Unorthodox Thieves (Chap. 26): Not Exactly a Flesh Wound

To be honest, it wasn’t as bad as Lucius’s paranoid imagination had conjured. He had imagined pools of blood soaking into the sand. Rivets overflowing from her mouth. He blamed the earlier body for setting the expectations.

Instead, Reyna laid on two of the wood boxes, face a clammy white and fingers digging into the board cracks. Hovering over her and watching for unexpected movements with narrowed eyes, Claud kept his hand around hers. He was also probably the one who had wrapped her knee with what seemed to be a t-shirt.

“What happened?” Lucius suddenly found his trip with Wila and Mikhail gratifying. They hadn’t run into whoever attacked Reyna, even if Lucius had expected Wila to do so a couple times.

Claud jerked to meet Lucius’s eyes. His gaze darted between Wila and Lucius, then to Mikhail, who was crouching near the fishing rods and observing everyone with a blank, unreadable gaze. “Um,” Claud stammered, unsure of himself, and then let go of Reyna’s hand. “A gun. Two bullets. One missed but another got her. She passed out about halfway back.”

Was the injury that bad? Lucius was walking over to inspect the wound when Claud’s first words shot through his thoughts. “… Gun?” A memory pierced his brain like a bullet. “Chris?!”

Mikhail peered at him from the shadow-laden corners, making no movement to come closer. “Chris?” Recognition lit his eyes. “The… guy with the bird?”

“Yeah, him,” Lucius said, his hands moving in panicked, unrecognizable contortions. “He had a gun, you remember, right?” Grinding his teeth, he saw that the wall was too far to hit and settled for a kick that sent sand flying everywhere, including into his boots. “He must have been the one to shoot her! Must’ve not gone far when he left, and, and wanted some sort of exchange-!”

“I don’t believe it’s him,” Claud dully said without taking his eyes off Reyna, “We caught a glimpse of our attacker, although he took off rather quickly and I didn’t want to leave Reyna there, bleeding. I didn’t see his face, but he, and it looked to be like a man, was on the stout side of things.”

“But it has to be,” Lucius insisted, not quite listening to Claud’s description. He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. At some point, his body had begun to pace around the small area. “He had a motive for actually doing it.”

“Everyone has a motive, Luc.” Wila tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. A ghost of a smile hovered about her lips and Lucius wanted to knock it off her face. “This is a place where taking something from someone else gets you your own wish. Remember what I told you before?”

Claud made a questioning noise, although it was more from obligatory curiosity than an actual want. His fingers reached to untie the knots on the blood-soaked bandages. Then, he frowned and  his hands hovered in the air, occasionally shifting in a certain direction before returning to their uncertain origin.

Lucius’s position in this, right then, struck him. Wila knew that Reyna was the main factor in pushing her out, and with the woman incapacitated, they couldn’t do anything about her. No wonder she had looked relieved earlier- Lucius’s threats of exposure were null. Maybe they could push her out with numbers, but there was the risk of someone getting a fatal slash. Not to mention the fact that throwing out a teenager in such a place would be an inhumane act… Lucius banished the second reason from his traitorous mind. Age had nothing to do with danger. 

“What’s wrong?” Mikhail asked, his voice carried over by the sea breeze.

Eyes twitching, Lucius turned around to glare at Mikhail for asking the obvious. He was met with a furrowed brow and shake of the head.

Taking a deep breath, Lucius reached up and gripped the lighter hard enough that he was afraid he dented it. Of course he didn’t. Arianna would kill him if he did, when he got out of this place, that is. He would not get anywhere if he could not control his temper a little better. “Nothing.”

“Mm.” Claud took it as an appropriate answer. He stood up and stretched his limbs. Although angled at the green and copper-brown patches on the rock, Lucius noticed that a fleshy pink polluted some of the man’s eyes. Or perhaps it was red. The lighting made it difficult to tell the exact shade. “Mikhail, would you mind watching Reyna for a second? I’m going to go get some water to clean her wounds.”

“S-salt water?” Gulping, Mikhail took a step towards the unconscious woman. A flicker of doubt passed over his pale features like a snake, fleeing just as fast as it came. “Isn’t that… um, not good?”

“Well, I don’t have much else, do I?” Claud snapped, then seemed to internally recede. “Ah. Sorry. Just please, do it. Trust me, it works better than you’d think.”

“… Alright then.” The boy shuffled across the uneven ground, digging his toes into the sand with every dragging step. Sitting down and placing his hands on his knees, and then his chin on his bony knuckles, Mikhail’s eyes just came up over Reyna’s stomach.

“Tell me if she wakes up!” With that, Claud broke into a jog, swinging down to hook a basket in one hand without slowing. It only took several seconds after the man left the shade of the overhang for him to degrade into a walk. Running in the sand was an unpleasant affair.

Lucius stared at him for a couple seconds past. An idea began to form, and he casually turned away from the others to hide his growing smile. Perhaps the situation was not as disadvantageous as he thought.