The Forbidden Secret (Forbidden #2)

Chapter Nineteen

Zeke Coleman

The words sent a ringing in my ears.

At least your father was there for his family before he killed them.

At least your father was there.

“Fuck,” I yelled before balling my fist and swinging it at the wall. I needed pain to bring me out of this. I needed something more than the emotions and internal dialog of not being good enough. The sting of the wall on my fist that radiated up my arm wasn’t enough as I punched it again.

How had I fucked up so badly?

In an attempt to be the opposite of my father, I had become something else—something that wasn’t much better. Her words rang true. I thought worse about myself than she could ever think about me. I knew I was a monster. I knew I was evil and no good for her.

But when she said that…

I couldn’t think through the roar in my ears.

There was nothing that perceptively changed, but the roar seemed to slowly fade and give way to a feeling of defeat. A bone-deep feeling that I could not shake off. I recognized the feeling almost immediately.

Something was wrong.

I didn’t know how I knew or what had tipped me off, but I had been living a life of death and danger for long enough that I had become finely in tune with the potential of danger surrounding me. I stood, listening carefully to everything around me. I heard nothing from Evelina in the living room, but there were voices outside my window. Soft enough that I could tell they were on the ground level, lingering outside the apartment complex. It wasn’t unusual, but something felt like it didn’t belong, and while I couldn’t place the disturbance, I wasn’t foolish enough to think it was internal.

I slid open my blinds and found a small group of men, all wearing SWAT gear, lingering outside the building. They gestured inside with their hands as they spoke, and I glanced around the street for the tell-tale van that would mark them as law enforcement.

There was nothing.

I looked closer at their outfits and found nothing aside from a haphazardly stitched SWAT on the back of their shirts. I took notice of the weapons strung across their back and holstered at their sides.

The disguise would be enough to be allowed into the building, but they were not SWAT.

They had found us.

I stormed out of my room and saw Evelina sitting where I had left her a half hour ago, staring solemnly at the wall across the room, likely lost in thought. When she saw me, she immediately rose to her feet.

“Zeke, I’m so—”

“Get your go-bag, now,” I said, grabbing my own as I pulled a knife and second gun from my bag, arming my body with them. She didn’t move. “Now, Evelina!”

She jumped and rushed across the house, gathering her bag in the time it took for me to finish arming myself and palming my metallic Glock.

“What’s happening?”

A distinct crash came from the level below, and dozens of steps began pounding up the staircase. I put all of my anger and disgust behind me. “Go to the closet in my bedroom,” I demanded as I went toward the window, opening it and pushing the curtains through it swiftly.

It was as much of a deterrence as I could manage in the seconds we had to get out of here.

I rushed to my room, then my closet, where Evelina had found the door and opened it. The maintenance shaft had been the reason the apartment was cheaper than most. A ladder went all the way to the basement, with much of the plumbing and electrical exposed for repairs. It was old and rusty, but it would do.

“Go,” I whisper-shouted as something banged on my door. I heard it splinter, but it didn’t open. Not yet. The reinforced locks did their job and bought us an extra second.

She didn’t argue as she tightened her backpack and pulled herself onto the ladder, moving downward quickly. She jumped as they pounded into the door again, and this time, it did crack. Feet pounding on my tile floors filled my apartment with just enough time for me to slide into the maintenance chute and close the door behind me.

“How did they find us?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It could have been anything.”

Silence fell as we continued our descent. I considered all the places we could go from the basement, as the street wouldn’t be an option. There were sewer tunnels that ran beneath the city, but the thought of trudging through feces and piss did not sound appealing.

I landed on the ground level and turned to Evelina.

I froze.

Two men rounded the corner, one bringing Evelina to his chest as the other man fired at me. I saw her thrash once before I rolled and reached for the gun I had been forced to tuck away on the ladder. The boom of gunfire undoubtedly marked our location, and as I rose, I fired twice into the man’s chest.

Voices rose from outside the basement, and heavy pounding from boots drew closer. How many men were there? It had to be no less than a dozen, but as I factored in the men upstairs, I knew there had to be more. More than I could take on by myself. More than I could hope of keeping away from Evelina, especially with only twenty-six total shots—twenty-four now that I had fired two.

Evelina struggled in the man’s grasp, her face reddening as he pulled out a gun.

She saw it from the corner of her eye, then saw me struggling to find a shot, and she moved quickly. She proved exactly how skilled she was as she lunged to the side, throwing the man off balance enough to duck and fling him over her body. Her legs strained as he flipped over her back, but the second she was out of the shot, I fired once at the man.

Twenty-three bullets.

“Where do we go?” she asked frantically.

I considered the reason I chose this building. There was a sewer grate, and I knew all the turns to get us out. There was also a secondary tunnel—one that led into various different buildings and places beneath the city. The danger of those tunnel systems—the unknowns of the entrance and exit points—was a risk that we couldn’t take.

I grabbed Evelina and pulled her behind the building’s furnace as men came into the basement, shooting in our direction without ever seeing us. One of the assailants shouted for his companion to watch where he shot, but I peeked around the corner and fired back. So far, three shots, I had only hit one of them.

Twenty-two left.

When I ducked back, they fired again. Back and forth we went, firing as I tried and failed to see an escape route. The sewer was behind them, and from the sound of it, they had backup coming in our direction, preparing to outnumber us.

But there were the tunnels a few feet to my left.

Fuck.

I fired my last shots in one gun and pulled out the other, tucking the empty Glock into my holster and dropping my bag to the floor. Sixteen shots in this gun.

Sixteen bullets stood between us and safety.

