pushed back from his face by the rain. Hands that have seen work but not labor no calluses in the right places for someone physical, but old scars on the knuckles that say something else entirely.
He doesn't look like a victim.
He looks like someone who forgot, just for one night, to be careful.
I reach forward to check his temperature and my hand brushes against his ribs as his shirt falls open.
I go still.
There is a tattoo across the left side of his ribcage. I've seen tattoos before half the kitchen staff at the diner have them, roses and names and faded anchors.
This is not that.
A serpent, coiled and massive, its body wrapping around a crown so detailed it looks almost real. It is done in black ink so precise it looks like it was carved rather than drawn. Not the tattoo of a man who picked something off a parlor wall.
The tattoo of a mark. A brand. An identity.
Something cold runs down my spine.
My hands go still on his skin, rain still dripping from my hair onto the floor, and I stare at that crowned serpent and feel for the first time since I found him genuinely, deeply afraid.
Not of him.
Of how much I don't know.
His eyes open.
Dark. Fully alert. Staring directly at me.
He has been awake this whole time.