Chapter 14 #2
He didn’t even blink, and I hated him. Hated how calm he was in the face of imminent danger. Hated how I couldn’t reach out for his hand and tell him I was scared. Hated that he’d trained me to put on the same facade and keep it together no matter what.
I let my training take over and dampened the emotions slicing me raw inside. “If you burn that, we won’t replace it,” I said coolly.
My father tittered a laugh and placed his hand on my arm. “Let her do what she wants, princess. She needs to know she can trust us.”
I felt my pulse leaping in my wrist where his hand lay. I tried to read his face, to know what he was thinking, and, more importantly, what his plan was for escaping this room when the bill burst into green light like a firecracker.
Olena only continued to smile at us, giving nothing away.
“Sweet girl. Thinks I care about a hundred dollars when there are millions more.” She brusquely said something to her henchman, and he flicked open the lighter.
The flame sparked to life and licked the edge of the bill before I could take my next breath.
I continued not breathing because I was too shocked when the bill burned like a real one. The edge of it caught fire and curled with a wisp of black smoke.
The room was tense enough to explode.
My father calmly held up his hands. “There, see? All this fuss for nothing. Now—”
Olena narrowed her eyes and barked something at her henchman. He dropped the bill and stomped out the flame while she reached for the stack she’d pulled it from and took another one from the center. “Again,” she demanded and held up another crisp bill.
“Olena, please—” my father said with a weary sigh, and I heard it in his voice. The tiniest tell only I could make out. We were about to get caught.
I glanced at the case and realized he’d lined the stacks with real bills, but their insides were made up of the fakes for this exact reason.
My father expected a test; he knew she was going to take a bill from the top of a stack and burn it to make sure it was real.
His error was assuming one bill would satisfy her.
Olena muttered something in the other language, and her henchman flicked the lighter again. When this bill caught, it burned emerald like a radioactive orb.
I didn’t have time to panic because a hell we weren’t even expecting broke loose.
A loud clang called our attention to the living room.
The waiter dropped the silver dome, which had been covering one of the plates.
I’d honestly thought he’d left, and Olena must have too, based on the startled look on her face.
The dome clattered on the floor, and when the waiter bent as if he were going to pick it up, he reached for his ankle and retrieved a gun.
He stood back up with it aimed right at us.
“FBI, nobody move. This room is surrounded.”
Nobody listened, and everybody moved.
Olena’s henchman reached for his own gun at the same time my father leapt out of his chair. I knew he was armed, and it would be a matter of seconds before someone pulled a trigger.
I tried to dive under the table, but Olena grabbed me. Her bonelike fingers dug into my upper arm hard enough to bruise. “Where do you think you’re going, princess?” she snarled.
I shot her a terrified glance and prayed she didn’t pull out a gun too. Though, Olena probably knew how to kill me with one hand if she wanted, no weapon needed.
A gunshot rang out, and we both flinched. Someone cried out in pain, and I was too terrified to figure out who it was.
“Get out of here!” I heard my father shout. If he had been the one shot, he at least had enough life left to instruct me to run.
My heart pounded in my chest, my ears, my eyes, it felt.
I scrambled to get away from Olena’s death grip.
I yanked my arm free and threw it back to slam my elbow into her beak of a nose.
I felt the bone crack against the hard point of my bent arm.
She screamed and threw her hands over a sudden gush of blood.
I sucked in a breath, ready to escape, and made it half a step before I slammed into a brick wall of a body.
The henchman hooked an arm around me, and before I could blink, he was squeezing the air from my throat and jamming his gun into my temple.
The entire room froze, and my life teetered on the brink.
I blinked, already getting dizzy from lack of oxygen, and saw the waiter, who was apparently an FBI agent, on the floor. A wave of relief hit me because the gunshot from earlier had not struck my father. I wondered if the man was dead.
“Don’t move,” the henchman pointing the gun to my head said.
My father aimed his weapon at us. His jaw clenched and his eyes were black pits. I saw a slight twitch in his lip and a fraction of a shake in his hands. To anyone else, it would have been invisible, but I knew all his tells. He was nervous, and it terrified me.
“Dad,” I whispered.
“Shut up!” the henchman barked and tightened his grip on my throat. The gun pushed into my temple like a screwdriver. I squeezed my eyes shut in terror.
Olena croaked something from the floor, her bloody hand muffling the sound of her voice. The man gripping me glanced down at her, and another gunshot rang out. It split my hearing in half, deafening me to everything but a mind-shattering ringing.
I screamed and it took a few seconds to realize my ability to scream was a result of the vise around my neck having gone slack.
The enormous henchman swayed against me, his weight threatening to collapse and take me down with him.
I spun in his arm still loosely hooked around me and found myself face first into his bloody chest.
Another scream ripped from my mouth as I shoved him away. My palms were blood soaked and my legs like rubber. Before I could gather my thoughts, another gunshot tore through the room.
I heard my father cry out in pain, and I feared the worst.
“Dad!”
He’d been shot in the leg and had fallen to one knee. His face twisted in pain. He gripped the dining table with a sweaty hand and used his other to wave me away. The FBI agent in the living room was not dead. He’d sat up and landed a successful shot. He was preparing to take another.
“Get out of here!” my father screamed at me. The pain from the gunshot looked excruciating, but not as painful as the fear in his eyes that something would happen to me.
“Dad, I can’t!” I cried. I couldn’t leave him. A warped sense of loyalty wouldn’t let me.
The henchman was dead from the bullet my father had fired, I knew it. Olena was nursing her broken nose, swearing in another language and spitting blood, and the agent was preparing to do more damage.
I rounded the table to get to my father. His leg was pouring blood. He’d been hit in his left calf. The wounded limb lay out behind him like a useless log. I knew I couldn’t lift him, especially not with someone actively shooting at us. The best I could do would be to drag him to the door.
He held out a hand to stop me approaching and gave me a look that was at once pleading and a command. “Stop. You have to get out of here.”
“Dad, I’m not—”
“Erin, go!”
The sound of my name stopped me in my tracks. He never broke character. Ever. The significance of it was too much to ignore.
“Go,” he said again, and I had no choice but to obey.
I pivoted on my toe before the agent rose and got off another shot.
I hurtled myself toward the door, not knowing what to expect on the other side.
It wasn’t until I was in the hall eyeing the glowing green EXIT sign that I heard a voice command me to stop.
I threw myself into the stairwell and ran down as fast as I could.
My lungs were on fire and my heart about to beat out of my chest when I reached the ground floor and yanked open a service door.
I found myself on a side street in the pouring rain.
I ran into the night, getting soaked, until a sturdy voice commanded me to stop, this time from in front of me and with a gun barrel aimed at me for emphasis.
Cornered, I splashed to a stop, my body drenched, and my toes numb in my strappy shoes. I hadn’t noticed the blood on my hands until I raised them, and it began to wash off in the rain.
The man pointing his gun at me had FBI in block letters on his coat slicked with rain.
I knew it was all over.