24. Deniz
Chapter 24
Deniz
I wake up to the sound of my garage alarm blaring from the other room. Thick sleep coats my eyes, making it difficult to force them open. The shades are pulled, and someone tossed a thin blanket over me. I have no idea what time it is. Honestly, I’m not even sure what day it is. My head swims as I lift my face out of the pillow.
I stumble out of bed and open the door to the surveillance room, reaching around disoriented, looking for my phone. Silencing the alarm, I stare at the screen, unable to piece together what I’m seeing. Did someone steal my car? That seems impossible. I rub the exhaustion from my eyes, focusing. No, that’s Clara behind the wheel. Clara took my car.
Thirty-seven minutes. That’s how long ago she left the garage. Why would she leave without waking me? I tried to get her to sleep earlier, but she insisted on heading downtown to check on things. I think she needed to clear her head, which I can empathize with. Both of us lean into our work when we need to feel in control.
The door to my workspace was closed, which is why the alarm didn’t wake me up earlier. I swore I left it open when I finally crashed, my eyelids no longer able to hold themselves open.
The screens are dark, but I shake the mouse to wake them up. Most everything I was working on is still on the screens, but the one directly in front of the chair has changed. Instead of the files Bea sent, there are multiple video feeds of downtown Los Angeles and I-110 up. Many of them are paused, capturing stills of a white sedan passing by. I click through them, refusing to sit for fear I’ll fall asleep again. Hidden beneath are more and more paused recordings, some of them including Clara, and others not.
This is too familiar. Clara was stalking herself. But why? Did she recognize someone? Is the white sedan a threat? I shake myself, scrubbing my hands over my face to wake up. Clara left, so she must have a good reason. I scan the images that don’t include Clara, looking for similarities.
I don’t recognize anyone, but there are a few repeating faces in each shot. That makes sense, it’s a shopping area. People walk up and down the street, or mill around. I compare the face behind the driver's seat of the white sedan, but he doesn’t match anyone in the crowd.
Abandoning the effort, I move to follow Clara. She’s taking a different route than the white car, but in the same direction, toward the south bay. I click through feeds as quickly as possible, a horrifying sense of foreboding creeping up my spine.
Why didn’t she wake me up? I ask myself as I watch her park my car in a construction lot, hidden inconspicuously among other vehicles. But why would she think to wake me? Something changed between us in Bari, but that doesn’t mean she trusts me.
There’s a camera right outside the gate to the port, and I watch her sneak around the fencing, avoiding the small box of an office where a security officer watches something on his phone.
Something tells me I have to follow her. She may have left without me, but I told her I would always know where she is. I won’t allow her to face danger alone. Never again.
I head to my nightstand, pulling out the keys to my Hellcat. It was a gift from Chase years ago, a suspicious one that I didn’t question, not wanting to be involved in whatever nonsense Chase gets into when the rest of us aren’t around to play referee. I barely drive it, but tonight I’m thankful to have something with more horsepower. As I head down the elevator, I search through my servers to see if I have access to any cameras at the Port of Long Beach. The Los Angeles side is a client of ours, but we haven’t secured Long Beach yet.
Clara entered the gates eighteen minutes ago. I feel like I’m on some sort of internal clock, ticking down to something out of my control. I let the program on my phone scan for unprotected video feeds as the engine roars to life. I haven’t driven a manual in a while, but I let muscle memory take over as I tear out of the garage.
I slice through traffic, knowing the car will draw more attention than I want it to, but needing to move quickly. As the minutes pass, I’m increasingly certain that something terrible is going to happen to Clara. The thought of her hurt or worse is unbearable, and an insane thought filters through the worry. If anyone’s going to kill her, it’s going to be me.
I narrowly avoid getting pulled over twice as I make my way toward the port. When I’m nearly there, a small ping alerts me that the program finally found unprotected cameras.
I pull over a few yards down from the security gate, keeping my lights off to avoid drawing attention, and scan through the options. All of them are live feed, with no back-up recordings. A double-edged sword, because it forces me to quickly skip through each feed, searching for any sign of Clara.
Before I can find her, a gunshot rings out. My heart beats out of its chest, terror filling me. I need to get to her. A light flickers, and I watch the security guard at the gate step out of his post, radio in hand. Clara’s not going to like that either.
I think on my feet, flooring it to the entrance, scaring the shit out of the security kid. He can’t be older than his early twenties, his eyes wide and expression frantic.
“Are you the only one on shift at this gate?” I ask with authority, pulling out my security credentials for the Port of Los Angeles. It’s a miracle I thought to snag them before I left the apartment, hoping they’d come in handy.
“Uh, yeah,” the kid stutters, barely glancing at me before turning over his shoulder. Sometimes, a false sense of authority is all you need. “I reported it to the central office; I think patrol is on their way.”
Three more shots go off in the distance, and my heart rate picks back up. Clara is capable. She’s fine. She’s probably going to be pissed that I followed her all the way down here.
“Give me a radio, I’m going to go assess,” I command, holding my hand out. The kid raises his eyebrows at me, but leans back into the office to pick up a spare.
