Chapter 14 #4
“Listen to him.” His voice does not sound like Nate’s anymore.
“For once in your life, listen, goddammit.” I force myself to the small wired-glass window set into the service door, but the angle gives me almost nothing.
Beige walls. A catering trolley stacked with empty champagne flutes.
One employee hurrying past. The brief flash of an officer disappearing around the corner.
A car door slams. My pulse spikes. Cole’s voice comes from the other side of the door.
“Where good to go,” he shouts to someone in another car.
Every instinct inside me snaps.
Fuck it.
I shove through the door. The corridor narrows around us, and Cole turns just in time to see me.
My fist reaches him first. Bone cracks beneath my knuckles as my uppercut pushes him off balance, blood exploding from his nose before he crashes onto the polished concrete with a howl that echoes through the service hallway.
Then everything collapses. Weapons appear seemingly from nowhere.
His. Ours. Two catering staff drop serving trays and draw concealed pistols from beneath their jackets.
One of the chauffeurs abandons the waiting SUV, reaching inside his coat.
A woman I passed ten minutes earlier carrying a tray of desserts produces a handgun from beneath the folds of her apron.
They have been here all along. Hidden in plain sight.
The corridor erupts into shouted commands as officers identify themselves, civilians scatter toward emergency exits, and Cole’s own men point their guns at us.
Where is she? My weapon is already in my hand, the movement natural, one smooth draw from the holster beneath my jacket.
The first shot cracks somewhere behind me. Everything disintegrates.
Bullets shoot from all corners, but I don’t lose my focus, noticing Cole getting up and opening the door of the car, pulling out Ella, and positioning her like a human shield.
Hell no. He rushes to the main gate. I follow him, aiming at his head, but I cannot shoot.
I’m too close to hers. He drags the love of my life, her eyes wide, terrified, tear striking her beautiful face, one of his arms locked around her while the muzzle of his pistol presses cruelly beneath her jaw.
“Come on, Ashford,” he calls with a grin stained red from his own blood. “Be a big boy for once.” His hand strokes her cheek with the barrel. “If you’re going to shoot, try not to ruin the dress.” Every muscle in my body turns to stone.
“Let her go.”
“Aren’t you being greedy now? Haven’t you taken enough from me already?”
“She was never yours.”
“Oh, but she is.” His smile widens. “She didn’t even fight getting into the car.” He brushes the cold steel along Ella’s cheek as though comforting her. “My little birdy.” His eyes lock onto mine. “She still remembers who her master is.”
I flinch, but I hide it, because Cole is pressing every button I have, and Ella’s horrified, pleading gaze is boring straight through me.
I’ve got you, sweetheart. It’ll be okay, I wish I could tell her.
The bullets have stopped raining. Brenton moves in my peripheral vision, one hand raised, the other near his weapon. Two plainclothes officers appear on the other side. Nate is behind me aiming in the same direction as the others, and Cole’s eyes flick to him before sliding back to me.
“Or maybe I should just shoot your brother, huh?” Cole tilts his head. “Let me go with her, or I’ll shoot him. How about that?”
“Cole Vodianov,” Garron shouts, her voice firm and trained, carrying the weight of procedure into her tone. “You are under arrest. Drop the gun, release Ms. Brooks, and put your hands in the air.”
Cole laughs loudly.
“Felony warrant,” he repeats, savoring the words. “How official.” Ella’s knees buckle. His arm tightens around her as if to keep his shield upright, and I see red so violently that the gun digs deep into my hand. Her lips say something.
I love you.
Magical words, giving me the strength and clarity of a thousand soldiers. Ella’s lips part as the barrel presses harder beneath her throat. I send one last prayer, hoping the hours of gun training won’t fail me.
“Ella,” I whisper, then pull the trigger.
The explosion is deafening inside the night, shaking the silence far from the music inside.
Cole jerks violently. Sideways. The bullet tears through his shoulder just as his own finger tightens instinctively around the trigger.
No.
Please, no.
Ella
The gunshot tears through me before I even understand it has happened, the sound so violent that it does not merely reach my ears, but seems to split straight through my ribs.
