Top Assassins Call Me The Lady Boss-Chapter 141: Bleeding quietly in between.

Chapter One Hundred and Forty-One

Cole 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

Cole knelt beside him and listened for breath like his life depended on it.

Because maybe not his, but Ahmet’s did.

Ahmet’s chest lifted shallowly, unevenly, like the body hadn’t yet decided whether to stay or go. Blood seeped through his fingers where he pressed down, slick and impossible and warm in a way that made Cole’s gut turn.

"Don’t be stubborn now," he muttered under his breath, though he didn’t know who he was speaking to.

He tore fabric from his own shirt and packed it against the wound, hard enough to make Ahmet gasp weakly. It was the first sound he’d made since he fell, and it tore through Cole like proof of life.

"Yeah," Cole said hoarsely. "Do that. Say something. Make a sound at least."

Getting him up took more strength than Cole had prepared for. Ahmet was dead weight and iron at once, his arm slung uselessly across Cole’s shoulders as they staggered toward the exit, boots dragging against concrete. Each step smeared blood across the floor in a trail that felt like a confession.

The night air hit them hard when they got outside. Cole half-carried, half-dragged him to his own car, abandoning Ahmet’s gleaming machine where it sat like a monument to bad decisions.

He wrestled him into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut with shaking hands before rounding the hood and getting in himself.

The engine roared too loudly in the quiet.

Cole drove fast. Too fast. The city lights stretched into streaks as the warehouses fell away behind them and his hands clenched the wheel like he was trying to bend the road itself into submission.

"Stay with me," he told Ahmet, glancing sideways. His face was ashen, sweat slicking his skin. Blood bloomed dark through Cole’s makeshift bandage with frightening speed.

Death didn’t scare Cole. What scared him was the idea that a man like Ahmet could end like this. They didn’t die in silence on cracked leather seats

Ahmet didn’t answer and Cole didn’t slow.

He didn’t go to a hospital.

He went where names didn’t matter. It was a small house at the edge of the city that no one with sense would trust with a dying man, much less a king of the underworld. The paint was tired, the gate crooked, the porch light flickering like it had been considering giving up for years. Nothing about the place whispered money or influence or safety.

It belonged to a man who had never worn silk or signed a death order. A man whose hands had learned tenderness instead of violence. And somehow, years ago, those same hands had been forced to learn how to keep him alive.

Cole remembered the first time he had dragged himself there.

He had been bleeding badly that night, staggering down an unfamiliar street with his vision tunneling and his pistol heavy in his grip. He had passed the building without noticing it at first. It was the glow of a single bulb inside that had caught his eye. Then the sign. It was a small and plain veterinary clinic. Unimportant but safe-looking in the way nothing really ever was.

Cole had gone in out of spite as much as desperation.

The man inside had been thin and startled, smelling faintly of antiseptic and animals and fear. Cole hadn’t said a word to him. He had only reached for the picture frame on the counter and lifted it, studied it slowly. It was a woman and two children. They were smiling in a way Cole found uncomfortable.

Then he had placed the gun beside the frame.

He remembered the way the man’s hands shook when he understood.

"Fix me," Cole had said quietly, pressing his fingers into his own torn side so blood bloomed darker through his shirt. "Or they pay for it."

The man had stitched him together that night in a back room that smelled of dogs and disinfectant. His hands had steadied once fear finished settling into something colder. The needle had gone in clean. The cuts had closed properly. The bleeding had stopped.

Cole had walked out when it was finished without a single word of gratitude.

And yet, instead of disappearing like most people who crossed him, the man had remained exactly where he was. Same house. Same flickering light. Same portrait on the counter.

So Cole had returned.

Once after a knife wound. Then after a bullet graze. Then after a night that should have killed him.

And now, years later, here he was again... dragging a legend through the same narrow doorway.

Only this time, the monster in his arms wasn’t himself.

Cole didn’t knock as usual.

He kicked the door in.

"I need you," he said into the quiet house. "Now."

Lights snapped on and a shape moved. A curse rang out.

And then Dr. Green was there, older than Cole remembered, yet his eyes remained sharp behind the years of things he’d never asked about. One look at Ahmet and his mouth flattened.

"Get him inside."

That was all the man said. He didn’t show any signs of panic. Not even shaking. His hands were already on Ahmet’s shoulders, already steering dead weight toward the narrow hall like he had been born knowing this moment would come.

Cole could tell the old man was no longer scared of him.

"Hurry up." The old man shouted again. Scissors started flashing and gauze was tearing. The room was filled with the low music of urgency. The doctor spoke in short, clipped instructions, his voice quiet but impossible to ignore, and Cole found himself obeying without even thinking.

It irritated him.

Aside from Asli and her father, there was no one alive who told him what to do, and lived comfortably with the result. Cole had never been the kind of man who followed orders. He gave them. He invented them. He broke other people beneath them.

Yet here he was, holding pressure where he was told, standing where he was placed, moving only when that steady voice commanded it.

For him.

Damn this man.

The thought burned through him even as his palms grew slick with blood. Even as he watched the gray drain slowly from Ahmet’s face, like night being forced back by a spiteful dawn. Even as breath that had been shallow and lost fought its way into something real again.

Was this what Ahmet had always done to Asli?

Made her act out of instinct instead of reason.

And now, even half-dead, the bastard was doing it to him.

Another man arrived before midnight, summoned. He was not invited. Cole could tell he doctor’s man

Cole didn’t listen to his name.

He only listened to the sound of Ahmet still breathing.

When it was over, when the bleeding was finally stopped and Ahmet lay stitched and silent in a narrow bed that smelled faintly of antiseptic and old books, Cole felt something inside him shift from terror into exhaustion so deep it nearly dropped him to his knees.

The doctor pulled his gloves off slowly. "If he’d been ten minutes later..."

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Cole nodded anyway.

He left cash on the table in amounts ridiculous enough to insult and impossible enough to refuse, then stepped outside and sat on the porch stairs like a man coming back into his body after war.

He picked up his phone to check the time. Before he could hide the phone back into his pocket, it buzzed in his hand and he picked up immediately. Then, asked the man on the other side of the call to go to Asli’s warehouse and bring the car. The man was once a car thief he had saved. He knew how to move a car without its keys.

He then gave him his current location and in less than an hour, he was there. Cole ordered him to clean the car.

He then entered his own car and whipped the steering wheel where blood had been smeared and the back seat where Ahmet had lain.

He then unlocked it.

Then locked it again.

Then he made one final call.

"Erase everything after she enters the warehouse," Cole said into the phone when the line connected. His voice was calm now. Too calm. "Not just the cameras inside. Neighbors. Street feeds. Private systems. Anything with eyes in that district."

A low whistle came through the receiver. "That’ll leave a hole."

"Good," Cole replied. "Let it look like the whole night coughed and forgot."

A pause. "You sure you want this gone? After the other night, Godfather tightened the tech security."

Cole stared through the windshield into the burned-out dark of the city.

She would never know.

That was the worst part.

"Yes," he said. "I’m sure."

When the call ended, Cole sat in the empty car with his hands in his lap and wondered... briefly and quietly... if this was what love looked like when it turned feral.

Here he was caught in the middle of these two rivals... or should he call them secret lovers? He was caught between saving the man and protecting the woman while bleeding quietly in between.