Chapter 43
Elijah
What am I seeing?
I can’t move. I don’t know what to say or think. Peripherally, I see Eve run to Vaughn.
“V! You’re okay. You’re okay.” She’s checking her over, but Vaughn’s eyes are glued to me.
The pull I feel toward her is agonizing, but I can’t look away from my brother.
He’s coming toward me. He has a mild limp.
Of course he does. He’s missing all or part of his leg.
He lost it to save me. Then, I left him to die.
To be taken. Probably tortured and then. ..hunted.
Wait...how is he here if he was sold and shipped to Russia to be hunted? How did he come here and save my ass again?
He’s right in front of me, and I’m still on my knees staring up at him with my jaw on the floor. My big brother.
“Hey there, little brother.”
“Abe.” The name is a broken whisper from my too tight throat. Spoken across the rocks and glass that seem to be stuck there.
His hand is extended to help me up. How could he want to help me? How could this be the way he chose to spend his time? Saving me when I left him.
The next thing I see takes the remaining breath from my lungs.
They walk in through the big hole in the side of the building.
Long range rifles slung over their backs.
Roman, Dusty, Nick, Matteo, and...Abbi. They’re talking to one another like they’re friends.
It was Abbi on the radio. She was signaling that Abe was coming out.
That’s why they started dropping the remaining bad guys.
They were distracting from the real threat on the landing.
My brother. Deadly as the plague. Quiet as the night. The Silencer.
Tears start falling unbidden from my eyes, and all I can do is hug my brother’s knees, begging for forgiveness. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I would’ve come for you. I would’ve come for you.”
“Get the fuck up.”
He uses a surprising amount of strength forcing me up off my knees.
Once we’re face to face, he grabs me roughly between his hands.
“No son of Cain and Ruth Washington is going to cry on their knees. Stand up and get shit done. You have men here, and there’re.
..well there are a fuck ton of dead bodies. Manage your team.”
What he doesn’t say is that we’ll hash the rest of this out when we get home. Home. With my brother. And my wife.
“My nephew?”
“Safe. With mom.”
Using everything, absolutely all of whatever I have left in me, I compose myself.
“Vaughn.”
It’s like my acknowledgment of her presence lets her know that it’s okay to come to me.
She runs to me, jumping into my arms like she isn’t covered in bruises and likely sporting some internal injuries.
I catch my wife, attempting to be wary of the most obvious damage, and I have never felt more whole in my life.
Abbi strides over to us, and Abel pulls her to his side. His eyes close as he buries his face in her hair. I still can’t believe it. It was him. He took them.
Cotton walks back into the building. I’m seeing him for the first time since he carried one of our injured outside during the melee.
“We have several men who need medical attention. I have a doctor and two techs on the way, but they’ll need help, and we have to find a place for them to work.
Eve, Abbi, can you two find a spot? Adam, Cal.
Grab some men and get the bodies outside.
Pull them all in here. Jax, Marshall. Grab any shell casings you can find.
” Cotton delivers these precise commands before walking back outside to.
..who knows what the fuck the boss is going outside to do.
Abe looks at me, perplexed. “Well, shit. This whole time I thought you were in charge.”
My honest, genuine laugh bellows between us, and we hug like brothers. We both pull Abbi and Vaughn in and just...breathe.
Cotton coordinated a streamlined cleanup effort.
He was apparently owed a favor by the owner of a crime scene cleanup company.
How anyone is owed a favor from a company.
..no idea. Apart from the hole we left in one of the buildings, the whole place looked like it did when we first arrived.
Cal wiped all the security footage on the way home, and Cotton’s doctor patched up all of our injured so well that everyone walked out on their own two feet.
Not only did we not lose a single member of our team, but we’ve actually returned home with more people than we left with.
Mama and little Abel were in a hotel in New Braunfels.
We picked them up on the way home. Seeing my nephew with his father is nothing short of incredible.
My brother looks at his son like he’, his hero.
Little Abel looks at his dad with awe and wonder.
It’s not every day your dad comes back from the dead.
Back at Eve’s, we all clustered in the front yard to say our goodbyes.
