Bound By Sin

Rain fell heavily down, drenching everything that strayed within its range, and caused the sidewalks to shine in the neon glow. As Elena Carter locked the back door of the Moonlight Diner, she wrapped her coat more tightly around herself and bent her head into the biting wind. The familiar stench of greasy fries and dark coffee clung to her, but all she’d been thinking about was how tired she was and how her tips hadn’t been enough to pay rent for another month.

Low thunder rumbled across the sky, like the city itself growling at her. She ordinarily was careful not to use the alley that pressed between the diner and the vacant laundromat next door when it was dark out. After all, alleys were about as sketchy as it got, with shadows that could conceal anything. But tonight, her urge to take a shortcut overrode her better judgment until she caught sight of a figure hunched against the dumpster at the end of the alley.

She stopped in her tracks.

For a second, she thought it was trash — a heterogenous pile of plastic bags. But then, it stirred. A hand moved, barely perceptibly. The figure let out a groan.

Elena’s heart raced.

No. Please, not tonight.

With a combination of dread and curiosity, she crept closer, her eyes wide, attempting to make sense of what she was observing in the low light. That’s when she saw the blood — dark and glistening under the flickering street lamp. It was oozing through the man’s shirt and collecting at his feet. The jacket was torn, draping off one shoulder, and a nasty gash crossed his ribs.

“Oh, Jesus…,” she whispered.

The man did a weak turn of the head. His lips moved like he had something to say, but nothing came.

Elena took a step back, instinctively.

She had to fight the urge to walk away. She should call for help. An ambulance. Police.

But something about that man froze her in place. It wasn’t just the blood. It was the haunting look in his nearly-closed eyes. A blend of agony and something worse — like he had seen too much, gone through too much.

“Help…” he croaked.

One word, and it broke her hesitation.

But as she looked down at him, she saw more. Both claimed someone was holding on for dear life.

“Oh, crap,” she muttered. “Fine. But if you die in my car, I’m leaving you on the curb.’”

Struggling, she half-dragged/half-carried him out around the corner, where her old Corolla muscled into the curb. She ripped off her jacket and pressed it against his side, hoping it would staunch the flow. His blood seeped through the fabric almost immediately.

“Hang on,” she said through gritted teeth, inserting the key into the ignition. “Just… don’t die yet, O.K.?”

He didn’t respond. His forehead dropped against the window.

It was its own struggle to get him up to her tiny apartment, two blocks away. By the time she slammed the door behind him and lowered him onto her couch, she was exhausted and sweating. Her tiny studio smelled of lavender soap and leftover ramen, an average person’s mess of life — and now the bloody stranger had sprawled in the middle of it.

She hurried to collect a towel, some peroxide, and whatever else she could find in a pathetic little first-aid kit under the sink, muttering to herself, “This is so freaking insane. This is how people get murdered.”

But she kept working nevertheless.

The man’s chest was its own chronicle of war, old scars and new, birds of a feather in the end, even as they spread. Whoever he’d been, he’d seen some serious sh*t. The deep gouge across his ribs indicated someone had intended to kill him and failed.

He stirred when she poured peroxide over his wound, cursing.

“Sh*t! That hurts!” he hissed, trying to rise.

“Stop moving! You’ll make it worse,” she said sharply, shoving him down again with surprising strength.

His eyes opened, focusing on hers for the first time. They were a chilling, steely gray, and she felt as if he could see all the way through her.

“Who… are you?” he managed to croak out.

“I should be asking you that,” she said, as she fumbled to sew up the wound with trembling hands, cursing the YouTube tutorials under her breath. “It’s a good thing I didn’t just leave you to bleed out.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I’m not a coldhearted b*tch,” she retorted.

He looked at her as if he were weighing her answer before he lost consciousness again.

Hours went by. Elena eventually fell asleep in the old armchair facing the couch, with a bat propped against her knee for protection. When he finally stirred, it yanked her awake, her heart slamming.

He sat up slowly, now shirtless with bandages around his ribs. His skin had the softness of pale blood, his eyes wide open and alert, studying her closely.

“Who are you?” she whispered, lowering her voice.

His gaze snapped to hers.

“Don’t scream,” he cautioned, his tone cold.

She merely nodded, caught in place by his sharp gaze.

A little tenser air, trepidation, if you will.

He sat up straighter, putting out a hand for his coat — it was a damp, dirty thing — and pulled out a sleek, dark pistol.

Elena flinched, reflexively shielding her face.

“Relax,” he said, laying the gun on the table as casually as you would a cup of coffee.

“Oh, super reassuring,” she said, attempting to sound normal.

He continued to watch her, his expression inscrutable.

“Do you have a name?” she finally said, willing herself to sound steady.

“Dante.”

No last name, no additional explanation.

“Okay, Dante. So, what happened to you?” she pressed.

“No,” he replied simply.

The room was filled with thick silence.

