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I was just thinning the herd, culling the sheep.
They would get to land the final, devastating blow.
I opened the door, the joints whining from disuse, and made my way down, flicking on the battery-powered lights, and closing the door.
I wasn't a fan of small, dark, underground spaces, but when it came to things as dangerous as the ingredients in a good bomb, it was safety-wise to be as far underground as possible, to prevent any collateral damage if something went wrong.
But nothing was going to go wrong.
I could build a bomb in my sleep I had been tinkering at it for so long.
They always underestimate in shows and movies how long it takes to make a bomb. They sit a guy at a table, have him throw some pipes together and sprinkle some powder inside them and they're done.
Truth be told, it was a long, tedious, painstaking process that you needed to get absolutely perfect or you had a bomb that didn't detonate or only detonated partially. You only got one chance to create the impact you wanted so you needed to do it right.
So while I was impatient and I wanted to get things handled, I took a deep breath, I compiled all the working parts from the stopwatch to the ammonium nitrate, I sat down at the table, and I slowly set to work.
Hours later, I sat back, rolling the tension out of my neck and shoulders. It was probably the longest I had gone without sick to my stomach worry about Wolf since the bullets ripped into his body.
Even remembering it, even just having the quick flash move across my mind, I had to get up and move, I had to try to take slow, deep breaths.
Nothing had ever compared to that moment.
I had lived through a lot, a sickening, disgusting lot in my time with Lex, but Wolf had been the one to finally show me a good side of life again. He had helped me sleep. He had brought me back to life. And to stand beside him, a smile still on my face because he was home finally, and hear the bullets break out, to feel him push me behind his solid form, to watch as he went down, as the blood bloomed from the holes in his body, as he slowly slipped unconscious...
I had felt gutted.
I had felt like someone had reached into my chest and ripped my heart out of my ribcage.
I had felt like my world had crashed down around me.
I had felt truly and utterly devastated.
I didn't even understand the meaning of that word until that moment.
I just... lost it.
And I didn't stop losing it for a long time.
Hell, I was pretty sure I was still a little lost.
But at least I wasn't useless anymore. Wolf wasn't the kind of man who would have wanted me at his bedside, tending to him like a baby. He would have much preferred I was getting shit done, getting justice, protecting his people. What was left of them.
I didn't even want to think about having to tell him what had happened since he was shot- how many men he would have to mourn while he recovered.
But if I could at least help eliminate the threat, I hoped it would mean he would take it easy and give his body time to heal. If he woke up while things were still crazy and up in the air, I could see him ripping out his IVs and trying to take off on a one-man mission to put an end to it all, likely making himself worse in the process.
I carefully boxed it up and made my way back to the car, keeping the gloves on even as I drove one town over where the idiots had luckily rented a very secluded three bedroom home on a cul-de-sac. Technically, there were two neighbors, but they were bank-owned and vacant. They didn't want to be seen. And, luckily for me, that meant I wouldn't be either when I parked on the street behind and cut through the woods, the night falling giving me perfect cover with my dark hoodie as I made my way across the backyard and toward the Bilco doors and greased the joints before pulling them open and slipping unseen inside.
It wasn't the kind of basement you wanted to be in. Me, I never really liked being in any basements, but this one was dirt-floored and spider-infested with old, forgotten rusted hoes and rakes leaning on the walls beside festering buckets of lord-knew what. Well, one smelled strongly of gasoline so, hey, that worked in my favor. Who the hell left buckets of gasoline laying about? That was just asking for an explosion.
A floor above me, I could hear the scrape of a chair, the thump of footsteps, and the muffled, low register of male voices talking.
