Chapter 16
Kitt
My body reacted before my brain finished processing the sound of the gunshots.
I pulled Jordy down with me, ducking to the side to hide around the corner of the cottage on the opposite side that the gunfire was coming from.
He didn’t make a sound as he let me manhandle him into cover, but I could see the fear in his eyes as he clutched my briefcase to his chest.
“Damn,” I muttered as I peered around the corner of the cottage. “There’s even more than I feared.”
From the moment I saw Thomas take his last breath on the floor of my cottage, my first assumption was that the new witness was behind the attack.
It was too coincidental that Thomas was attacked on the same day that Sam—if that even was the man’s name—appeared in the safe house.
My hope was that Sam acted alone. A single assassin we could probably handle.
With both Sebastian and Logan here, we had a decent amount of firepower, and I wasn’t helpless in a fight, either.
However, judging by the amount of gunfire I was hearing, Sam obviously wasn’t alone.
My cottage was near the heart of the bunker, just beside the main lounge area.
I’d chosen it not only for its extra room that could act as an office, but also because it was equidistant from each of the witnesses.
From here, I could see all the cottages where they’d been staying.
Several had their doors kicked in, including Jordy’s cottage, and a chilling thought crossed my mind.
If Jordy hadn’t visited me tonight, would he be lying dead on the floor instead of Thomas?
Looking back over my shoulder to ensure that Jordy was still there, I hated that I felt relieved.
This was supposed to be a safe place. No one was supposed to end up dead.
I shouldn’t have a preference over who lived and who died, but I did.
I couldn’t deny it. If I had to make the choice, I’d choose Jordy’s life a thousand times.
Maybe that was selfish of me, but I’d seen enough of the world to know that there was a little bit of selfishness buried in every human heart, and I wasn’t ashamed of mine.
“Hey, over here,” someone shouted.
I risked leaning a little farther around the corner to see Sebastian waving at me from the window of the main lounge area.
It wasn’t far away. Just the next building over. The distance would probably only take us about ten seconds to cross. Yet, even as I calculated the time, another gunshot rang out and a hole appeared in the fake lawn between us.
Even just ten seconds was too long. There was no way Jordy and I would make that distance without getting shot.
Judging from the direction the bullet had come from, our attackers were using the pool’s decorative cave as cover.
I couldn’t see them, and had no idea how many there even were, but they could obviously see us.
I shook my head, trying to signal to Sebastian that we wouldn’t be able to make it, but Sebastian waved us over again.
“It’ll be all right. Logan’s here, too. We’ll cover you. Just get over here.”
Sebastian and Logan each posted up at one of the lounge’s windows like it was a saloon in an old western movie, bracing their arms against the windowsills as they fired a round of bullets toward the enemies hidden in the fake cave.
They were right. We wouldn’t be able to do much while we were spread out. We needed to coordinate, and to do that, we needed to regroup.
“Keep hold of that briefcase,” I whispered to Jordy as I tucked him under my arm, making sure to place my body between him and the shooters.
With a serious expression, he nodded and gripped the briefcase tighter.
Our evidence for the case was important, but it wasn’t the first thought on my mind. As we stepped out from our cover and started running for the main building where Sebastian and Logan were waiting, I just hoped the briefcase’s metal material could shield Jordy if worst came to worst.
Half a dozen steps.
That was all that stood between us and relative safety.
We ran without even looking toward the people shooting at us. It would only slow us down. Even when we reached the lounge area, we didn’t stop, and tumbled right through the doorway.
Logan slammed the door behind us, muffling the sound of gunfire.
“Glad to see you’re both okay.”
“Okay?” I scoffed as I stood from the floor, trying in vain to dust myself off. “We are the furthest thing from okay right now. What the hell happened?”
A particularly loud gunshot rang out, and a chunck of a nearby windowsill exploded into a shower of splinters. Sebastian took a deep breath before pointing the nose of his gun out the window and returning fire.
One.
Two.
Three.
He pulled the trigger three times, his hands never wavered for even a moment, and the gunfire on the other side of the bunker momentarily fell silent.
“Turns out that new witness, Sam, was a rat working for the bell ringers,” Sebastian said as he used the opportunity to reload his gun.
