Chapter 24 Breathe
brEATHE
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Anger surged through me like a bolt of lightning.
“The fuck you will,” I replied and lifted my pistol.
Four gunshots rang out into the desolate space, the sharp echoes resonating in my ears as the bullets tore into Darren’s chest and abdomen. I wanted to rip his last breath from the holes in his lungs before he could release it under the guise of his own volition.
If anything was mine eternally, it was his death.
It belonged to me. And only me.
As he said, I had earned it.
The sound of a pained whine caught my ears and just like that, the magnitude of what I had just done was swept away by the excruciating relief that Camaro was alive and right here with me.
“Come here, girl,” I called her, still in disbelief. But as she pressed her body into mine and I wrapped my arms around her, sobs of overwhelming gratitude ruptured through me. “How are you here?” I whispered to her. “How did you survive?”
I had no idea how she could live through two gunshots and then not immediately drown in the ocean, but someone or something had been watching out for her. And I would be forever grateful to whoever it was.
For a long time, we just sat there while I stared at Darren’s body, the weight of my own seemingly heavier than it had ever felt before.
His eyelids were lowered, but not all the way closed.
The blue of his irises still peeked out from their enclosures.
And I suddenly decided I never wanted those eyes to exist ever again.
Dragging my exhausted body to a stand, I trudged my way over to where he lay and lifted my pistol one final time. Squeezing the trigger twice, I planted a bullet through each eye, decimating the windows that could inflict such torment with just a single look.
“You won’t be seeing shit, asshole.”
The weight of my shoulders suddenly became unbearable, and I slumped down to my knees in front of Darren’s body, Camaro quickly moving next to me. But as I sat there drained and wrecked, I realized there was still one final task left to do before I could ever seek rest.
Reaching forward with shaking arms, I searched his pockets for his phone, my anxiety flaring at the possibility of waking the fucking dead.
When I found it, I lifted his thumb for the fingerprint scan to unlock it and searched for the app that would finally release me.
It took me several minutes to find it, but when I did, I pressed the setting for disengagement and held my breath.
The weight of a thousand worlds suddenly fell from my body, the cuffs around my wrists, ankles, and throat disconnecting in a harmonized synchrony.
Grasping the collar, I yanked it down and chucked it at Darren’s feet, the cuffs on my ankles and wrists quickly following suit, wrenched away to clink against the floor.
And then I exhaled all my torment from my chest until the pitch reached an octave indiscernible to any human ear.
It grew and grew until I had no breath left in my body, and I could no longer hold myself up.
I collapsed, my hands gripping my arms as I leaned over, attempting to convince my lungs to take in oxygen in rapid, uneven breaths.
Camaro sniffed along my body, whining and licking me where she could in an attempt to comfort me.
Reality had dawned on me, causing me to shake uncontrollably.
I had completed my goal. Defeated my enemy. And now I was free.
But I was also completely fucking lost.
What the fuck do I do now? Where do I go from here?
Sid had told me this was supposed to be an extraction, but I hadn’t encountered any of my alleged saviors.
I was too busy shooting the same targets.
I still needed to find Romero, assuming he was even still alive.
If he wasn’t, Kayla and I needed to disappear quickly. I just didn’t have the energy to move.
But the faint sound of my name had me lifting my head, fear paralyzing my frame as I stared up at the dead man in front of me. The call echoed in my ears, but it did not come from a corpse.
It grew louder and louder, bouncing in my head with a familiarity I thought wasn’t possible. And then the jostled footsteps over rubble and debris carried the source of the voice into view.
And once again, I was staring at another dead man. Or so I thought.
“Jaden!”
Solid. Firm. Unmistakable.
An illusion?
But then it came again. Even stronger.
I blinked away my denial and stared back at the mossy-green eyes I thought I would never see again.
Jason.
He was alive.
I blinked again, sure my brain was playing tricks on me. Darren had told me he killed him, and at that moment, I had believed him. But there he was, standing right in front of me, weathered and worn, bleeding and bruised—but still very much alive.
“Jason,” I breathed.
The single word gave me the strength to stand, my need for validation that this was real fueling my steps until we had reached each other’s embrace.
