Reckless Abandon

Pick a place to die. Any place.

“Miss?”

Where would you rather meet your end? In a hospital, your bed at home, in an accident in the middle of the road? Asia? Europe? Freezing to death in Siberia?

“Are you okay up there, honey?”

Most people never think about where they’re going to die, when and why. ‘Most people’ included Nora until very, very recently.

“Please come down?”

There’s just something about humans that makes them ignorant to the fact that they’re all going to die. The knowledge is there, everyone has to die eventually, be it of old age, their own free will, disease or an avoidable, stupid accident. But they ignore it and keep going, insisting that they still have years left to live. Whether it’s just plain fear or lack of understanding of what being dead actually implies is a thing that everyone has got to deal with themselves.
In Nora’s case, it had always been sheer ignorance. Not wanting to think about it or even acknowledging the possibility of a premature departure.

“I’m gonna call the police now, okay?”

“No!” The word left her mouth before she even had time to think about it.
No police, no more people involved than the three already standing at the bottom of the bannister. “I’m okay, just- I’m not gonna jump, I just need a minute. Or two.”

She didn’t need to turn around to know the woman didn’t believe her. It was there, plain as day. Granted, even the most stupid person alive would know what she was currently up to.

She felt warmth near her left side again and didn’t need to turn to see the first man hovering. He was unsure, reaching out with his hand before pulling it back again nervously, his other gripping his phone tightly, the screen lit. His suit was wrinkled, his tie loosened, his hair disheveled but his eyes wide and dark. A late night at the office with a way more adrenaline filled ending than he had anticipated. And the idiot had just called for help.

Letting out another shuddering breath, Nora weighed her options. There were three in total. One, jumping. Two, getting down from the bannister and having to deal with the police. Three, getting down from the bannister and running for dear life.

The first option had seemed like the best up until she had finally calmed down enough to think somewhat straight again. Now the water underneath the bridge just seemed cold and hard. There were other ways to go. The best option was probably the third one. The only one that might have been able to outrun her was the third one. Blond, muscular, terrified and seemingly torn.

Gripping the freezing steelbeam on her right, Nora maneuvered her body down from the bannister, painfully slowly. She didn’t know how long she had been standing up there but according to the ache in her bones and the stiffness of her muscles, it had been an hour at least.

She could still feel her three unfortunate helpers hovering behind her, tense and wide-eyed. But Nora didn’t give them time to breathe a sigh of relief. As soon as her feet touched the ground she ran, picking up pace and ignoring the pain in her legs.

The woman yelled after her and the men’s footsteps faded into nothingness after only a few seconds. Nora wasn’t a fast runner but they had probably realized by now that she was a lost case. Well, to Nora herself, she was a lost case.

Dashing straight down the length of the bridge, she only slowed down to prevent herself from slipping on the patches of ice and falling straight on her face. But there was no chance in hell any of the three was following her. No maniac would run after her at two in the morning, in the middle of winter, straight into New York.

//

Ever since Nora had been aware of her influence on the growth and eventual end of her own life, she had been unsure what to do with it. As a child, these things were easy. Do this, do that. Do you want to eat that, yes or no? Do you want to play, yes or no? She missed the easy questions with two possible answers and no wrong one. This was easy, as was high school. No one had asked for her opinion there, either. Yes, no, multiple choice answers on standardized tests. Either wrong or right, memorizing page after page of math formulas and using them in the exact same way as with the twenty math problems beforehand.
Even living up to her parents’ expectations had been easy. At least up until she was expected to choose a college major. With no real passion for anything, this moment had been the first in a row that showed her just exactly how she had no idea what to do with her life. And what a terribly boring human being she really was.

But inaction in this vital time was as unforgiving as the wrong move and with each decision she made, or didn’t make for that matter, she seemed to become more and more bored and frustrated, looking for fulfillment in other daredevil activities.

Freshman year of college is considered an experimental phase by many. However, Nora had seemed to push boundaries more so than others and before she had even completed a semester, the threat of expulsion was not only hanging over her head like the sword of damocles. It cut her.

//

Leaning against the cold brick wall, Nora tried to catch her breath. The cold air hurt her lungs and with each deep breath she took, the feeling intensified. A thousand needles to her chest. Salt. Fire. Gravel. She had had worse.

