34. Fire For Effect
Chapter 34
Fire For Effect
Taz
Four helicopters. Four. How the hell did that happen?
I only vaguely had an idea who Cerberus was. I knew even less about Paradigm, other than the fact that they gave Sierra a lady-boner.
She was fangirling so hard, she was giddy at the prospect of working with them, which was only slightly tempered by her partner bleeding and unconscious on a litter that she and Veder carried to the Chinook.
“Wifey!” she yelled at me, as we ducked beneath the spinning rotors over our heads. “He and I are supposed to stay together, but I’m giving you my seat, okay?”
She practically shoved me to the helicopter, before she ran to another one - the one that I guess had been designated for me.
I felt the familiar downward drop of my stomach, as we lifted off the ground, hovering for a moment, before the bird tilted forward, and sped towards the horizon.
We looked back at the compound. The lights were on, but there was no movement there.
“Have we cleared the area of civilians?” Cobra said into a radio handset.
“Yes,” the voice on the radio replied.
“Then fire for effect!” I screamed. They needed to fucking douse the place in artillery. Burn the fucking place down.
“Droning on US soil is kinda different than on deployment,” the voice cautioned. “Please do a final visual scan, to ensure that none of our people aren’t there.”
I did. It was fast, but Cobra was faster.
“Visual cleared, Brett,” he said, calling the voice on the radio by name. “Prodigal Sons are regrouping below. Do as my daughter says. Fire for Effect.”
“Roger.”
It didn’t take long, as the helicopter almost meandered it’s way out of the area. When the missile was launched, we heard it whizzing before it exploded in a splash of white and yellow light, then smoke.
The bricks rumbled as the weakened structure gave way, crumbling to the ground, it’s insides lighting on fire. It burned, the heat of it reaching us in the sky for a moment, before we flew out of visual range.
“Great hit,” Cobra said. “Fucking beautiful.”
Then there were sirens. Fire fighters were coming.
“Called the Fire Brigade already?” Cobra asked into the radio.
“Called them while we lit up the place. We’re in the United States, bro. We operate under different rules.” The familiarity between him and the strange man I had met for a moment with Noam and Griff made me bristle. “How’s the kid?”
Cobra’s eyes flitted to me.
The rising morning sun was bathing the world in gold. I looked into his eyes, and they were, indeed, the same color as mine. Darker on the outside, and a blue-green near the pupils. Not quite hazel, and not quite brown, blue or green, but somewhere in in between.
“The kid’s fine,” Cobra finally said. “Tell Braun he’s a dead man.”
I longed to speak to my father. But it wasn’t the time. Not while I held Griff’s hand and willed him to live. I needed him to. I needed him to be alright.
The dark metal band on my finger fit so elegantly that it was like… fate.
I thought I’d hate wearing a ring again. I thought that marriage would make me feel claustrophobic and broken. But it didn’t. I felt… freer. I felt more alive because I was tied to him. And he deserved all of my attention now. He deserved everything I had.
Cobra had waited thirty years. He could wait another thirty hours.
We went to the Saratoga Springs hospital, landing on the roof. They kept us on the top floor, the whole level secured like we were the President of the United States. Men in suits with spiral ear pieces stood at all the doors, looking somberly outward as a handful of people in scrubs hurried around us.
The night was long. My head and body ached.
They forced me to do an X-ray on my face and ribs. My nose was definitely broken, rib was only slightly cracked. I was wrapped up, disinfected, and bandaged within minutes. All that was left for me to do was wait for them to bring my fiancé back to me.
Griff was still unconscious when they finally pushed his bed in. I waited on an uncomfortable, lumpy couch, staring at him, as the hours passed, marked by the beeping of the heart monitor.
Despite having been seen by a more than competent nurse, Cobra had bellowed up and down the hallway until a doctor was sent in to look at me.
A slightly terrified man in a white lab coat came in, double checking every bandage.
Cobra stood over him, arms crossed, biceps bulging as he stared at the back of the doctor’s head.
“What Medical School did you go to?” he asked, as the young-looking doctor touched my face with his fingers.
“I got my MD from Florida State University,” he answered, not taking his eyes off of me.
“Florida State?” Cobra crinkled his nose. “Party School.”
“It’s one of the top hundred Medical Schools in the country!”
“Oh yeah? There are only 155 accredited Medical Schools in the United States, so that doesn’t mean a whole lot.”
“Cobra,” I said, trying to stare him down.
“I went to MIT for engineering. Top 1 school in the country. Got any doctors that went to Harvard? Or at least to an Ivy League?”
Was Cobra snarling? He looked like he was snarling.
“I know what I’m doing, sir,” the doctor said, moving on to look at my swollen hand.
“I haven’t gone to college, so he’s doing better than me,” I said, trying to stick up for the doc in my own way.
“My daughter deserves nothing but the best, and Florida State isn’t the best,” Cobra said. “And what the hell do you mean, you didn’t go to college?”
The doctor got up and left after telling me that a nurse would be in to finish bandaging me up.
“No money,”
“Bullshit!”
“Well, it’s true,” I said, with a sigh.
“How can that be? What’s your mom been doing with the child support this whole time?”
“You never sent child support.” He had insisted that he had, but I had never seen a dime.
“I’ve been putting half my profits into an account for you and your mom every paycheck since the day you were born,” he said, and I blinked, wondering if I’d had a concussion. “Your mom really never told you?”
