31. Thirty-One
There’s a definite benefit to being hidden away in this bunker for weeks on end, somehow further away from society than we were before, and I’m looking right at it. I can’t stop staring at the way Mads moves, the way her skin glistens. My attention catches on the smooth, unbruised skin of her neck. Just a few days ago I laid a fresh layer of marks down on her, and you’d never be able to tell. A distinct thrill rushes through me.
I get to mark her over and over and over again.
Silas and I watch from the sidelines as Ray drills her on different punches and kicks, continuing the same routine we’ve carved out together. She’s actually landed a few solid hits, and I’m impressed. They’re just warming up, but the fire in her eyes matches her determination. She’s already grown so much and every correction she receives galvanizes her further. She’s being molded into something none of us expected.
I think she’s close to being able to take one of us down. If she kept at it with Ray for a few more months-
No.
The deadline for this adventure is coming up soon, and she is going to leave us. She’s going to get the freedom she deserves more than anyone I’ve ever known.
I have to remind myself more and more often that she’s leaving. That this haven we’ve found may as well be built out of cellophane. She is going to go as soon as Dane releases her after this task, and it’s going to destroy us.
She should.
An angry knot writhes in my stomach, it’s the same every time I come to this conclusion.
This isn’t a life. This is not the safety and comfort she wants. Sure, Dane says that after this job it will all be smooth sailing, that no one will be able to come after him and, by extension, us.
We all hold that promise lightly, knowing we stomped past the world of comfort a long time ago. Even before we blew a hole through Omni’s wall to kidnap Madeline, stealing the intellectual property of Omni Biomedical, and thwarting their dreams of the ultimate military contract.
A heavy thud reverberates through the room, and Silas jolts beside me. He must have been lost in his thoughts too because we both whip towards Mads, finding her sprawled out on the floor in front of an ecstatic Ray. He’s bouncing around and she’s letting out an appropriate string of curses.
“Fuck you! You said you weren’t going to flip me, asshole!”
Silas bursts into laughter and I have to smother my surprise. An actual, genuine laugh, is shaking his shoulders and making him double over. He even has to put down his obscenely heavy weights to pull himself together. I blink a few times, hardly believing what I’m seeing. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard him so much as chuckle before, and suddenly I’m laughing with him.
As much as she’s grown, as much as she’s come out of her shell, she’s been changing us too. Gently kneading and stretching the very makeup of who we are, and forming us into more whole people.
“Why would he say that?”
All the air is sucked out of the room in an instant. Silas drops his smile faster than I drop my dumbbell, and the tension is building in heavy roiling waves around us.
Madeline only huffs at Dane standing in the doorway before standing and turning her back to him. She does her little prep bounce before sinking back into a defensive position, her eyes hard with focused determination.
Ray doesn’t match her stance. Doesn’t set up to keep going. Doesn’t even turn to look at her. His eyes locked on the man in the doorway.
Ray, like the rest of us, understands this was a fuckup. A big one. In Dane’s eyes, he might as well have been pissing all over the plans he’s been agonizing over for God knows how long. The plans that account for every variable except for one.
Madeline.
When she realizes that Ray’s not going to continue, that he won’t ignore Dane’s presence, she turns with an exasperated groan, her pivot fast enough to swing her arms outward a little. Against every instinct, my lips quirk up at the sight, but they slam back down when I notice how tightly Dane’s jaw is locked.
“Has any real training been happening this whole time?” Dane’s quiet fury fills the room, his voice just short of yelling and his stance so rigid he may as well be a statue. An extremely pissed off statue. I’ve never seen him this mad, not even when Ray nearly blew up the shed three years ago, and even then, it took days for him to chill out.
“We’re still in the middle of her warm-up.” Ray’s doing his best to cover the mistake, to charm our way out of this, but he’s not hearing it. “We were going t-”
“Get out.” He’s not looking at any of us when he says the words, but we understand all the same. His fury might be directed at us, but his attention is firmly centered on Mads.
“No. We’re still training,” she scoffs at him and starts to turn back towards Ray. He’s still not watching her, his eyes are slightly unfocused like he’s trying to sort out how to diffuse a bomb, and there’s no solution in sight.
“Not. You.”
Ray, Silas and I look to one another, silently agreeing that whatever is about to happen, can only go down between the two of them. We all want to stay to defend her, but this distance, the tension between the two of them needs to be resolved.
We move as a unit, each of us shuffling out of the room. I try to make eye contact with her, to give her what little of an apology I can shrug out, but she’s found a target to direct her fire at. Ray passes Mads, and gives her a light squeeze on the shoulder as he steps away, no doubt wishing he was about to get chewed out with her.
Who knows, maybe she and Dane will go into thermonuclear meltdown and take this whole place with them.