Chapter Forty-Four #2
“Oh shit, your dad then. Either way, you somehow die by a kitchen knife.”
I heard a few chuckles from the children.
“And you with the tiny creepy pigtails … Wait, did your mom make those?”
“My sister,” the girl answered.
“Ah shit, she hates you; never let her do your prom makeup or cut your hair, it’ll end in a disaster, and you’ll never get to date the cute boy in braces who everyone thinks is cool but still sucks his thumb when he sleeps.”
More chuckles.
“What? You guys have someone like that in your school?”
“Yes! His name is Alessio.”
“Ha! Called it, it’s always the Alessios. Ladies, stay away from them Alessios; they’re not the cool people. Mommy issues, you don’t fucking want that baggage.”
Laughter and snorts.
“Right, pigtails, you get eaten by your dog. Horror Movie 101, never get the dog in the first cage with the watery eyes; they’re always the dog cannibals, but you didn’t listen because it was cute, and it smiled at you, even though you know dogs do not smile!”
“My dog looks at me weird,” a kid said. “I got it from the first cage. OMG.”
“See? Always skip the first cage.”
“What about me? How will I die?”
“And me too!”
“Will my dad kill me; I think my dad hates me.”
“I wanna know how I’ll die too!”
I shook my head, tuning them out as Dog continued to … do whatever the fuck he was doing. It worked, and that was all that mattered.
I blew out a shaky breath as I touched the dark red wire, moving it to the side a little so I could see where it was attached to the control panel.
I shook my head. This was a bomb created not to be defused unless stopped by the remote or by an expert.
I knew I could do it. I just had to remember.
But how could I remember it without remembering him? It was close to impossible.
I blew out another breath and closed my eyes.
The red ones are always to stop or make it fast …
but sometimes it might be the yellow one.
The white is uncertain, a … a … detonator.
The voice penetrated my thoughts. I wanted to fight it off, but I ground my teeth together and stopped resisting.
“Or your saving grace,” the voice continued.
“It all depends on how it was built or who built it. Your call matters, trust your gut.” Gloved hands traced from my forearm to my arm.
“You can do it, Amore mio, you can save them. Focus and think, don’t make me do it for you. ”
“Let the children go, Manuel; they’re scared.”
“Only you can save them.”
“Not like this. I can learn some other way; put a dummy inside instead … please.”
“I can’t go back in there without setting off the bomb, my Zahra.” His lips brushed my bare shoulder. “You just have to do it the way I taught you. Focus on the sound, where exactly is it coming from?”
I stopped to listen. “The middle.”
“What angle in the middle?”
“Uh … I don’t know. Left? Or—or maybe—maybe right?”
“Focus.”
“I-I’m trying.”
“Then try harder!” The voice roared in my head, and I flinched with a gasp, my hand jumping with the dark red wire still in my grip, pulling it from the control panel.
The beeping increased immediately, and the time started going down faster, the same way my panic went from a five to a fucking hundred.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
“What! What is it?” Dog asked, his footsteps rushing back until he was crouching beside me.
“What happened?” Devil’s voice urged from the front.
“I pulled a time wire … I pulled a time wire by mistake. I didn’t mean to; I was still studying it. I don’t—how—fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Zahra.” Dog’s hands were on my shoulders. “Hey, hey, you need to breathe and focus—”
I pushed him aside, getting to my feet and shaking my head like the thought of focusing was burning my lungs to crisps.
Dog was up too, trying to catch whatever mumbling I was doing …
I knew many people were in attendance that day; anyone could have told Chika how that training ended, how I had failed.
“Zahra, what is going on?”
I shook my head frantically. “I can’t—I can’t do it. I don’t know how … I’m sorry, I can’t, I fucked up, I didn’t think he would know to pull this shit—I can’t—I can’t—”
“Of course you can. You can do fucking anything; it’s just a moment of mild failure. I’m sure if you—”
“No, no, not this … I can’t—I’m serious. I can’t do this—”
“Dog, come over, handle the wheel.”
I felt Dog leave my front towards the driver’s side. My heart was hammering, the walls were closing in, and a second later, Devil was in front of me. “Hey, Z, look at me.”
My throat felt like it was about to jump out of my mouth, alongside my heart and everything in my chest; it was so tight. I was hyperventilating and, at the same time, trying to stop myself from hyperventilating. Trying to take control. It was chaos. I was chaos.
“Zahra—”
“No, I’m sorry—I just can’t—I tried, I tried to focus, but I fucked it up.”
“No, no, you didn’t. Not yet, because we are alive.”