Breathing through the pain, she started moving again. It was only two in the morning and despite what had happened before, she felt the murky swirls of the long-known feeling enveloping her again. Obeying, her feet carried her down the avenue swarmed with people, all dressed up, laughing, flirting and being carefree. But her feet carried her further, away from the bars these people frequented and down into a part of New York City that had never heard of the meaning of ‘carefree’. Dirty, dark and reeking of a mixture of bodily fluids. But before she could ponder their origin any longer, the crimson door of her destination came into view.

Despite it’s color, the door didn’t protrude but blended seamlessly into the rest of the building. Had she not known about the premise behind it, she would have passed right on and never spared it a thought again. But she knew, and God knows she always needed money.

So without hesitation, she pushed open the door to reveal the greasy bar hidden behind it. As usual it was filled with men any normal twentyfour-year-old with a sense of self-preservation would steer clear of.

“Griswold!” Stopping in her tracks, a smirk replaced her neutral expression before she turned around to face whoever had called after her. However, the heavy accent and barking laughter following her name made that rather easy to determine.

“I told you not to call me that, Nikolay,” she shot back with a smile, causing the heavy man to bark out a laugh in amusement. He didn’t seem like a man as much as he did a bear. The dark head of hair, the beard, his broad nose.

Elbowing a path through his customers to come to a standstill in front of her, his grin overtook most of his face, his yellowed teeth gleaming in the dusky bar. Nikolay seemed like a friendly and fatherly man until you got on his bad side. Thankfully he had a weak spot for women. Nora knew that because she had done a lot more than men that had disappeared after doing him wrong. She didn’t know the specifics of the Bratva and she didn’t want to. If she did, ‘fatherly’ might have had a very different connotation for her.

“I’m coming for what’s mine,” she shot back with a grin, eliciting another rumbling laugh from the Russian man.

“They have been waiting for you, my love!” he told her, grabbing her upper arm and pulling her with him towards the back rooms. “Always a place for you, da!”

Being guided through the masses of people left her with the chance to watch them. She had seen most of them at one point or another. The Bratva had been built on family relations and one could see that in the customers frequenting the bar. Nora had come there for the first time when she was twenty, stubborn and ready to fight anyone that looked at her the wrong way. But Nikolay had laughed and invited her in. Since then, gambling in this place had been her main means of income and it had the positive side effect of pissing off idiots.

However, as he pulled her along the length of the bar, her eyes fell on a strange face. His blueish eyes didn’t match his face, seeming way too weary for his otherwise handsome and youthful face. He generally seemed too out of place among the masses of conversing brothers in arms, quietly nursing a glass of amber liquid. But then his eyes fell on her, too, and their gaze locked. Both furrowed their eyebrows at each other, Nora trying not to stumble as Nikolay still kept dragging her along. The man averted his eyes and murmured into his glass, his eyebrows still furrowed in confusion.

But then a door closed right before her nose and after a few moments of confusion and subsequent collecting of thoughts, Nora turned around to face the table that had been set up in the stuffy back room of the bar. Occupied by several men and their mistresses, she grinned, when she saw the amount of money pooled on the table and the empty seat right before it.

“Good evening, boys,” she trilled, aware that most of the men were old enough to be her father. “What are we playing tonight? Poker, Bank, Gilet?”

“Blackjack,” came the answer from her right, Anton. His worn suit was as much of a regular as he was. He was also one of the only ones that didn’t hold a grudge against her if she won. “Leave Gilet to dirty Italians.”

His reply elicited laughs and grunts of agreement from his fellow men. Nora sighed and shrugged. She liked playing Gilet.

Watching them as they finished their game, she scrutinized the amount of cash piling up on the table. “Minimum bet?”

“Two hundred.”

“You people are animals, you know that?” she answered and started rummaging through her pockets.

However, she only ever got to pull out one crumpled hundred dollar bill when suddenly the casual banter was interrupted by a commotion outside. The room fell silent, all straining to hear what was going on. But by the time they recognized the sound for what it was, it was too late.

The door, heavy wood, clattered to the floor like tacky chipboard. Most of the men had either pulled out guns or knives immediately to face whoever had dared to intrude but Nora couldn’t see most of it as she suddenly got pushed down onto the floor and shoved under the table, her vision shielded by the heavy cloth that had been thrown over the old wooden table. However, she knew none of the Russian men except for Nikolay would care enough about her to make sure she remained unscathed. Sitting beneath the table in confusion, she merely listened as she heard body after body dropping to the floor. But there was a lack of gunfire. Whoever had raided the bar wasn’t out for blood, which made it just that much more unusual.