“As soon as he was alone, he slipped back up to the main house and unlocked all the security. There must have been people lying in wait nearby, because we were overrun in minutes.”
Jordy was still pressed against my side, safely tucked under my arm where I could clearly feel him shaking against me. Most of the furniture in the lounge had been knocked over in the commotion, but a few chairs remained upright, and I led Jordy over to the nearest one.
“Here, Jordy, sit down for a minute while we figure out what to do.” Despite saying that, I was reluctant to let him go. My hands practically felt fused to his skin, as if separating from him would be the same as cutting off a piece of myself.
He must have shared the sentiment, because after he sat down, he continued to cling to the hem of my shirt with one hand while cradling my briefcase with the other.
Blue eyes looked around the lounge area, their pupils blown wide like he was struggling to understand what he was seeing, until his gaze landed on one of the other witnesses nearby.
“Clay? You okay?”
A few feet away, Clay sat slumped in a chair, elbows braced on his knees. There was a smudge of dirt on his cheek, and his hair was a frizzy mess, but he otherwise looked all right.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, confirming my initial observation. “But Maria wasn’t so lucky.”
He nodded over his shoulder at the twin girls huddled in a corner. One of them, presumably Maria, sat curled up in a ball, blood staining the side of her shirt while her sister pressed a cloth over a wound on her side.
“It’s just a graze,” Maria said through clenched teeth. “I’ll be fine. Let’s just get out of here.”
“Fuck!” Sebastian shouted as he ducked down below the windowsill after a bullet came precariously close to his head. “I second the idea of getting out of here. Where’s Thomas? Has anyone seen him?”
Jordy pressed closer to me, and I wrapped my arm tighter around his shoulder.
“Thomas isn’t coming.”
Thankfully, no one needed me to explain more than that.
The plan to leave ended up being relatively simple.
With only one way in and out of the underground bunker, we didn’t have many options.
The only real question was how to create a big enough distraction that would let us get up the only staircase that was currently being blocked by an untold number of gunmen.
“I’ve got an idea,” Sebastian said as he tossed Logan his gun. “But I’ll need you to buy me two minutes.”
Logan never lowered his own gun from the window as he shoved Sebastian’s weapon in the back of his belt for safekeeping. “All right. But I can’t hold them back on my own. They’ll push forward in that time, and we’re running out of ammo. I hope your plan’s a good one.”
“I don’t know if it’s a good one,” Sebastian called back over his shoulder as he headed off toward the lounge’s kitchen. “But it’ll give us a chance at least.”
With that vote of confidence, he disappeared into the kitchen, and Logan returned to standing guard at the window. He was more conservative with his bullets than he had been a minute ago, only firing when he was certain he had a shot.
Although I couldn’t see what was happening outside the walls of our hideout, I could practically feel our enemies creeping closer. It was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck.
I hated to separate from Jordy, but I hated the feeling of being hunted even more. If there was something I could do to help, I had to try. After leaving him sitting with Clay so that the two could at least take some comfort in each other, I joined Logan by the window.
“I’m no trained marksman, but I’m also no stranger with a gun. Can I help?”
Logan’s whole body looked as if he were carved from a stone statue, completely unmoving, as he lined up the sight of his gun. Yet, he didn’t pull the trigger.
“Unless you’re certain you can hit the target every time, we’d be better off conserving the ammo right now. We might need it later.”
At some point while we’d been hiding, our attackers must have found the control panel for the bunkers artificial light and switched it from daytime mode to nighttime.
The painted ceiling now resembled a sky of stars, and everything was covered in the cool shadows of midnight.
It was the perfect cover for our attackers to sneak up on us.
In the distance, I could see the vague shape of people moving around, but nothing distinct enough that I could shoot with a hundred percent accuracy.
I reluctantly had to admit my own limitations.
Two minutes on the dot later, Sebastian returned from the kitchen, carrying what looked like several aerosol cans that had been tampered with. He handed most of them to Logan, though he also gave me one as well.
“These should work like smoke bombs to give you some cover. Just twist off the spray nozzle and throw it. If you toss a couple into the stairwell, it should confuse whoever is guarding it enough for you to make up back up to the surface.”