Chapter 6 Savannah
Chapter Six: Savannah
The war room briefing lasts forty minutes and the short version is this: Kreiss is moving money.
Fast, in large amounts, through accounts Alexandra has been tracking since I gave her the Meridian Star connection.
He's pulling his network tighter, repositioning operatives, consolidating resources.
Leone thinks he's either preparing to run or preparing to strike, and either way the window to act is closing.
The longer version involves financial diagrams that Alexandra projects onto the wall and names I don't recognize and territory maps with pins that get moved while I watch.
Emilio sits beside me and his knee bounces under the table the entire time and he doesn't look at me.
Not once. Which tells me he's thinking about me constantly because my little asshole only avoids eye contact when he's trying not to think about the thing he's avoiding looking at.
I know this because I'm doing the same thing.
I can still feel his hand between my thighs.
The pressure of his palm through denim. The sound he made when I bit his lip.
The taste of his blood, copper and warm, still sitting on my tongue an hour later because I haven't had water and I haven't brushed my teeth and I'm going insane.
Leone assigns tasks. Alexandra continues tracking the financial transfers.
Claudio begins building a profile on the Meridian Star's movements. Emilio is tasked with preparing a surveillance team for the marina, which will deploy within the week. Carmelo is doing some recon work, which I’ve come to realize is actually interrogation of assets.
And me, I'm told to stay in the compound and remain available for follow-up questions about the intel I provided.
Stay in the compound and remain available.
The polite version of sit in your room and wait.
I don't argue because the briefing isn't the time and Leone isn't the audience. I nod and I leave and I walk back to my room, sit on the bed and roll the bottle cap between my fingers before staring at the wall.
I am so fucking tired of staring at walls.
The attack comes at two in the morning.
I'm awake because I haven't been sleeping as well as I’d like.
In my own space, I can sleep like a bear, but here, I listen to everything.
I'm sitting on my bed in a t-shirt and underwear with the lamp on and a book I found in the common room open on my lap, something in Italian that I can't read but the pictures of old churches are nice enough to look at, when the sound hits.
A series of hard, fast pops from the east side of the building, followed by shouting, followed by boots on concrete moving at a speed that means this isn't a drill.
I'm on my feet before the second round of pops. Shoes on, jeans on, ready to help however I can. I grab the bottle cap off the nightstand and shove it in my pocket and I'm at the door before the alarm starts.
The alarm is loud as it screeches, and it fills the corridor with a wailing that bounces off the concrete walls and makes it impossible to think.
Red lights strobe from panels I didn't notice were there.
The corridor fills with soldiers in various states of readiness, some fully kitted, some pulling vests on over bare chests, all of them armed and all of them moving toward the east wing.
I open my door and step out.
Emilio is already there. He's coming from his room three doors down, dressed in black tactical gear I've never seen him wear, a vest over a long-sleeve shirt, a gun on his hip and another in his hand, and his face is different.
The grin is gone. The charm is gone. The bouncing energy is gone.
What's left is something cold and focused and completely still, and the transformation is so incredible that for a second I don't recognize him.
This is what he looks like when the sunshine turns off.
"Get back in your room," he barks.
"What's happening?"
"Castillos. East wing breach. Four, maybe six shooters. They're hitting Alexandra's office."
"They're coming for the intel."
"They're coming for Alexandra. Get back in your room and lock the door."
"No."
He stop and turns to look at me, and the flat expression cracks for a second and underneath is not anger but fear, actual fear, and seeing it on his face does something to my stomach that I'm not prepared for because this man does not get scared.
He gets loud and reckless and violent, but he doesn't get scared, and the fact that I'm the thing scaring him right now rewrites something in my understanding of what's happening between us.
"Savannah. I am not fucking asking."
"And I am not fucking hiding in a room. I threw a fucking lamp at you, imagine what I could do with a gun in my hand. It’s not my fucking problem you want to treat me like Rapunzel."
"Your problem is staying alive. My problem is keeping you that way. Get your fucking ass back in the room."
"Yeah… you’re gonna have to make me. Asshole."
They’re the same words from the gym, but they aren’t.
In the gym they were flirtation, a dare, foreplay and a challenge.
Here in this corridor with red lights strobing and gunfire echoing from the east wing and soldiers running past us, they're a fight.
A real one. Two people who want opposite things and neither of them is going to bend.
He steps toward me, one, two, until he’s so close I can see the fire burning in his eyes.
"If something happens to you," he says, "I will become the monster I try so hard not to be. Do you understand me? I will burn this place down and everyone in it and I won't feel a goddamn thing except that I didn't keep you safe."
"Then keep me safe. Don't lock me away."
"Savannah, this is stupid."
"Emilio, don’t talk to me like a fucking child. I’m a whole ass woman. I even get my period once a month."
We're inches apart and the corridor is chaos around us and his free hand, the one not holding a gun, comes up and grabs my jaw, not gentle, firm, his fingers pressing into my cheeks, tilting my face up to his.
"You're going to get me killed," he says.
"Not if you do your job."
He kisses me. Hard, fast, teeth on my bottom lip, his hand on my jaw holding me in place, and I grab the front of his vest and pull him in and kiss him back with everything the gym started and the phone call interrupted.
His tongue is in my mouth, and the alarm is now background noise and somewhere down the corridor a gun goes off and none of it matters because his mouth is on mine and his body is pushing me backward until my shoulders hit the wall.
His hips pin me there and I can feel him, hard against my stomach, and the man just heard gunfire and put on a tactical vest and his body is still responding to me and the power of that is fucking surreal.