“You sure you want to go out there?” he asks, his voice shaking as he turns the radio to the right channel. I pull my jacket aside to flash the pistol at my hip, and he quickly hands me the device.
“I’ll let patrol know what quadrant to meet me at. Don’t let anyone but me in or out.”
I don’t stop to see if he listened, jumping back in the car and flooring it through the gate as soon as it’s open. I park the car around the corner. It’s too loud, and I still don’t know if I need the element of surprise.
I make my way toward the shots, keeping my hand over my gun and my body pressed against the sides of the containers. After a few minutes, I hear three more shots. This isn’t Clara taking someone out easily. It’s a fire-fight. And she’s alone.
But the sound gives me a more precise direction, and I follow it, peering around corners to make sure I don’t stumble directly into someone’s line of fire.
Two more shots, separated by a few beats. So close, I can’t be more than a football field away. I run down the alleyways created by the rows of containers, desperate and terrified for her.
I nearly stumble over his body. A man, not very tall, his bald head sporting a bullet hole right through the center. I breathe deeply, pulling out my own gun as I kick his away from his hand, even though he is most certainly dead. About ten rows up, there’s another body. Male. Not Clara.
Before I even make it to the second man, I’m distracted by a sudden, agonized cry. Turning down another aisle, I find a third man. He’s gripping his arm against his chest, wrist splintered, his hand hanging at a sickening angle. My stomach lurches, but I breathe through the sensation again. The man, blonde and pale and screaming in pain, reaches toward his weapon with his good hand.
I kick that away, too, pointing my gun at his head. He has to know where Clara is, but there are more security officers coming, and I need to clean up this mess. I cock the gun, chanting under my breath, reading myself to kill him and keep looking for my fiancée.
“Alive.”
Her murmured voice pulls me from my tunnel vision. I look over my shoulder and see her slumped against a steel wall, one hand pressed into her hip while the other grips a small gun. I’m on my knees in front of her in an instant, her pale, sweaty face between my hands.
“Talk to me, ????,” I beg, shifting her hand away to reveal a gunshot wound. So much blood, too much blood, seeps into her pant leg, soaking the dark fabric. “We’re going to get you out of here, okay?”
“Need him alive,” she mumbles, her head lolling to the side, eyes fluttering closed. I press hard on her wound, staunching the flow of blood and forcing her to cry out. Good. Pain is good. Pain means she’s alive.
“You need him alive?” I repeat, looking over my shoulder at the blonde man who clearly shot my moon. His knee is obliterated, blood pooling around his leg even more quickly than at Clara’s hip. “I don’t know if he’s going to make it, my love.”
“He’s…” she drifts off, and I pat her face as gently as I can to wake her back up. “He knows Konstantin.”
In an instant, everything is clear. She was here to capture him, maybe to torture him for information about her mother’s attack. She must have noticed him on the street and used my surveillance systems to follow him here.
There’s a thread of pride under all my fear that she figured out how to use my systems alone and tracked him here. I know she’s done this type of thing her whole life, but logic doesn't seem to be dictating my actions or emotions.
“I take care of you first, and then I’ll try to keep him alive, okay ?????”
She nods, but I don’t know if that means anything at all. Still, I pull off my jacket and shirt, tearing strips from the hem. I wish I had changed before I got here, so there was something cleaner to pack her wound with, but if I had hesitated any longer at home, she might already be…
No . She will be fine. I will make sure of it.
I shove the torn strips of fabric into her wound, wincing at the sound of her cries, murmuring to her in every language I know. Telling her I will take care of her, that I will make sure she lives, how it is impossible for her to die when her life is in my hands.
Voices over the radio grab my attention, and I pull it from my pocket.
“Shots fired near the Queen Mary,” I say, picking a spot as far away from here as I can think of. “I haven’t seen anyone, but there are shell casings around. Send backup.”
The voice of the security kid comes over, confirming he’s redirected all assets, and my relief at the temporary solution is short-lived. Clara’s wound is too high up to use my belt as a tourniquet. I wrap my jacket as tightly as I can over the packed cotton, hoping it stems the bleeding as much as possible.
I look her over for more injuries, noting scrapes on her fingers, but don’t find anything life-threatening. Confident that I’ve done as much for her as I can, I turn to the blonde man.
I want to kill him. For hurting Clara, for being involved with the man who caused Kerem’s death. I don’t only want to put a bullet in his brain. I want to wrap my hands around his throat and feel the life leave his body. I want his heartbeat to stutter out beneath my touch. I want my face to be the last thing he sees before he meets his end.
But Clara asked me to keep him alive. And like the moon controls the tides, I follow her command.
I pull my belt from its loops and wrap it around his thigh a few inches above the knee. The wound to his wrist looks painful, but blood isn’t welling, so I’m fairly certain it’s not going to kill him. Still, I pull off my undershirt and wrap it around his arm.
“You are too weak to kill me?” he groans. I didn’t even realize he was still conscious. He’s sweating profusely, agony etched into every feature. “You will let me live after what I did to her?”
Perhaps last week, his taunt would have worked. But I look back to Clara, with her head leaned back against the container, her lips forming incoherent words, and the choice is easy.
“Weak?” I mock, standing and placing my foot near his head. “No. Just not that merciful.”