His Heir Was Meant for My Sister, but the Kingpin Wanted Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Man on the Lab Floor
Phat locks a bleeding stranger in the teaching lab, lies to the gunmen at the door and stitches his ribs; then the stranger's phone lights up with Phat's sister's face.
"Lock the door," the man on the lab floor said.
Phat locked it with blood on his fingers.
He had not decided to.
The man had come through the fire exit a minute ago, folded over, one hand clamped to his ribs.
Now he lay between two benches with his black shirt soaked dark, and he was grinning.
"Good boy," he said. "Now the lights."
Phat turned off the lights.
The teaching lab went black except for the green glow of the gel reader on the far bench.
Out in the corridor, shoes slapped the tiles and stopped.
Somebody rattled the handle.
Phat's mouth was dry.
It was midnight on a Thursday, he was nineteen, and he had a protein assay running.
He did not know this man, and the man was bleeding on the floor he mopped for extra credit.
"Khun," a voice said through the door. "Open up. Security."
The man on the floor lifted one finger to his lips.
His other hand was red to the wrist.
There was a dark strip torn along his side, and his shirt had stuck to it.
He looked about thirty, with a scar through his right eyebrow and a tattoo of dragon scales running up his forearm.
Phat had seen faces like that on newspaper stands, and never this close.
"There's no security on this floor after eleven," Phat whispered.
The man's grin got wider.
"Then you'd better be a good liar, nerd."
Phat took a breath and pulled the door open as far as the chain.
Two men stood in the corridor in dark jackets.
One had a hand inside his coat.
"I'm doing an overnight assay," Phat said, and his voice came out flat and bored, which surprised him.
"The gel takes four hours. Please don't turn on the lights, you'll ruin the plate."
The man looked past him at the green glow and the empty room.
"Anybody come through here?"
"Through the fire door?" Phat looked at the fire door, which was shut. "It's alarmed. If it had opened, my whole floor would be screaming."
He pushed his glasses up his nose with a wrist.
"If you're not students, I'm calling the campus police."
The two men looked at each other.
One of them looked at Phat's lab coat, at the mechanical pencils in the pocket, at his shaking hands, and he decided he was nothing.
"Go back to your gel," he said.
They went.
Phat shut the door and put his back against it and listened to them leave.
Then he realised he was shaking and could not stop.
"You lied better than half my men," the man on the floor said. "What's your name?"
"Phat." He crossed the room on stiff legs. "You're shot."
"Grazed."
"Take your shirt off," Phat said.
"That's usually my line."
"Take it off or I'll cut it off." Phat found the first aid kit and the surgical scissors from the dissection drawer.
His hands were steadier now that they had a job.
The man peeled the shirt away, and Phat saw the wound.
It ran along the ribs under his left arm, a long open furrow, bleeding hard.
It was a clean line, not deep.
Under the wound his stomach was hard and brown, and Phat looked at it a beat too long.
"Sit on the bench," he said. "It's going to hurt."
The man hoisted himself onto the steel bench, hissing through his teeth, and Phat stepped between his knees.
He swabbed the furrow with saline and then with iodine.
The man didn't flinch.
He watched Phat's face instead.
"You've done this before."
"I've done it on pigs' feet." Phat threaded the curved needle under the lamp. "It's four stitches. Stop looking at me."
"No."
The word was easy and warm.
Phat put the first stitch in, and the muscle jumped under his fingers.
"Is it always like this?" Phat said, to say something.
"Since my father died." The man's mouth twisted.
"He left me a house, and half of Bangkok would like it more than they would like me breathing."
"It must be a nice house."
"It has a river," the man said. "Keep sewing."
Heat came off the man's skin, and he smelled of smoke and cologne and iron.
Phat tied off the second stitch and felt a hand settle on his hip.
It was big and slow, and it did not ask.
His whole body went still.
"You're not bad, Phat," the man said. His voice had dropped.
"Don't move."
"I'm not moving." The thumb pressed once into the hollow of his hipbone. "You are."
Phat was leaning in.
He had not noticed it, and now he could not stop.
He tied the last stitch and set down the needle and looked up.
The man's eyes were black and amused and a little unsteady from the blood he had lost.
His hand slid from Phat's hip to the back of his neck.
"What do you want for this?" he said. "Money? A favour?"
"Your name," Phat said.
"No."
The hand pulled him in by the nape, and the kiss was hard and unhurried, tasting of iodine and smoke.
Phat's glasses knocked against the man's cheekbone.
He should have pulled away.
He grabbed two fistfuls of the man's belt and kissed him back.
The man groaned into his mouth, and it was the most obscene sound Phat had ever heard.
On the bench, the man's phone buzzed against the steel.
They broke apart, breathing hard.
The screen lit the dark between them.
It said PIM, and under the name was a photo of a round-faced woman in blue scrubs, laughing with her eyes shut.
Phat had taken that photo himself, at his sister's birthday, in June.
The man glanced down, and his face went soft in a way Phat had not seen yet.
"That's my best friend," he said, and thumbed the call to silent with the other hand. "She's having my baby."
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