Lifting a corner of the tablecloth to catch a glimpse of her surroundings, she found Anton’s passed-out body facing her. At least she hoped he was only passed out. Anton was a nice guy, ignoring that whole Bratva thing.

“Oh Anton,” she sighed and pushed him further away, his jacket swiping up the dust from the floor, so she could get out from underneath the table.

There was still noise coming from the bar, the back room however was deadly silent. On another note though, whoever had just intruded had given Nora her most thrilling night in months. She would be damned if they got away without letting her see their face.

Sneaking towards the broken down door, she peeked outside and found two men’s backs facing her and standing in a sea of destroyed furniture and bodies.

“Holy fuck,” she gasped and looked around in wonder at the men littering the floor. The men, not having anticipated her quiet outburst, turned around lightning-fast. However, she didn’t like the fact that she recognized both of them.

“You,” the blond man stated in disbelief but Nora didn’t pay attention to him as her gaze had wandered to the other man.

“You,” she marveled. “I knew there was something fishy about you. Handsome face, but your poker face...” she trailed off, leaving them in partial silence amongst the groaning men on the floor. However, the disbelief on both men’s faces hadn’t yet faded. “I just wanted their money,” she clarified with a shrug and started walking back into the back room. “A girl’s gotta live.”

Tiptoeing around the men on the floor, she headed towards the table, grabbed one, two wads of cash. The amount would be enough for at least two weeks but she also needed to find another way to get money now. The men had thoroughly destroyed her safety net. Turning back around, she found both of them still rooted firmly to the same spot.

“We’re not here because of her,” the dark haired man harshly whispered to the blond with urgency. “We got what we came here for. Steve, they’re waiting.”

“I know,” the blond replied absentmindedly, his eyes not leaving her as she entered the bar again. Both of the men were aware that she followed their exchange with rather big interest.

“I’ll just..,” she trailed off, stepping around the broken chair on the floor and pushing past them, dead-set on leaving, when suddenly a big, warm hand came to rest softly on her shoulder. Her whole body tensing in response, she faltered for just a moment. But her vulnerability wasn’t on show long enough for the men to catch on, before she whirled around, uncertainly. “What?”

“Maybe she knows something,” the blond man, Steve, proposed, his eyes on his friend. Hadn’t it been for the hand on her shoulder, Nora would have thought they weren’t aware of her presence. Rolling her eyes, she shrugged off his hand and took a step back.

“She’s a kid ,” the other man countered, clearly unhappy. Steve faltered, his gaze jumping from Nora to his friend and back again. Nora raised her eyebrows at them, unsure of what to say. At the moments there were more urgent problems for her to work through than the uncertainty of a single man.

“Guys?” a man’s call suddenly rang out. All three of them snapping their attention towards the front of the bar, they watched another older man, maneuver through the rubble. When he saw the men standing there with Nora smack in the middle, a small frown settled on his face. “Who’s that? I thought we took everyone out.”

“She’s not part of the Bratva,” the dark haired man explained with a roll of his eyes.

“How would you know?” Nora shot back, annoyed that she was treated as if she was invisible.

“Because it’s my job to know these things,” he sneered, his eyes finally meeting hers for a moment before addressing the dark blonde man again. “Steve’s trying to pick up another stray again.”

“Bucky, that’s not-,” Steve started, closing his eyes in aggravation but the older male interrupted him, his eyes focusing on Nora.

“You know these guys?” he asked, jerking his head in the direction of the nearest passed out man.

“Yeah, I do,” she replied, confused but curious. The man seemed to think for a moment and the dark haired man huffed before she even heard his answer.

“Sweet, we could use the intel. Come on, I’m starving,” he replied cheerfully and turned to walk away, leaving Nora to stand between the two men towering over her. The height difference would have been hilarious to her, didn’t it feel just the tiniest bit intimidating.

“I can’t believe you,” the dark haired man, Bucky, muttered and turned on his heel to leave. Nora still wasn’t sure whether the dark blond man had been talking to her before but when this Steve-guy spoke up again with a ‘Come on’ and a jerk of his head towards the door, Nora shrugged and went. She had nothing to lose, after all.