“I can’t—”
“Fuck, Zahra, I need you to breathe; you’re not breathing.”
“I should—I should have listened to you, we—we should have planned—I’m such a fucking idiot—under—underestimating people—fuck—I can’t—I can’t believe—”
I felt him manage to hold my face in his hand, his cuff brushing my chin as he tried to make me look at him, worried eyes searching mine. “It’s not your fault—”
I frowned. “No … no, it’s my fault—I did this, I never fucking learn—I forgot that I—that I couldn’t trust me—I can’t trust me—I shouldn’t trust myself—because it’s not fucking reliable—I am—I am not fucking reliable—I shouldn’t have—”
He kissed me.
His lips stopped my rambling and breathing as he pulled me tighter towards his body. Warm. Still alive. Like mine. I’m still alive. We’re still alive.
He pulled away from the kiss, locking gazes with me as my breathing leveled gradually.
“Are you with me?” he asked quietly.
“Y-yeah.”
“Good,” he breathed. “Listen, I know how this looks; you want to blame yourself, and yeah, maybe you did make the wrong call, but you gotta remember that you’re not the first person in the world who has ever made a wrong call.
It happens to everybody. And when it happens, you don’t dwell on that shit; you do everything you can to make sure you live to see another day and learn from it. ”
I breathed shakily, swallowing down the nerves.
“You’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever met, Zahra. You pave roads when we are standing in front of a big fucking wall. You never break. At least you don’t show it—”
“But I did—”
“Sometimes, when we break, it’s okay to let people see, people you trust. Remember that day when you told me I could cry, and you’d never tell anyone?”
I nodded.
“Great, I’m making the same promise to you. You can break down all you want and have thousands of panic attacks; I’ll hold you through them … I’ll kiss you through them if I have to. Z, you don’t have to fucking hide from me.”
I held on to his shirt and released another calm breath.
“You can do this. I trust you with my fucking life. If anyone can get us out of this, it’s you.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, yeah…” I looked back at the timer; four minutes left. “We don’t have much time.”
I rushed to crouch in front of it, Devil beside me.
My gaze went to the blue wire. I couldn’t take the risk of pulling it now. It could have changed its usual function since I had removed the other red wire.
I couldn’t touch the light red one. That was a no. It would most definitely be the trip wire; same went for the yellow one.
That left only the white. It never changed function. But I didn’t know what exactly its role was. It could either be … a detonator or your saving grace.
Manuel’s voice reached my head again.
“Do you want to take the risk, Zahra?”
I blinked.
“Where’s your head at, Z.”
“Here,” I blurted. “Here. I’m here.”
The timer went down to one minute.
“I’m thinking the white. It has two functions. One guarantees our safety, and the other…”
“Yeah, but what does your gut say?” Devil asked calmly as if the timer wasn’t getting close to death time.
Forty-three seconds.
“It says I should pull it, but what if…” I swallowed, looking at him. “What if I’m not right, what if, what if I pull it and—”
“Hey, if your gut says it’s right, then it’s right.”
I frowned. “What the fuck is with you and Elio on this gut-feeling shit.”
He frowned, pausing. “What?”
Shit.
I pulled out the white wire.
The beeping stopped, the red timer turned off, and the bomb …
“Holy shit,” I said, staring at it.
“Did it … did it stop?” Devil asked.
“It stopped?” Dog exclaimed from the driver’s seat.
“We gotta wait for the one-minute dramatic silence, or we’ll jinx it,” I whispered, and we all went quiet.
When one minute passed, and we were still conscious and alive, I breathed a breath of relief. “I think we can freak out now.”
The children erupted in screams of happiness.
“Fuck yes! That’s what I’m talking about.” Dog pressed the bus horn. “I never doubted you for one second, motherfucker.”
“Right, you didn’t.”
Due to the cuff, I turned to Devil, threw my arms over his head, and hugged him. “Thank you. But tell anyone about what happened, and I will fucking skin you alive in your sleep, and I promise you wouldn’t even be awake for it. Pass that across to Dog too.”
He hugged me tighter. “You got it.”
After about three hours of legal necessities that we took care of discreetly, asking for our fake names and faces to be kept out of the news because of our supposedly high-profile military mission, we arrived back at the compound, where we had to report back to Angelo and have Dog’s wound properly treated.
While he was getting attended to at the hospital in the compound, Devil pulled me aside.
“So, today was wild,” he started, and I laughed weakly.
“Yeah, let’s never do that again.”
“Deal,” he said with a smile, as he looked around before his gaze settled on me once more. “Um, so, about earlier … in the bus … the kiss…”
“Oh—”