“Drop your bag and run toward the tunnel as soon as I shoot again,” I told her. “I’ll catch up.”

She looked hesitant, but she did it. I rounded the corner, and she exploded into a run, leaving her bag behind her. I wasn’t sure if she glanced back as I moved to disable as many men as possible before running toward the open grate to the tunnel. It was the work of a moment to catch up with Evelina, and she exhaled loudly as I met her pace.

I didn’t hear them following us—not yet, at least. I guided her down a few turns before the pounding of heavy boots began sweeping the tunnels. We needed a way out of here, and I didn’t even know where we were. I ran sporadically, taking long turns before going up and down a few rusted metal staircases that fortunately didn’t collapse on us.

And then, a damp and musty-smelling stone wall rose up to meet us.

A dead end.

Evelina panted beside me. I looked around and found nothing, and we had likely run a quarter mile down this tunnel pathway.

“Should we turn back?”

“This path branched off of a main one. We can’t go that way again.”

“If we don’t get out of here—”

“I know.”

She didn’t need to remind me. I knew that we needed to get out. I didn’t mark the path the way I would have ordinarily. Hell, I had taken so many sporadic turns that there was no way I would be able to find our way back to my apartment building.

But if we didn’t get out, they would sweep the tunnels, and they would find us. Reinforcements were likely already on the way.

“Zeke, are they going to find us here?”

I wouldn’t lie to her. “I don’t see how we’re going to get out without being found. I don’t have any ammunition left.”

I heard her shuffling around, and when I glanced toward her in the near darkness of the tunnel’s dead end, I noticed a darkening spot on her shirt. I straightened, narrowing my eyes. The closer I looked, the more the spot appeared to be… blood.

“Were you hit?”

She shrugged it off. “A bullet barely grazed me when the guys came storming into the room. It’s not too deep.”

I didn’t have a pack, nor did I have the first aid kit I usually carried. It had been foolish to leave it behind, but running with our bags was even more deadly. We would have lost speed, and we couldn’t afford that.

“Zeke, I really am sorry. You know I didn’t mean those things, right?”

I didn’t say anything. What she said had been true.

I walked toward her and lowered myself to my ass with an exhale. I set one of my Glocks—the empty one I carried—at my side as I stared into the mouth of the tunnel, waiting to hear any sign of someone approaching. We spoke in hushed tones, but I had to remain aware of our surroundings.

“I left you alone with a baby, and then as soon as I learned about her, I took off again. You were right. That makes me worse than my father.”

She scoffed. “I was pissed off that you left. I was so pissed off that I couldn’t bring myself to listen to you, even though you deserved to be heard out. You are nothing like that man, and if you never think about him again, it will be too soon. I should have never said that, especially since it wasn’t true.” She reached her hand over and placed it on my knee. “Whatever happens down here is meant to be, and I wouldn’t want anyone else at my side if we’re going to experience our last moments.”

“You’re not going to die down here. And they’re not going to find you.”

“I wish you had a chance to meet her and spend some time with her. Beatrice is such a special little girl,” Evelina said, a smile stretching her cheeks as she stared at the ground in front of us. “When I looked into her eyes for the first time, everything wrong I had ever done fell away. My goals and life’s mission shifted. She became the only thing that mattered.”

I could only imagine a little bundle in Evelina’s arms.

“It kills me that I haven’t been able to raise her. A few hours here and there, but… I feel like I’m failing her every day.”

“You could never fail her,” I scolded.

She smiled sadly. “Yet, she has never lived with her own mother. How shitty does that sound?”

I decided that I could talk to her. I had, after all, left her alone to raise a child. The least I could do was talk through the reason I had run. The whole reason.

“I didn’t leave the apartment because I was upset with you or because I was angry. I didn’t leave it as a way to reject our daughter. I left because the thought of hurting either you or her drove me to a point of desperation. The thought of ever laying a hand on either of you makes me sick, and the thought that I could do it one day—” I cut myself off and shook my head. “I needed to sort through it. I didn’t need you to see the mess.”

“Do you think your father ever had those fears?” she asked.

“God, no,” I scoffed, glancing at her.

She gave me a knowing look. It took me a moment to understand her point—to see where she was going with her words and the intention behind them.

As hard as I tried to consider all the ways she was wrong—the ways she didn’t understand—I struggled to find a good argument.

“I have killed people.”

“Congratulations, you have a single quality that your father had. When it comes to morals and generosity, you far surpass him. You can share characteristics with a parent without ever becoming them. Have you met my father?”

“I’ve heard plenty about him,” I grumbled.

“I’m nothing like that man, but he’s still my blood, and I will always share similarities with him. We both eat too fast, and I am good at holding back my frustration until I explode with it. I got that from him, too. But I am not him, just like you are not your dad.” She ran a hand over her arm, and her fingers came back damp with blood. “Do you think I’d let you near my daughter if I wasn’t sure about you?”

“I’m not good at letting people in.”

“You’re getting better with me.”

I was trying. Trying so damn hard. “Can you tell me about her?”

Evelina’s face lit up. “She looks like you. Uncannily like you, actually. Dark complexion and dark hair. And newborns always have gray-blue eyes, but hers are completely blue. Sky blue. Just like yours.” She paused. “She holds up her head during tummy time, and she is always laughing and giggling. Maggie said she’s the happiest baby, though for the first month, she was really colicky as we found the right formula. I wanted to nurse, but… it wasn’t in the cards given the situation.”

If this was all I got—if these were the only bits of information I would have about my daughter—it would be enough. If I had to give my life to protect them, it would be a death well spent.

“Let’s find a way out of here. For Beatrice.”