Page 160 of Dirty Hit
“She already did,” I say, then immediately feel bad because the look on his face says he heard that as ‘she hurt you because of me.’
“I don’t mean that condemningly,” I add quickly. “I just mean… she left a mark. Literally.” I gesture vaguely toward my side.
His gaze follows the movement, and his expression darkens. “I know exactly where she hit you,” he says. “I’ve seen that cutmore than once; she had a habit of going for the same spots. Muscle, not organs. Enough to hurt, not enough to kill. She wanted leverage, not a corpse.”
“So, I was leverage,” I say, because that tracks.
“You’re the only leverage she had left,” he says. “And now, she has nothing.”
The thought should make me feel safer. In a way, it does. In another, it just makes the room tilt a little, because the woman who raised him and shaped him into the weapon he is now is gone, and he’s sitting here with bloodshot eyes and no safety net for the first time in his life.
Eventually, the question that’s been sitting in my chest pushes its way out. “Do my parents know?”
His eyes flick back up to mine. “Yeah. The hospital needed to notify next of kin. You switched your emergency contact to me, by the way. Thanks for the heads up, asshole.”
Heat rushes up my neck. “I didn’t know how to tell you,” I mumble. “It sounded clingy.‘Hey, I wrote your name down on the form that people call when I’m dying.’”
“Next time, be clingy,” he says. “I like clingy. Clingy gets me here.”
I swallow around the lump in my throat. “What did they say?” I ask. “When you called.”
His mouth flattens. “Your dad answered, thinking you were calling,” he says. “He sounded annoyed before he even knew it was me. I told him you’d been stabbed and were in surgery. He treated it like I was trying to guilt him into funding your sin, or whatever bullshit phrasing he’s using in his head.”
“Oh,” I say, and the word vibrates against the raw hurt in my chest.
“I told him I was calling out of respect,” Dom continues. “Because you almost died and you still had them listed as family,even after they cut you off. He made a big speech about, your mom cried in the background. I quoted First Timothy at him.”
My mouth actually falls open. “You… quoted scripture at my father?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Figured if he’s going to use that book as a weapon, I can use it as a mirror.”
Despite everything, a rough, broken laugh slips out of me. It hurts my side, but I don’t care. The idea of Dominic, covered in my blood, standing in a hospital hallway and casually dropping Bible verses on my dad’s head is so absurd it loops back around to perfect.
“You weaponized Paul on my father,” I wheeze. “You absolute menace. How do you even know it by heart?”
“Hey, I read sometimes, and it worked,” he says. “He sputtered. I told him if he ever tries to claw his way back into your life, he'd better have a better answer for his God than the one he gave me tonight. Then I told him I’d be taking care of you from now on, and hung up.”
The laugh dies, and my eyes sting again, but the tears don’t fall. I’m too tired, or maybe I’m just empty where they’re concerned. “So they really want nothing to do with me,” I say softly. “Even after all that.”
“They’re the ones who have to live with that, not you,” Dominic says. “They had the chance to show up, and they chose not to. That’s on them, Brendon. That’s their sin, not yours.”
I swallow hard. He’s always framed my faith in twisted, filthy terms, teasing me with rosaries and blasphemy. Hearing him turn it around and place the weight somewhere other than on my shoulders feels… new.
I keep my eyes on the ceiling, because if I look at him while processing this, I might break apart in a way that makes the heart monitor start screaming. The pain I feel is familiar—like the moment in my office when I was told directly: disowned,cut off, funding terminated, future uncertain. This is just a confirmation, a repeat, but hearing it from Dom feels different. Less like a punch, more like a bruise someone pressed.
“So, it’s just you now,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “It shouldn’t hurt more, hearing that they repeated it to you.”
He shrugs one shoulder. “It hurts because they were supposed to fight for you, not against you.”
I blink fast because my eyes are starting to sting. “They fought for the version of me they wanted, not the one they got.”
“They don’t get you,” he says, voice going firm. “Not anymore. They threw that privilege in the trash and set it on fire when they hung up on your life.”
“It feels like it’s on me,” I say, because honesty is the only thing we have left. “I keep thinking if I hadn’t gone to the forest with you, if I hadn’t… wanted you so badly, none of this would’ve happened. They’d still be paying for my degree. You wouldn’t have had to carve your mother out of your life with a knife. You’d still be the golden boy with a dark secret, not…”
“Not what?” he asks, when I trail off.
“Not this,” I say, gesturing weakly at the room, at the IV, at him. “The guy who cries in hospital chairs, and quotes Scripture at pastors while covered in their son’s blood.”