He looked around at her place — a little kitchenette, a chipped coffee mug drying by the sink, and string lights fighting to stay lit. She could see something flickering in his eyes; confusion or disbelief, perhaps, as if her ordinary life were a world he couldn’t quite grapple with.

“You live here?” he said, the shock clear in his voice.

“Yes, I do. And now you’re sort of crashing here, I suppose,” she said, surprised by her abruptness.

He made no apology. So instead, he reclined, his fingers splayed gently on the table near the gun.

“You saved my life,” he said, as though he were trying to figure out why she’d done so.

“Wow, thanks. That’s like the absolute bare minimum of what a decent person does,” she said, half joking.

“Depends on who you ask,” he shrugged like it didn’t matter.

Elena leaned in, her curiosity boiling over. “Listen, Dante, I know you’ve got tons of stuff going on. Enemies, whoever did this to you, sure… but I didn’t sign up for any of that. I was just trying to help somebody who appeared to be two seconds away from bleeding out.’

“You did help,” he said.

“Cool. So now what? You gonna intimidate me into silence? Kill me when I least expect it?”

He cocked his head as though considering. “You wouldn’t even believe me if I told you no, would you?”

“No way,” she said flatly, and to her surprise, she was rewarded with a small smirk on his face, which softened his generally intimidating nature.

“You’re sharper than you sound,” he said.

“Thanks, I guess,” she said, sarcasm dripping from her voice.

Dante could see her hands trembling slightly in her lap. “You’re scared,” he stated.

“No kidding,” she shot back.

He bent in a little closer and lowered his voice. “Don’t be scared.”

His calmness, she thought, was strange, bordering on infuriating. “Easy for you to say. You’re the one who has the gun and that fierce face. I’m sitting here at a can of leftover soup and a waitress uniform.”

That hardening his expression.

“I owe you,” he said after a pause. “And I take debts seriously.”

“Great. Then repay me by leaving,” she said, attempting to sound tough.

“I can’t. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

He was silent, his eyes wandering.

He rose, crouching before coming to standing, his body wincing but steady. The wound wouldn’t be fatal. Not anymore.

“You have food?” he said as if this were the most casual thing in the world, as if they weren’t two people stuck in a tense, uncertain situation, but simply two friends chatting over coffee.

She stared at him, bewildered for a second. “Are you serious?”

He didn’t bother to wait for her reply, having already strolled to her tiny kitchenette.

As she warmed some chicken soup, the silence between them became too heavy.

Dante wolfed the food down like a man who hadn’t eaten in days. But even then there was something deliberate about his motions, a sort of vigilance in his eating.

She wanted to ask him what happened and who had hurt him and why he had a gun, but part of her knew that pressing him too hard would soil the fragile peace they’d only just begun to forge.

Instead, she decided to say, “You’re not just some random guy, are you?”

He paused mid-bite. “No.”

She hesitated, but he didn’t expand.

“This is the part where you explain to me what’s going on,” she said, fighting the irritation from creeping into her voice.

“This is not a story,” he replied, flatly. “It’s survival.”

“Mine or yours?” she shot back, chilled.

“Both,” he answered, his gaze unwavering, and that sent a chill through her.

Hours slipped by, tension hanging in the air.

Dante claimed the floor, refusing the couch even though she insisted. She was able to sleep little, every sound made her start, every gust of wind at the window was footsteps coming for her.

But he stayed put.

When dawn came streaking the sky gray and gold, Dante was still here, leaning against that wall, his eyes nothing but raw.

Just after sunrise, her phone rang.

In a second, he snatched it from his coat pocket and went out to the balcony. Elena peered through the glass, attempting to read his body language.

His voice was fast and staccato, in a language she didn’t recognize — Italian, perhaps? The tone was cold, serious.

Then he faced her, his expression inscrutable.

“I have to go,” he said.

Her heart pounded and, she said, she felt relief and fear all at once.

“Will you come back?” she asked, her voice shaky.

He didn’t reply, only walked to the door.

He hesitated at the threshold.

“You’re in this now, Elena.”

She shot to her feet. “In what?”

Dante’s eyes were fierce, searing into her.

“My world,” he said.

Then the door clicked closed behind him.

Elena then knew it was all over.

She had saved a man.

But perhaps she had also committed to a perilous game.

Just before dawn, Boomer woke up to an unnatural silence.

The apartment still stank of the mess left in the wake of last night’s storm — water pooled in strange places, the windows still slightly misted. It seemed strange, even creepy. She sat up and groaned a little, her body achy from the lumpy mattress she had slept on all night. A sliver of light squeezed through the blinds, highlighting little specks of dust dancing in the still air. But Dante was nowhere to be found.

As those thoughts swirled through her mind, an unwelcome chill crept down her spine. And not just from the chill air. It was because of him the man who had bled out all over her floor, the man whose personal chaos had spilled forth onto her carpet. Instead of putting her in harm’s way for seeing something she wasn’t supposed to, he had treated her like a puzzle he wanted to figure out. Or maybe tear apart.

She wrapped her arms around herself and stepped gingerly out of the bedroom. The bloodstain