Chapter 35 #2
I get the distant feeling that I should be happy about this. That I should feel validated that someone else thinks what Nico said was out of line, but instead, all I feel is this weird surge of anger.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”
His head tilts like a confused dog trying to understand a command. “Eden, he threatened to kill you.”
Zoey mutters something under her breath, her chair creaking.
“I know he did, but—” But what? I don’t even know what I’m saying, only that imagining Griffin punching Nico makes a sour taste cling to the roof of my mouth.
Griffin didn’t have an ulterior motive in defending me. He did what a good friend would do. I just wouldn’t know, because I’ve never had someone who’d do that for me before. Still. I can’t help but feel like I’ve fractured the team at the worst time possible.
Nico drives. I ride in the passenger seat, and don’t think I look at him even once the whole way to Pittsburgh.
Zoey calls once we get into the city.
“Coordinates haven’t moved in ten minutes.” Her voice crackles through the speaker of Nico’s phone, which has been jammed into the cupholder. “It’s in a business park.”
It’s the dead of night, that time when the city feels like it’s holding its breath.
The streets and sidewalks are empty. A chain-link fence wraps around the abandoned building, woven with ivy and sagging in places.
A tarp flaps in the wind near the loading dock.
Maybe someone’s makeshift shelter, but I don’t see anyone around.
Our vehicles are parked on the curb, engines ticking as they cool. Griffin, DJ, and Benji climb out of Griffin’s pickup, gathering on the empty sidewalk. Zoey insisted on staying behind so her connection would be more reliable, in case she needed to get us any more information.
“I doubt Morrow knows she exists with how little she comes out of her room,” DJ had said while we were suiting up, as if that would make me feel better about leaving anyone on their own. “She’s got Bob to protect her, anyway.”
Nico addresses all of us, “Eden and I will take the main entrance. We go in and see what we’re dealing with. If we’re not out in twenty minutes or we call for backup, DJ and Griffin, you come in hard and fast.”
Griffin’s jaw clenches, but Nico’s talking in his don’t-fuck-with-me team leader voice that would make me walk off a cliff if he told me to.
Benji gets into the van to run comms. Nico climbs into the back, pulling equipment out of the bags and crates connected to the van walls. He sheathes a flashlight into a holster on his belt and passes me one, which I put in my pocket.
“You have your earplugs?” he asks, slipping a glass jar and one of those mini ghost vacs into his pack.
I pat my pocket. “I’m not putting them in unless I have to. I need to be able to listen if I’m going to help.”
He pauses, then nods.
Even this tiny validation from him makes my chest warm, which is annoying when I’m supposed to be mad at him.
I am mad at him. But it’s hard to hold onto that anger when we’re about to walk into a trap, and even if it’s illogical, even if he said he’d kill me, there’s no one I’d want to walk into this obvious trap with more.
He offers me an earpiece, which I hook into place. A second later, Benji’s voice crackles through: “Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” I say.
“Same,” Nico says, testing his own.
Nico straps a shotgun to his back. He reaches for another, pausing with his hand on the barrel. “You want to carry one of these?”
I nod, and he hands it to me. The metal is cold even through my gloves. I check the chamber, then grab a handful of salt rounds from the bucket, my fingers steady despite everything.
Nico’s next words are careful, like he’s trying to navigate around the giant fucking elephant in the room. “Where’d you learn to shoot?”
“My dad taught me,” I say. “He’d take me to shoot clay pigeons in the woods behind his buddy’s house when I was little.”
Nico hums. “Only use it if there’s no other option. And I’d appreciate it if you refrained from shooting me.”
I drop a round into each of the barrels, slinging the shotgun over my shoulder so the barrels point at the sky. “Don’t try to strangle me, or I might.”
He flinches. His throat bobs as he swallows, and he nods once, then turns away from me.
I don’t know why I thought saying that would make things less awkward. The joke clearly landed wrong, but if he feels nothing as he claims, it wouldn’t have hurt him. That flinch says otherwise.
“Everyone good?” Nico addresses the others, tone commanding again. Nods all around. He steps in front of me. “Let’s move.”
I have to grip the shotgun strap with both hands and jog to catch up with him.
He’s already at the chain-link fence, kneeling next to a gap where the metal’s been peeled back.
He holds it up for me, and I drop to my hands and knees to crawl through.
I turn to help him, but he uses the horizontal bar partway down the fence to pull himself through the gap feet-first. Even in a crisis, Nico is smooth.
As I walk next to him, my eyes keep going to his bruise.
Griffin’s not a small guy, but Nico’s got at least three inches and forty pounds on him. If Nico had wanted to fight back, he could’ve, but he didn’t. That’s not the behavior of someone who has no control over his emotions, like he told me.
I gulp as I take in the building. It’s massive, all corrugated metal and broken windows. Graffiti covers the lower walls in layers of spray paint, and part of the roof has caved in on the far side.
Nico approaches the main entrance, testing the mottled handle. He lifts his eyebrows. “Ready?”