I wrapped my arms around him, and his solid frame stood firm in my hold, warming me almost instantly as his arms pulled me closer.
I could smell the sweat on him, feel the sticky coating of drying blood on his skin, and hear his steady breathing in my ear.
This was real.
He was real.
“You’re alive,” I murmured against him, afraid to let go lest he disappear on me again forever.
He tightened his hold. “We’re alive,” he confirmed, resting his cheek at the top of my head, tucking me closer. Butterflies warmed my stomach at the simple sound of his voice, the relief of his presence overwhelming my senses.
We stood like that for several minutes, just breathing each other in and ignoring the irrelevant world around us. Devastation gripped me when he finally pulled away, but it was abruptly replaced with love when I looked up into his warm, comforting gaze.
“He told me he killed you,” I said, my eyes scanning his body for what Darren might have considered a fatal wound.
Jason shook his head. “He threw a knife at me that landed in my chest, but I was already falling backward, so it didn’t go deep enough to do any real damage.”
I narrowed my eyes in confusion. “Then why would he think you were dead?”
“Probably because the floor had collapsed under me at the same time. I woke up under a pile of rubble stacked in near perfect formation for me to just barely fit between without getting crushed,” he explained.
“The guys found me after they took over the warehouse with our drones and pulled me out. Then we rushed to get here as fast as we could because no one could reach Romero or Derick. They were supposed to extract you. You haven’t seen them? ”
I shook my head at his question, wondering what Matt had done to sabotage them. “The only two people I’ve seen are Matt and Kayla.”
Jason’s face went white. “Where are they? Did he take Kayla?”
I quickly shook my head again. “No. I hid Kayla in one of the panic rooms, and I’m pretty sure Matt is dead. She has a busted ankle and a likely concussion, but she’s safe.”
The visible relief on his face concerning my friend was endearing to see.
“Oh, thank God. She was told to stay at the rendezvous point, but she’s clearly stubborn like you,” he said and then nodded down to the floor.
“I see Camaro found you.” His smile brightened the room as he reached down to jostle her ears like they were old friends.
“How is she alive? Darren shot her twice.”
“My team and I had been watching the property from the water for weeks. We tracked the yacht and observed from a safe distance. But when we saw the attack, we mobilized as fast as we could to take advantage of the situation and maybe get you out sooner than planned. But by the time we got close enough, the fight was over and we saw who won. And then we heard you scream when more gunshots rang out and we saw what happened to your dog. We managed to pull her from the water and got her to a good vet just in time. She recovered faster than I thought she would.”
I sighed with immense relief. “You have no idea how grateful I am that you were able to save her.”
But then I watched his gaze rise above my head to look on behind me, and his jaw clenched.
“It looks like she might have saved you too,” he murmured, nodding behind me.
I smirked. “She had her own vendetta to carry out as well.”
“By the looks of it, I’d take it you were both pretty successful?” he asked, tilting his chin as his gaze fixed on the body I had just recently decimated.
I nodded without looking back. “Yes.”
Jason’s gaze dropped back down to me, the warmth emanating from him giving me all the peace in the world I could possibly need right now.
“Then it’s over,” he declared with finality.
I shook my head. We weren’t quite out of the woods yet. “What about here? Has the estate been secured, or do we need to form another exit strategy?” I asked, kicking myself for not prioritizing the thought sooner.
“The rest of my team and Matt’s people already have the place mostly locked down. It’s just a lot of ground to cover. The only thing that’s left is to burn this place to the fucking ground. It really is over, Jaden.”
“The hell it is,” came another croaked voice coming from behind him.
Spinning around, Jason instantly pushed me behind him before I could even see who it was.
“Where is she, Jaden?” the voice asked, the furious tone becoming familiar.
Peering around Jason’s arm, I nearly dropped my jaw at the sight of Matt hunched against a cracked wall with a gun pointed at both of us.
His throat was black and blue, and he truly looked like the corpse I had believed him to be.
But apparently, Darren had failed to kill two people today.
He’d clearly gotten sloppy in his haste.
“Where is she?” Matt asked again, his voice rising with unhinged frustration, and causing Camaro to snarl in his direction.
“We don’t know,” Jason answered cautiously, lifting his palms in pacification.