Chapter Twenty
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“At your one o’clock, eighty meters,” Ivy said.
“How sure are you this time?” Gavin panted.
They’d hit so many dead ends already and he couldn’t keep going on like this, constantly battling his way through this angry, panic-stricken mob. He had no idea where his brothers were now, but they’d been out here fighting through the masses for almost forty minutes without a single positive ID on Carly.
He was soaked with sweat, his lip still bleeding, and the cops were deploying tear gas. Clouds of it drifted on the air, mixing with smoke whenever the breeze shifted.
It hadn’t reached him yet, but it would soon enough, and then every mucous membrane and every single inch of sweaty skin would feel like a flamethrower had opened up on him, making it damned near impossible to breathe or see.
He only had a few minutes before it happened, if that. They had to find Carly before then.
“One o’clock,” Ivy insisted.
He shoved aside the sense of hopelessness starting to creep into the back of his mind. Fuck that. He would keep battering his way through this crowd until he dropped from exhaustion, and then he would fucking crawl on his hands and knees to get to Carly if need be.
“Copy.”
He spun around once again, shouldered through a cluster of several dozen people huddled together between him and the location Ivy had just indicated. Beyond them through the shifting smoke and crowd ahead he spotted a flash of red hair, but when he got closer saw that it was a young woman.
“It’s not her,” he said, breathing hard, disappointment hitting.
More pockets of gas appeared amongst the groups of protesters still filling the street. The area he and his brothers were trying to cover wasn’t that big, but the density of the crowd along with the fires and the protesters battling with cops had turned it into a nightmare. Every meter he gained felt like a hundred.
“Copy.”
This wasn’t working, and they were almost out of time. One shift of the breeze, and he’d be practically blind. If they hadn’t had a single sighting of her yet, then it likely meant she hadn’t reached this point yet. “She’s got to be farther north.”
“Gav!”
He twisted his head around to see Tristan wading his way toward him. They both moved for the edge of the crowd where the concentration of bodies was thinnest. Trying to fight through the thick of it was slow and exhausting, like moving through quicksand with weights on his feet.
“Where’s Deck?” Gavin asked.
Tris shook his head, soaked with sweat and trying to catch his breath. “Dunno. But the gas is gonna be a bitch.”
“Yep,” he said grimly. The thought of Carly out here somewhere, alone and terrified, was like a knife in his guts. He drew in a sharp breath, felt a burn at the backs of his eyeballs that had nothing to do with tear gas. “Fuck. Fuck.”
Tris did a double-take, stared at him. “Hey, we’ll find her.”
It’s not that.
He shook his head, clenched his jaw, struggling to keep a lid on all the emotions roiling inside him. Tris was literally his other half, the person who understood him the best, and the one he trusted most in this world. But he didn’t know.
Gavin had to say it, or explode.
“She’s mine, Tris,” he rasped out, his voice barely carrying over the barrage of sound engulfing them.
Tris frowned at him. “Who?”
“Carly. Autumn just told me.”
“What the hell ?” Tris said, throwing out an arm to block a punch meant for someone else when a scuffle broke out next to them. They were both already pummeled to hell, would likely have been nursing broken ribs if not for the Kevlar vests under their dress shirts. “Are you for real? Is that even a possibility?”
“Yeah.” On both counts. Forty-five minutes ago he would have said no way. Autumn had seemed completely convinced, but was there any way she could be wrong?
Tris shot him a quick, are-you-fucking-shitting-me look, then went back to scanning the crowd. “When did she tell you?”
“Outside the ballroom.”
“Holy fuck.”
Gavin didn’t answer. Felt like he was still in shock as he looked across the seething sea of humanity between them and the burning hotel still two blocks away. Flames were shooting from the east side and roof, the fire crews only just beginning to deploy now that the crowd had finally been moved far enough away to let them work.
Gavin’s stomach sank. There were tens of thousands of people out here, too many of them bent on violence. If Ivy couldn’t spot Carly on any of the video feeds, how in hell were he, Tris, and Decker supposed to find her on the ground in the middle of this shit storm?
“Come on.” Tris grabbed hold of his upper arm, started towing him back toward the edge of the street. Everywhere he looked, people were running around in complete chaos with no idea what was happening and nowhere to go. It was fucking insane. “When the hell did you guys get together?” Tris demanded, still scanning.
He’d held the secret inside for so long, but now he was bursting with it. Trying to make sense of what had happened, while simultaneously scanning for any sign of Carly and hoping for more direction from Ivy. “Prom night. It was a one-time thing, and we never talked about it again.”
They were forced to stop and fend off three guys coming at them with bricks. With a few well-aimed elbow strikes, he and Tris knocked the bricks from their hands, then kicked their feet out from under them, sprawling them on their asses before quickly moving past. The violence these pricks had started had unleashed this entire thing.
Tris kept heading for the side of the street. “What about the guy she said was the father?”
“I don’t know.” He had so many questions. Wanted answers to every single one, but— “We have to find her, Tris.” He would have given his life to protect Carly even before he’d found out. Now... He wanted to burn down everything and everyone keeping him from her.
“We will. We won’t stop until we do.” Tris spotted someone, lifted an arm in greeting. “There’s Deck.”
Gavin followed his twin’s gaze to find their elder brother angling his way through the crowd toward them. “Not a word to him, Tris. I don’t want anyone else knowing until we get Carly back and I straighten everything out with Autumn.” Their family dynamic wasn’t exactly traditional. Deck saw himself as the head of the family and a father figure rather than a sibling and was a total hardass. Gavin couldn’t take a lecture from him right now about Autumn on top of everything else.
“Yeah, course,” Tris promised.
The three of them met near the edge of the crowd, moving to a moderately secure spot to look around from their new vantage point. “Nothing more from Ivy?” Deck asked, his chest heaving, face streaked with smoke, blood, and sweat.
Gavin shook his head, battled to hold it together as he imagined Carly crushed in that volatile crowd, or trampled while she choked on the gas, blind and unable to breathe as she cried for Autumn. Fuck.
“Ten o’clock, sixty meters,” Ivy suddenly said.
Gavin’s head snapped around, his gaze zeroing in on the location Ivy mentioned...right in the middle of the worst of the crush.
Pockets of gas drifted up and dispersed among the crowd, people staggering around covering their face and hands as the riot cops pushed the wall of people steadily back. His heart hitched. “Can you verify anything about the target?”
“Red hair in a ponytail, and she’s wearing a pink hoodie. Someone’s got her on their shoulders. Autumn’s sure it’s her.”
Raw adrenaline punched through him. He’d seen Carly wearing her favorite pink unicorn hoodie just two days ago when they’d flown the kite at the beach. “Copy. Moving to intercept.” He surged forward without stopping to consult with his brothers, not wanting to waste even a second, pulse thudding hard as he forced his way back into the churning crowd.
Less than ten meters in, a slight gap opened up in front of him and he spotted a red ponytail and the unicorn on the back of her hoodie. “Carly!”
She disappeared behind a cloud of smoke, pockets of gas drifting all around her.
A superhuman burst of strength punched through him, electrifying his tired muscles. He plowed through the crowd like a bulldozer, mowing down everyone in his path. Oblivious of the knocks and blows he sustained. Unaware of where his brothers were, his focus narrowed to the spot where he’d just seen Carly.
The veil of smoke lifted slightly, revealing the complete scene before him. His stomach plummeted like a concrete block as he realized Carly was now trapped between the second line of riot police and the violent mob attacking them.