He pulls back long enough to look at me. His eyes are black in the red strobe light.
"Please, I’m begging you, stay right here and don't move from this spot. I will come back for you."
"Emilio..."
"For fuck’s sake you vexing woman. Just fucking promise me."
Something in his tone tells me to give him some leeway. "I promise. Go."
He goes. He turns and runs toward the east wing and the gunfire and the shouts and he's gone around the corner before I can say anything else, and I'm standing against the wall in the corridor with my back against concrete and my lips swollen and the taste of him in my mouth.
The fighting is loud and close. Not movie loud, where explosions have bass and the sound design tells you what to feel.
Real loud. The flat crack of suppressed weapons and the fuller bang of unsuppressed ones and the shouts that come between them, orders and confirmations and once, a scream that cuts off too fast. The compound walls carry sound in every direction and standing here I can track the fight by the way it moves through the building, east wing ground floor, then the stairwell, then the corridor above, then back down.
The fighting lasts twelve minutes. I count them all because that’s what you do when the world gets loud and your hands are empty. I stand in the corridor with my back against the wall and my fingers on the bottle cap in my pocket and wait like I was told to wait.
Twelve minutes. Fourteen gunshots after he left, and each one is a coin flip I have no say in.
He's down there with a vest and a gun and the cold version of himself that I saw for two seconds before he kissed me, and I am standing in a hallway in jeans and a t-shirt listening and hoping the number stays at fourteen because fourteen means the shooting stopped and the shooting stopping might mean he's okay.
Then shouting, then silence, then Carmelo's voice on a radio somewhere saying "clear" in a tone that sounds more annoyed than relieved, which is apparently how Carmelo expresses everything including the end of a firefight, and then the alarm stops and the red lights die and the corridor goes back to its normal ugly white, and the compound goes quiet.
I don't move. He told me to stay right here and I'm staying right here because I promised and because the look on his face when he said it made promises feel like the kind of thing you keep for a man who kissed you against a wall while his family was under attack.
He finally rounds the corner. Walking, not running, with blood on his hands.
A cut above his left eyebrow that's bleeding freely down the side of his face and dripping off his jaw onto the collar of the tactical vest. His gun is holstered.
The vest has a new mark on the left side, a round that hit and didn't get through, and the sight of that impact point, a dent in the fabric a few inches from his ribs, makes my knees go soft in a way that has nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with the sudden, violent understanding that this man almost died thirty feet from where I'm standing.
A few inches. That's the distance between the bullet and his skin. Those inches and a layer of kevlar between Emilio DiAngelo's heart and a Castillo round, and I am not okay with how not okay I am about that.
"Four Castillo shooters," he says, like he's giving a weather report.
"East wing service corridor. They had keycards that shouldn't exist, which means someone on the inside is still leaking access codes.
Leone and Carmelo handled two. Claudio got one in the stairwell.
I got the last one outside Alexandra's office. "
"Alexandra?"
"Fine. Pissed, but fine. Her office is untouched and Charlotte's with her."
"And you?" I'm looking at the cut. The blood. The mark on his vest. The blood on his knuckles that belongs to someone who is no longer breathing.
He touches the cut above his eye, looks at his fingers, seems surprised by the blood. "Scratch."
"That's not a scratch, that's a laceration. A scratch is what you get from a cat. THAT needs stitches."
"It's a scratch and I'm fine and you kept your promise.
" He steps closer. Close enough that I can see the cut in detail, a cut that's going to scar, and the blood is still running and he's doing nothing about it because he came to find me before he went to medical.
Before he washed his hands. Before he did anything at all. He came here first.
The priority order implied in that makes my chest hurt.
I reach up and press my thumb against the cut. He flinches, but I hold the pressure.
"You need stitches," I say.
"I need a drink."
"You need stitches and a drink and to stop being a fucking hero for five minutes."
"I wasn't being a hero. I was doing my job."
"Your job is holding pads for me in the gym."
"My job is keeping you alive." His hand comes up and wraps around my wrist, not pulling my hand away, holding it there. My thumb on his wound, his blood on my skin. "And you're alive. So I did my job."
We stand there in the corridor. The compound is settling around us, soldiers moving, voices on radios, the low hum of a building that just survived an attack and is already preparing for the next one.
His hand is on my wrist and my thumb is on his face and the blood is warm between us and this is the strangest, most fucked up version of intimacy I've ever experienced, standing in a hallway with a man who just killed someone and came to find me right after.
"You kissed me," I say.
"You kissed me back."
"There were guns going off."
"Multitasking."
"You're an idiot."
"You already knew that."
I pull my hand away from his face. Look at the blood on my thumb. His blood, bright red, already cooling in the air.
"Go get your stitches," I say. "I'll be here when you're done."
"Promise?"
"I already promised once tonight. Don't push your luck."
He grins. The real one. The full one. The one that splits his face open and makes him look nothing at all like the man who just walked out of a firefight. He turns and walks toward medical, and I watch him go.
I go back into my room and sit on my bed, wondering what in the fuck is happening.
The bottle cap is in my hand. I roll it once, twice, and then I press it into my palm hard enough that the edges bite into my skin and I hold it there while my heart rate comes down from whatever altitude it's been at since he kissed me.
Gigi would have something to say about this. Something profane and wise and delivered with the casual authority of a woman who survived sixty-three years in a world that wasn't built for her.
I can almost hear it.
Baby girl, you are in deep shit.
Yeah, Gigi. I know.