Chapter 12 Conrad
Conrad
This fucking ship is practically a city of boxes.
We come over the ladder in two single file lines, boots kissing steel, headsets low on our heads.
Blackvine’s lead raises two fingers, cuts right, and the whole team flows with him like the deck tilted that way.
I hate them for being graceful and organized and professional at this when I don’t have the skill or ability or the technical know-how to pull this rescue off.
It’s been rankling ever since Maverick placed the call—the knowledge that we had to call on someone else for help.
All I have right now is sheer, roiling want. And everyone knows—if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
“Stay on our hip, gentlemen,” the lead says, unconcerned with my thoughts and irritatingly calm. “We’ll get your girl.”
We snake the lanes between containers—red, blue, gray—soaring tower-high.
Every corner is a potential ambush. Every echo is a lie, the sound coming from somewhere else entirely different from where I think it hails.
I want to sprint, find her faster. God only knows what could be happening to her right fucking now, while we take our time walking this maze.
The operators move like they’re shopping—select a route, remove an obstacle, proceed with caution. Two peel left on a hand signal. One forwards posts with a mirror on a stick, three inches of glass that decides which direction we take.
“This is taking too—” I start.
Gunfire snaps from the next corridor, cutting off my protest—two tight pops, then silence. A body hits the deck somewhere we can’t see. My hands go cold and hot at once.
“Contact,” a voice in my ear says. “One down.”
We flow again. The lead lifts a palm and we bleed into cover—Storm behind a ladder cage, Maverick near a stanchion, me pressed to a container that smells like paint and brine.
A guard’s shadow spills long past the corner.
I count his steps. Four. Five. He clears the angle and points the rifle too high, nervous.
The merc in front of me floors him with three shots.
My teeth hurt. “Give me a gun,” I say, reaching.
The merc turns, pats my chest once like I’m a Labrador with a lot of feelings. “Just wait here, pup. We’ll get your girlfriend.”
Storm’s head tilts, dangerous. He doesn’t argue.
Instead he pulls a blade from seemingly nowhere and holds it low and close, the steel a soft, unpromising gleam.
Maverick, with a tip of his chin, bends, grabs a wrench the size of a femur from a maintenance rack, and tests the weight with a roll of his wrist.
Atticus—Christ, Atticus is white around the mouth and tighter than a snare drum, but when a second shooter comes slashing in from above on a catwalk and sprays bullets, he moves.
He yanks me down, shoulder spikes me to the deck, and a beat later we hear the mercs return fire and a boot scraping metal and then a body ringing across the grating.
When the ringing stops, Atticus’s eyes find a dropped pistol. He looks at me, and I nod. He takes it, his hands good on a tool he doesn’t prefer. He pushes his glasses up on his nose and racks the weapon.
I pick up a rifle from the first man down, check the chamber, and feel my pulse settle when the weight is in my hands.
“Stay behind me,” the lead says. “We do this by the book.”
“I don’t have a fucking book,” I mutter. “I have Phoenix, and I need to get her.”
He doesn’t bother to answer.
We move.
The container lanes open into a wider apron, a crane overhead sleeping like a predator. Three guards hold poor cover by a hydraulic spool, the noise of the boat apparently enough to cover the gunfire.
The mercs don’t waste bullets. Two drop at a blade across the throat.
The third whirls and bolts—unfortunately for him in the wrong direction.
Storm flings his knife silently, like he’s been waiting to do for the past three days.
It embeds itself in the man’s trachea, and he goes down with a quiet gurgle.
Storm approaches, pulls his knife free, and wipes the blade on the guard’s shirt without looking.
Maverick, grinning like a man who found his favorite toy in a fire, uses the wrench to turn another would-be shooter’s ribs into a question mark when the man tries to flank us. The sound is ugly and righteous. Mav doesn’t smile after. He just steps over the body.
“Forward hold,” a merc calls. “Stairwell. Two down. One fleeing.”
“Phoenix?” I press.
“Lower decks,” he says. “They’ll probably be keeping them in the dorms. This way.”
We descend. The air is hotter down here, the engine thrum bigger, closer, alive in the bones. A bulkhead door is ajar, the key still in the lock.
It’s the kind of room I feel in my stomach before I see it: rows of bunks, a bucket, ten faces in the thin yellow light. All women. I scan the faces swiftly, searching. Phoenix isn’t here. My heart makes a noise I don’t let anyone hear.