“Pleasure meeting you all.” Matteo has a thick Italian accent and eyes that don’t miss a thing.
“I can never thank you enough for all that you’ve done.” I’m so grateful to all of these people. I couldn’t have done this without them.
“Yep. Thanks. You’re welcome. Everyone’s alive. Gotta go.” Cal runs to his truck like his ass is on fire.
Several of us look around, confused by his hurried words and abrupt departure.
“He’s going to get my sister. She’s in Dallas at our parents’.”
Adam doesn’t see the thing. Those of us who were looking confused, now look knowing.
“What?” Adam’s standard tone is annoyed, but he takes it up a notch when he asks.
“Not a thing, brother. Not a thing.” Cotton doesn’t seem to want him clued in.
Adam, Eve, and Cotton drove over with us to Abbi’s and stayed for a while until we got settled in.
They left soon after, and I could tell it was hard for Eve to go.
She hadn’t gotten more than six inches from Vaughn’s side since we got her back.
She held Vaughn’s hand up to the moment she left.
Adam whispered in her ear, and I swear she almost cried.
I can just imagine that he told her we needed time to sort things out.
He wasn’t wrong. I have so many questions.
Mom has had several more days than I have to get used to the idea of Abel being alive, but she still breaks down in tears every 30-40 seconds.
“So.” Abel slaps his hands on his knees before standing and walking over to the fireplace. “Let’s get you caught up so you can get out of my house.”
“Ah, yes. Still a dick.”
He ignores me and goes on. “Mom and Abbi already know everything, but I’m sure you have questions.
I’ll do what I can to clear everything up.
Obviously, I didn’t die in Liberia. Close, but not quite.
Men came and pulled me and the others out.
I only know that because we made it out.
We never saw Parker or Jackson again. Samuel and I, that is.
We both made it. I was in a coma for months.
Medically induced. Samuel was in a bad way, but awake the whole time.
When I woke up, I still couldn’t get out of bed for several weeks.
As soon as I could, they brought in the prosthetic, and I started PT.
We knew they had something planned for us.
They tried to act like they were good guys, but we couldn’t use the phone, and everyone around us spoke Latvian.
We played along and made plans whenever they allowed us to be together.
We just couldn’t figure out why they wanted us well.
Why didn’t they just let us die that day?
We would’ve. There’s no way we would’ve made it a day with our injuries without medical attention.
They saved us. It wasn’t until about a month ago that we learned why.
They sold us to the Russian leg of their organization. Still not sure how much we went for.”
“Thirty million.” Abel looks at me allowing me time to elaborate.
“The big guy. Well, biggest guy. My size. Cal. He’s a computer genius.
He’s probably the main reason we were so prepared last night.
We had financials, flight records, surveillance, everything.
You name it, he got it for us. He found a recent thirty-million-dollar transaction to the Russians.
We actually thought that it was for me. We thought they had already sold me. ”
“Ha! You think you’d bring in as much as me, little brother?”
The warm look in my brother’s eyes and the joking tone of his words feels like before. Before...everything.
“So, they sent us to Russia. It wasn’t long after we got there that we found out what was really going on.
It was a hunt. For us. They gave us a one-hour head start.
It wasn’t really a head start, though. We had shoes and the clothes on our backs.
They had long range rifles and cameras set up all over the grounds.
We went through the best we could and took out each one we saw.
Eventually, we decided it was best to split up, so the hunters had to do the same.
We made it several days. They started with a group of fifteen.
There are none left to tell the tale today, but I never found Samuel.
We were supposed to meet three clicks South after the last man fell.
I waited, but he never came. I knew they’d be coming for my family once they realized I was alive.
It took more time than expected to get transport out of the country.
Once I got here, I came straight for Abbi and Abel.
Then, Mom. You were already gone. I loaded up everything from the armory and had Abbi erase the cameras for the last few days for both places.
Everyone was...surprised to see me. We hid out at the escape and waited for you to get back. ”
The escape. Of course, that’s where they were. I was so focused on the Latvians, I didn’t even think about our retreat spot.
“By the time you got back, I had found out enough to know that they were already here.”