Nope, not at all. “Yes.”
The door swings open at his touch.
Nico raises his shotgun, taking slow, precise steps through the old factory floor.
Concrete pillars stretch into darkness. Conveyor belts snake like intestines over our heads.
Every breath coats my throat with grit that makes me need to cough, but I swallow it down.
The last thing we need is me announcing our location.
There are red emergency bulbs mounted at regular intervals on the low ceiling beams, casting just enough light that we don’t need our flashlights. It’s only enough to illuminate the factory floor.
I’m surprised the electricity is working, but I’ll take it. Using our flashlights could give us away if Morrow is in here.
Grit crunches under my boots. A gust of wind blows against the side of the building, whistling through the space, probably getting in through a broken window.
I’m trying to quiet my senses and listen like Nico told me, but I can’t focus on anything except how fast my heart is pounding.
Nico stops at the base of a utility stairwell with grated metal steps and a missing railing. The bulbs are mounted on the wall, too dim to light the stairwell fully.
“Can you feel anything?” he whispers.
“No.”
“Try closing your eyes.”
“What if something—”
“I’ll watch your back,” he says. “I promise. I got you.”
I know he does, despite how confused I am about him. So, I close my eyes.
I use the rhythmic push and pull of my lungs to guide me as I try to filter out the baseline sounds. The groan of metal settling. The whisper of wind through broken windows. Nico’s breathing, steady and controlled beside me.
But underneath all that… something else.
“I think I hear music,” I whisper.
“Music?” He sounds skeptical but not dismissive.
The melody becomes clearer as I focus on it, delicate and beautiful and completely out of place.
“It’s a waltz,” I say, my brain scrambling to place it. “Blue Danube, maybe?”
“You know Strauss?” Nico asks.
“I took a lot of music classes.” My family was not a classical music family, but when I was in middle school and still convinced I could be a Broadway star, Mom and Dad scraped together money for a keyboard and enrolled me in lessons.
I practiced all the time. It must have driven my parents crazy listening to it, but they never complained, and Dad even sat in my room with me while I struggled through my scales because he said he liked to listen.
I slam the lid back on my box and sling it to the very back of my mind so it can’t trip me up again. “You really don’t hear that?”
He really doesn’t, until we’ve climbed enough steps to reach the next floor and I don’t have to strain to hear the notes. There are no emergency lights up here. It’s pitch black.
At Nico’s silent command, I turn my flashlight on. Avoiding Morrow’s attention won’t matter if we bump into him in the dark. Better to have a couple of seconds of warning.
I expect a maze of dilapidated tables, machinery, and belts, but my flashlight almost immediately hits a wall with a few grimy windows set into it. We’re on a mezzanine level overlooking the factory floor.
I step closer to the windows. I thought my fear was what made our journey up the stairs feel so long, but we’re higher than I expected—far above the ceiling beams we walked under earlier. From here, the factory floor looks like it’s bathed in blood.
The mezzanine continues, following the factory wall. It’s really just a narrow hallway, with more filthy windows spaced along it.
“It probably wraps around the entire inner perimeter of the factory,” Nico says, his voice low. His flashlight is secured to his shoulder, the beam moving in time with his breaths.
I imagine Morrow standing in that elevated hallway, right above the door we came through.
“Eden.”
At the end of the hallway, light spills under a closed door in a thin golden line.
I get an uneasy feeling. My eyes flick back to the production floor, find the door we came through, and trace the path we just walked to the utility stairwell.
I see a faint rectangle of light, fractured by columns and belts, shining onto the floor.
I’m sure it wasn’t there before. We would have practically walked through it.
It’s possible that we missed it. Against the floor, the difference in hue is subtle, only making the reflection from the emergency lights look slightly less blood-like, but the window it’s coming through? When the entire mezzanine is shrouded in darkness? A lump lodges itself in my throat.
This light wasn’t on when we entered the building. We would’ve seen it immediately.
Meaning someone just turned it on.
Nico holds up his closed fist, pinning me in place with wide eyes that suggest he’s thinking the same thing. I turn off my flashlight and grab the shotgun from my back, aiming it at the door and gripping it as hard as I can as I rest my finger on the trigger.
Nico waves for me to follow him. He places one foot soundlessly in front of the other, like a panther stalking its prey, until we come to a stop in front of the door.
He counts down on his fingers. Three. Two. One.
He kicks the door in with a boom that echoes through the space, swinging his weapon into the room as the door crashes against the wall. I charge in behind him.
It’s some kind of old supervisor’s office. Loud classical music pours from a CD player in the corner, and in the center of the room, Donny hangs from the ceiling by chains around his wrists.
My brain can’t process what I’m seeing fast enough. A deep gash runs across Donny’s throat, pouring blood down the front of his body in a steady stream that has already pooled on the floor under him. A piece of paper has been nailed into his ribcage. Words are written on it in blood:
LOVE FAILS