“There are other rooms,” the merc says. “We’ll get these out in a minute. Let’s keep moving.”
We clear two more—empty. Then a hallway with a guard at the end, back turned, talking into a radio. He turns too slowly. Atticus shoots once and the man folds. Atticus doesn’t blink. He hates guns, but he never misses.
We reach a door with a dent near the hinge. The merc gestures. “You ready?” he asks me, like he’s offering me an indulgence before he finishes his job.
I push past him and hit the handle.
And there she is.
On the floor, her back to the wall, her eyes open and not seeing us for half a second and then seeing me.
For a moment it reminds me of the way she sat, back against the wall, in our penthouse the first night she belonged to us.
A bloody scrape streaks her cheekbone, and a bruise sweeps beneath her ribs like someone signed their name there, and I will learn who that bastard is, and when I do my capacity for forgiveness will be gone. Expired. There will only be reparation.
The world goes quiet.
“Phoenix,” I say. It comes out wrong—ragged and not the way I rehearsed and entirely honest.
Her mouth trembles and makes itself straight again, and she half lifts her arms. “Conrad.”
I go to my knees so I don’t loom over her. I put the rifle down, palms up, the oldest trick in every book that asks someone to trust. “We’re here. We’re going to get you out of here now. We’ve got you.”
Her eyes flick past me to the mercs, to Storm’s knives, to Maverick’s wrench, to Atticus with a pistol. She counts us, her lips moving silently.
One-two-three-four. Hers. Ours. Each other’s.
“Others,” she says, her voice sanded down to a thread. “I think there are ten in a different room, maybe more in another. But they moved me a few hours ago. Danner is dead.”
A line of heat goes through the room. Storm’s jaw tightens. Maverick breathes like a man who just put down a load he carried alone for too long. Atticus gives the smallest nod, a tally in a ledger that says that’s one thing done right.
“We’ll get them,” I say. “You’re first.”
She shakes her head. “No.”
Maverick crouches on her other side, puts a hand near her shoulder but not on it. “Firebird,” he says, voice soft, “we’re gonna get them all out. But you’re fucking going first.”
Her mouth softens and trembles. “Okay,” she says, which is to say hurry.
Her arms lift again, and I lift her carefully, holding her to me.
I can feel her heart thumping against my chest and have to fight the urge to squeeze.
For a second I just stand there, one hand tight and tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck, the other arm braced beneath her thighs, and breathe her in.
I start to walk, and she pushes against my chest. “I’ll walk.”
Again, I have to fight my natural instinct. I don’t want to set her down. I don’t want to let her go. But I do.
Once she’s on her feet her spine straightens, and she visibly steels herself. She motions, and sighing, we begin to move the others.
The operators become a conveyor of bodies and fear and then something like relief.
The boy’s name is Luis, and he comes beside me and grips my sleeve as if he can hold me accountable that way.
The split-lip woman walks under her own power and checks every door we pass like she’s making sure no one is left behind.
The humming girl hums quietly. The woman who holds her holds her still.
We leave the way we came—methodical and infuriatingly slowly. Twice more, guns bark at us. Twice more, someone whose name I don’t know drops and stays.
On the open deck, the wind is a cold, clean blade. Phoenix sways, her eyes enormous as she stares down at the water. The boats, large enough to transport everyone, look tiny beneath us nonetheless, the ocean enormous and indifferent.
“We’re going down that thing?” She points to the ladder.
“It’s the only way.”
Her chin trembles. “I don’t like heights.” A tear streaks down her cheek, and the wind catches it, drying it on her skin.
Aw, hell. Reaching out, I pull her to me and crush her face to my chest. “We won’t let you fall, Princess, I swear it.”
We go down the ladder one at a time: the women first, the boy between two operators who could be statues. I descend with Phoenix one swaying rung above me and my arms bracketing her hips. Storm is in front like a bookend you can’t tip.
On the water, everything gets sharper. The cold in the face helps. Phoenix sits on a bench, blanket around her shoulders, her hand clutched in that of one of the girls that came down the ladder after her. She stares at the horizon, gaze distant.
“Coast Guard?” the pilot asks.
“After we’re gone,” I say. “Anonymous. Here are the coordinates and the headcount and then nothing else.”
He nods. He’s done this before.
I keep my hand on the rail and my eyes on her and my mouth clamped tightly shut because if I speak right now I will say the wrong version of this will never happen again.