I don’t know what Ronan thinks he’s going to be able to do. But, he’s my only hope. I can’t go in there. As it stands, I can barely breathe. Mack warned me I would overdo it, and I didn’t believe him. But he was right.
I’d give anything right now to tell him so. Usually, I thrive on telling him how wrong he is. But this time, this one time, I just want the ability to say to him I was wrong. If Ronan can help me do that, I don’t care if he and his family have been enemies of the Limonov’s for as long as I can remember, I will be indebted to him forever.
I rest my cheek against the window, my head vibrating on the glass with each new explosion. The gunfire is easy to drown out, but the bombs, they shake me down to my core. Every sound wave that ricochets off the car reminds me of how long it’s been since I’ve heard from anyone in my crew.
Few men have attempted to escape via the back of the property. They are gunned down almost immediately. The number of men my father must have brought here is staggering, given that I’m sure Andrei already had at least twenty-five on site.
If Mack and the girls are alive and can get out, will my father’s men even care that they aren’t part of Andrei’s crew? Will they just shoot to kill anyway? And will my family be in any position to defend themselves? Especially after what looks like an entire building has fallen down on and around them?
If Ronan can help, then I hope he hurries. At most, it should take him twenty minutes to get here. I count gunshots—the single shots not the rapid-fire— to pass the time. But by the time I reach one thousand, two hundred, seventy-six, I have to wonder if he’s coming at all.
26
Mack
We’ve been stuck in this room for close to half an hour now. The power flickers off and on, leaving us in total darkness about half the time. Jen and Roxie sit patiently, either resigned to our fate or just unaffected by impending death. Al is working on her comms devices, trying to get them to work through the solid feet of concrete between us and a working signal. I want to tell her it’s not worth it, but I don’t want to be the negative voice. Plus, she’s smart as fuck, maybe she knows something I don’t. Scratch that, I’m sure she knows something I don’t.
Regardless, I can’t just sit here and wait to see what will happen next. The bleeding has stopped on my wound, Quinn’s pulse is weak but steady, the explosions have dropped off, and the gunfire has moved to the other side of the compound. If there’s a time to try to get out, it’s now.
“I’ll be back,” I tell the group.
“Where are you going?” Reed asks.
“The dust has cleared, I’m just going to check things out, see if we can get out somehow.”
“I’ll go with you,” he says, looking around to see where he can put Quinn.
“No, stay here. It’s a one-man job, I’ll be right back.” I head out the door, careful to place it back in the doorjamb as carefully as I can to make it look normal. Not that anyone is down here, but shit, you never know. There could be other passageways none of us know about and Al’s equipment can’t find. Weirder shit has happened in more normal places than this.
I head toward the direction we came in from, figuring if there’s going to be an escapable route to the outside, it will be there. The area is not as bad as the explosions would lead you to believe. I mean, yeah, walls and ceilings are down in some rooms and parts of the hall, but it’s mostly traversable. I have a small flashlight with me that I use to find my way to the end of the hall.
It’s blocked, for sure, but I don’t think the blockage is all the way to the vent shaft we came in through. One of these standing walls must be a retaining wall or even a couple, or the entire thing would have come down around us. Which is what I’m banking on as I begin to climb the pile of concrete and brick, looking for a weak point.
Daria has spent a lot of time over the last couple of days complaining about how hard it is to get by with only one useable arm, and I’ve made fun of her. But I get it now. Even though Jen has pumped me full of morphine, I still can’t move my arm, and it has zero strength.
The rocks below my feet shift as I put my weight on them. Which is either a good thing or not. I want the whole pile to move, but I don’t want any of it coming down on me. And I can’t tell from here if it’s holding up anything else so that if I can move parts of it, will more just rain down?
I brace my back against the far wall and use my right hand to try to pull some top rocks toward me and down the pile. The movement is counterproductive, but it works. The smaller ones fall away with little effort. But the larger ones I won’t be able to move one-handed. I will need Reed or one of the girls to help me. I pull as much as I can to get a look through a small opening along the top.
I make my way back down the pile and to the room. “We can get out; it’s just going to take some effort. I’ve got a space at the top that I can see out, but it’s still too small to fit through. I’ll need some help to get the larger pieces away.” I point to my left arm as an explanation. “But once we do that, I think we’ll be good.”
Reed takes off his shirt and wraps Quinn in it as he lays her gently on the ground.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Boy Scout, but you just improved the view tremendously.” Roxie winks at him. It’s the levity that we need to give us the fortitude to keep going.
“Wow, how could that be taken wrong, Rox?” Al asks drily.
“I don’t want him thinking I’d like to jump his bones, I mean obviously he’s got it bad for the girl so that pursuit would be pointless on my part. But I do want him to know that I appreciate his physique. It’d be no different than if Mack here took off his shirt too.” She points to me. My chest puffs out a bit. I can’t help it. It’s just fucking nice when women appreciate the work you put in to tone your body and keep in shape. It’s vain, I know, and I don’t care.
Roxie stands guard, once again, and Al says with Quinn and continues to fiddle with her electronics while Reed and Jen come to help me with reducing the debris pile. For such a little thing, Jen is frighteningly strong. Between her and Reed, they barely need me at all to get a sizable gap for us all to squeeze through.
Gunfire continues to sound off outside, but it’s not as frequent as it was. I’m assuming they are all down to the last few men. I only hope that doesn’t hurt us once we’re out more than it helps us.
27
Reed
The physical strain of moving large chunks of concrete and brick feels good, even when it hurts. I need something to counteract the pain of knowing how monumentally I’ve failed Quinn. She was right under my nose this entire time. I should have suspected something when they referred to the woman as American. At the very least, checked to see who it was. But I didn’t. I missed all the signs once again.