Something hot scrapes across my throat, sharp enough to wrench a scream from somewhere deep inside my chest, only the scream never escapes. I can’t see. Everything turned black.
I do not know whether I lost consciousness for a second or several minutes.
Time no longer seems to follow its usual rules.
Voices find me, drifting as though carried through water, distorted and impossibly far away.
Words melt into one another until they no longer resemble language, too distant for my mind to reach.
“…Ella…”
Tristan.
Even before I remember my own name, I know his voice.
“Ella… Sweetheart…can you hear me?” The panic in his voice frightens me more than the gunshot ever could.
He’s not a man who panics. He plans, runs, commands.
He does not shake. That’s just…not him. Even when I woke in the middle of the night these past few weeks, trembling from dreams of concrete walls and fluorescent lights, he was always the calm one, gathering me against him, humming softly until I could breathe again.
His voice breaks as he asks me once more if I can hear him, every word pulled from his chest with pliers.
I force my eyes open, though the effort is monumental, my eyelids unbearably heavy.
My mask is gone. Blurred silhouettes rush back and forth around me.
Men in black suits lie on the ground, blood spreading beneath them, leaving dark red stains on the gravel.
People shout. Radios crackle. And finally, like a war angel kneeling at the edge of death’s door, Tristan appears above me.
One arm beneath my shoulders, holding my chest slightly lifted from the ground. I’m unbearably heavy, as if bags of sand have been sewn into my bones, and my neck hurts real bad.
His mask is gone. And his hair has fallen across his forehead, disheveled and wild. My fingers rise with difficulty to brush a smear of blood on his jaw. Is he hurt?
There is blood on his collar. Across his hands. Blood soaking the white cuffs of the shirt I had stared at only a few moments earlier because he looked so painfully handsome in it.
Whose blood is it?
I’m floating in a different reality, while he observes me.
I don’t know what’s happening, nor why my neck hurts so much, but one thing is certain.
The man I have fallen in love with, the one who saved me from drowning and carried me to shore, is afraid.
His eyes dart frantically over my face before dropping to my throat, then back again.
“What have I done ?” He mutters, his face turning white.
“It’s his blood, right? Tell me it’s his blood.
” He is speaking, but not to me. His tone is cold and direct, aimed at someone else, someone I cannot see.
His hands hover over me without quite touching, fingers shaking so violently that I realize he is afraid of hurting me if he presses in the wrong place.
“Why…” His breath breaks. “Why is there so much blood?” He drags a hand over his jaw, smearing more red across his skin, and I wonder if the question is meant for God himself.
“Why is there so much blood?” he repeats, shouting. Someone answers with medical words I cannot hold on to. All I know is that Tristan is here, kneeling beside me with his black tuxedo stained crimson, looking at me as though he has already begun mourning someone who has not even left yet.
I have not gone anywhere.
I am right here.
I wish I could tell him, but my body is betraying me, and pain widens inside me like quicksand. I part my lips, determined to say his name if nothing else, but agony tears across my throat so fiercely that all I manage is a broken breath, ragged and pitiful.
“Sweetheart…” His forehead falls against mine.
Strong hands appear between us, asking him to move, insisting they need room, but he does not seem to understand them.
His entire world has narrowed to the space occupied by my body on the cold ground.
And just like that, he’s gone. Separated from me, held back as we both try to reunite with our second half.
I watch the argument happen through blurred vision, strangers trying to pull him backward while he resists with desperation, calling my name again and again.
A silhouette that looks like Nate grips him by the shoulders.
Even then, Tristan’s fingers refuse to leave mine.
He holds on to the last tips of my digits, as if he will fall off a cliff if he lets go.
I blink. Then he is not there anymore. Tears blur my vision as several people kneel around me, attaching something to my finger, pressing gauze to my neck, shining a flashlight into my eyes.
Voices talk to me, asking me to blink once, then twice.
She’s conscious.
No second to waste.
We’re moving.
A shift moves through the air, and suddenly every dream, every hope, every fragile piece of love inside me is sucked backward by a foreign force as a voice emerges from the darkness. Terrifyingly familiar. A voice that has wounded me for years.
“She’s my daughter! Let me see her. I need to know if she’s alive!”
Mara.