Wounds of the Wild (Patreon)

Title: Wounds of the Wild

The forest did not care that she was beautiful. It never had.

Elena Voss had come here to finish it. One last job. One last mark who thought the deep woods outside Bratislava would hide him. She moved like smoke between the trunks, black sports bra and leggings blending with the shadows, fingerless gloves tight across her knuckles, Glock 19 warm in her right hand. The silver watch on her wrist ticked off the seconds she had left to live.

She never heard the first shot.

The round punched into her belly just above the waistband of her leggings, a wet slap of impact that folded her forward. Pain bloomed hot and immediate, like someone had shoved a branding iron through her gut. She staggered, caught a sapling with her left hand, and tasted copper. When she looked down, a small red mouth had already opened in her skin, blood sliding down the taut plane of her stomach in a single obscene line.

The second shot came while she was still processing the first. This one struck between her breasts, dead center, punching straight into her heart. The impact spun her half around and slammed her back against a mossy log. She slid down it, mouth open in a silent scream, long brown hair catching on the rough bark. Her gloved fingers flew to the new wound, pressing hard, but the blood welled between them anyway, dark and glossy in the dappled sunlight.

For a moment the world narrowed to the sound of her own breathing, short, ragged, animal.

She should have stayed down. Instead she laughed once, a raw broken sound that turned into a snarl. "That all you got, you Czech bastard?"

Elena pushed herself up. Her legs shook but held. She raised the Glock in a two handed grip that was no longer steady. The forest spun around her. Every heartbeat pushed more blood out of her body, but she kept moving, one staggering step after another, deeper into the green cathedral.

She found him behind a fallen beech, trying to reload with shaking hands. Their eyes met. His widened in disbelief at the sight of her, blood slicked, furious, still on her feet.

She put three rounds into his center mass before he could get the magazine seated.

He dropped. She stood over him for a long second, swaying, then her knees gave out. The Glock slipped from her fingers and thumped into the moss.

Elena crawled the last few meters to a thick moss covered limb that had fallen across two trunks like a natural altar. She hauled herself onto it with a grunt of pure agony, rolling onto her back along the curve of the branch. Her long hair spilled down like dark water. The wounds throbbed in time with her pulse, belly and heart.

She stared up through the canopy at fragments of sky. Birds called overhead, indifferent.

A strange calm settled over her. The pain was still there, but it had become something almost intimate, like a lover who refused to let go. She traced the edge of the heart wound with one bloody fingertip, feeling the ragged lips of torn skin, the slick heat beneath. Her back arched slightly off the moss, a low moan escaping her throat, half suffering, half something darker.

Minutes passed. Or hours. Time had gone soft.

She thought about the money waiting in the dead mans accounts. About the safe house in the Tatras. About how she had always known this was how it would end, not in some sterile apartment with a suppressed pistol to the back of the head, but out here under the trees, painted in her own blood.

A weak smile touched her lips, showing teeth.

"Still breathing, you stubborn bitch," she whispered to the leaves above.

Then the final convulsion took her.

Her entire body arched hard off the mossy branch, spine bowing like a drawn bow. A guttural cry tore from her throat as the heart wound seized. Her gloved hands clutched at her chest and belly, fingers digging into slick red ruin. Her legs kicked once, twice, boots scraping against bark. For one fierce, defiant second she hung there in the air, every muscle straining against the inevitable.

Then the strength left her all at once.

Elena collapsed back onto the branch, chest heaving once more before going still. Her eyes stared sightless up through the leaves. Blood continued to leak from the wounds between her breasts and in her belly, slow now, peaceful almost.

The forest did not care that she was beautiful.

But in the end it had taken her anyway, the way it takes everything that bleeds.

End.