I tried to wrack my brain, to see if maybe my mother had lied to me this whole time about my father. Teresa was a pill. She always had been. A tiger mom through and through, in every possible way. But she wasn’t a liar. Even when you wanted her to lie to you, she wouldn’t.
“I don’t think she knew,” I said.
“Bullshit,” he said like he was chewing the words like a blade of grass between his teeth.
“Cobra–”
“Dad,” he corrected quickly. “Or if you’re not comfortable with it, you can call me Joe. That’s what your mom called me.”
“Joe, then,” I said, looking over at Griff’s unconscious form, lying peacefully on the white linen. “I don’t know what happened between you and my mother, but I promise you, she worked hard for everything we had, and she didn’t have some kind of… other income coming in. I would have noticed if she had.”
“She’s probably keeping it for herself and never spending it on my kid —”
“No,” I said, feeling the awkward pain of being in a position to defend my own mom. “My mother is a lot of things - the least of which might be a mother. But she’s not a liar, or a thief.”
Cobra looked at me, his jaw ticking like he was grinding his back teeth into a powder.
He stared at me with eyes I had inherited from him. And I stared right back.
“I’m getting a coffee,” he said, finally breaking off our stare down. “Want one?”
I nodded. Not because I was thirsty, but because I just needed a moment. I needed a second by myself, with Griff.
When we were alone, I rolled a chair up to his bedside, and held his hand.
I leaned forward in the seat, my elbows on my knees, trying to wrap my mind around everything. Everything that I couldn’t understand. Everything that I couldn’t feel right at that moment.
“You told me that you’ve nearly seen me die three times,” I whispered into the quiet space between me and Griff. “I’ve seen you shot twice. I’ve been with you at the hospital twice. It’s not a fun feeling.”
He didn’t respond, and there were no changes in the rhythm of his heart monitors.
I traced my finger on my face, feeling the Quasimodo-like bruising from the hits I took from my ex-husband. My late ex-husband?
We had lit up the compound like it was the fourth of July. He had to be dead.
The same day I placed Kai’s ring on my finger, the demon of my past died in fire and agony.
If that wasn’t a good sign of things to come, then I didn’t know what it could be.
It wasn’t like my last engagement ring and band. Heath had bought an ostentatious diamond, and thick eternity band, in an attempt to show off how much money he had made. The supposed valuable diamond ended up being nothing but moissanite. Not that I would have cared. A ring was a ring, but the thing he passed off as something of value was something he bought only for the cost of a fast-food meal.
A bit of sentiment would have given it value.
I stared at the one-of-a-kind ring on my finger now. Sierra told me that the woven band was made of two shell casings that had been ripped out of Griff’s body. Sentimental, and incredibly morbid. It was perfect on so many levels.
That sense of victory was only blunted by the fact that Griff had been shot… again.
The wound had a clean exit, so there was no metal to pull out of his body, and even the surgeon seemed bored.
I guess he had been excited at the prospect of stitching a person back together from a bullet wound, but what we came in with wasn’t up to snuff.
“Barely counts as a GSW,” the annoyed surgeon said. “It was all very textbook. Once the anesthesia wears off, he’ll need some rest, but after two, maybe three days of observation, he can go home.”
“Seems familiar,” I mumbled under my breath, remembering the last time.
He had been awake last time, though, so it was a little different.
The surgeon back then wasn’t as unimpressed with the wound as the new one was.
“We’ll keep monitoring him, and we’ll consult with you if he doesn’t come to in the next day,” the surgeon yawned.
“Consult with me?” I asked. “I’m not his wife or anything, I don’t think I get to…”
“Are you Trinity Guerro?” the surgeon flipped the stack of papers on the clipboard at the end of Griff’s bed.
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re his medical proxy,” he said, flipping it closed. “You’re the only one authorized to make choices for him.”
“What?”
“Have a good day,” he said, turning around, and leaving with the flurry of his white coat trailing behind him.
The fuck?
I suppose it wasn’t that unusual. I had a copy of his keys, and he left his car with me. Hell, I was allowed to check his mail, and sign off on needed repairs, and somewhere in the depths of my important papers, stowed away in a fire-proof safe, was access to his bank statements, and a Power of Attorney, just in case. He was overseas a lot, and if he needed someone to sign off on repairing his condo after it flooded, or if a gas main broke, or something, then I was here, able and willing.
A knock on the door pulled me from my circling thoughts.
“Come in!” I said.
Cobra stayed at the door, his thick, tattooed forearm leaning on the frame as he looked at me, one foot in the door, and the other out.
He brusquely walked in, handed me a Styrofoam cup full of coffee, then walked back to the door like he couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me.
With his palm on the doorknob, he asked over his shoulder, “Do you need… anything?”
“No,” I said, automatically. “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” he said. “The floor has been secured.”
“Which means what, specifically?”
“Some of my colleagues are on the floor, with a couple staff from Cerberus, and the floor has been fully vacated to keep you and your boy safe.” Cobra tensed. “They’ll be here until it’s time for you to go home, and they will secure your residence until…” he sighed. “Until you get to somewhere a little more permanent.”
“I have a permanent residence.”
“A trailer isn’t a permanent residence.”
Great. Now I’d have two parents to judge my living choices?
“Who are you, my mother?” the corner of my lip twitched, as I felt a smile coming on.
“No, but I’ll definitely be having a chat with her real fucking soon.”