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“I would have bought one,” he said. “I don’t know how you feel about something like rings.”
He was in a jewelry store earlier… “You stole it?”
“The money for it and what we took will go back.” He gently squeezed my hand and then removed the ring from my grasp. He moved it to my finger. “It was a valid distraction for what I needed. I didn’t know your size.”
It fit. A little snug. Diamonds and their value were beyond me, something I never really thought about. This one appeared big, but simple. A single round stone on a gold band.
“With Alice after us…” I mumbled.
“I don’t want to wait,” he said. He sat up on one elbow, holding my hand with the ring on it. He lifted it to his lips, kissing my knuckle. “Not when, at any minute, something can happen and I’ll regret every second I didn’t spend near you.”
I’d been worried before his feelings would change after knowing at several points of time I’d been with the others. This relieved a lot of that bottled up worry I’d had. I bit my lower lip for a second. “I don’t know what this is supposed to mean. The ring…”
“I wasn’t sure, either. Which is why I didn’t give it to you earlier,” he said. “Not that you married to Raven would have stopped me from…” He trailed off and just looked at the ring on my finger. “I don’t imply ownership with this.”
“I know.”
He squeezed my hand gently again and pulled it to his chest, over his heart. “If something happened, I didn’t want you to think—”
Suddenly, the front door shook hard, cracking and splintering at the frame.
Axel was up in an instant. I scrambled, leaning with my back against the wall to pick myself up.
There was another slam. The door shook harder and a crack formed.
“Someone knows he left,” I whispered. “Those neighbors are after his recycling…”
Axel picked up my shovel and took it to the back wall of the apartment. There were some exposed boards here. He used the shovel to wedge between them and make a small opening. The back wall had been basic plyboard and was easy to move.
We scuttled through with our bags in tow just before the front door shattered apart.
As the apartments had been made up of offices connected to warehouses, we wedged ourselves into the wide-open space, the remains of the warehouse section. The ceiling was falling in on this one. Holes allowed beams of light to shine down on exposed, cracked concrete.
But where it was dark, it was horrifyingly dark. The brighter beams of light made it harder to see.
Axel ran right for these dark spaces, taking me with him. I held my breath, as if breathing too much of the darkness would contaminate me. We darted through the dark. I kept a hand on his back to be sure I didn’t lose him.
Once we were in shadow, he moved carefully and quietly in an S-pattern, aiming for the rear of the building.
Behind us, there were voices, but I couldn’t make them out. Footsteps. More cracking of wood, probably from the hole we made in the back.
There was the echoing sound of a gun’s safety being taken off and a hammer cocking…
After that sound, Axel moved faster with his weaving but remained quiet. If their eyes were trying to adjust like ours, they couldn’t see us.
When we got to the rear, a light shone behind us, a bright LED beam. There was a shout, and an echo followed. “Don’t move!”
Axel crashed through an exit door on the far side, and I followed.
More loud shouting. “Around back!”
Male. Authoritative.
Once in the alley, we ran.
??????
It was blocks of mad dashing and weaving between buildings before we finally broke into residential blocks.
I was out of breath and came to a stop in someone’s yard, but Axel pulled me until we were between two houses.
We kept our backs up against a wall. Axel scanned the neighborhood while I clutched at my chest, trying to breathe.
“I don’t think that was the neighbors,” I huffed out.
Axel muttered curses under his breath. “I thought it was police at first, until the gun. It couldn’t have been them, which means Alice is looking for us.”
“She did get someone killed in jail, right?”
“There might be a bad cop among them willing to look the other way, but the police are generally on our side. They’re not going to pull a gun in the dark and not alert people that they are the police.”
“Should we go to the police?”
“You might end up doing that once we find where they’ve got everyone, but it’s likely whoever is working with her in the precinct would tip her off if they’re on the way. She’s gone this long not getting caught. This might be our only chance.” He brushed his forehead and wiped away sweat at his temple. “We shouldn’t have stayed. Carl must have told them about where he’d been living.”
I wiped my brow. “He didn’t hand the note to Roger?”
“Maybe after he handed the note to Roger, someone stopped Carl and questioned him.” He huffed and leaned his head back, gazing up at the sky. “I should have told him to leave quickly. Gave him a timeline…”
“We can’t think of everything. Maybe he tried…”
“I can’t keep ahead of this.” He blew out a breath and then checked around the corner of the wall we were leaning against. “We need to keep going. They’ll be doing sweeps through this neighborhood.”
This time, we walked quickly and weaved between homes until we were on the edge of where North Charleston met downtown Charleston.
“Too close to the more upscale neighborhoods and we’ll get caught in street cameras,” he said, motioning further down the street. “We need to get to the location.”
“The police aren’t going to figure things out and be there waiting for us? What would you write down that gets the message to her without alerting the cops to where we’ll be?”
“It was in the note to Roger. If Carl did get the note to him, it’s something Roger relays to the right people. If it got picked up by someone other than Roger, then it won’t matter. Because I’m not picking the location. Roger is.”
“How do we find out?”
“Phone call. Maybe some other way. They’re smart. They’ll get it to us. We also need a car to get there.”
It was late afternoon, and being December, the shadows were already long and it was starting to cool off. After all the running, I was sweating through my T-shirt and I’d lost my hat back at Carl’s place. I raked my hair back behind my head, making a temporary ponytail to cool my neck. “If it’s around Charleston, won’t the police be looking and come pick us up?”
“He’ll pick a location that’s out of Charleston. Different jurisdiction,” he said. He turned to me and removed a ponytail holder out of his pocket, passing it to me. “Need this?”
I raised an eyebrow, taking it and using it to stuff my hair behind my head in a sloppy, half-done tail. It was enough to allow the colder air in the shadows to reach my neck. “Teach me how to steal a car.”
“You want to know?”
“It’s been useful.”
He breathed in slowly and then blew out a breath. In between the homes, it was pretty dark. The shadows made the lines of his face deepen so he looked depressed. “Funny how the more I try to pull you out of that life, the further we dive into it. And now it’s the only card to play when we can’t…”
He trailed off, but I knew what he meant. The Academy. Without them, without their network, we were resorting to crime to get by. The moment we stopped pretending to be good guys, we turned right into bad ones, justifying stealing and other things for survival.
I moved to him, putting a hand on his chest. “Maybe that group, they saw things happening they couldn’t touch. Things beyond them. They wanted to help, but didn’t know how. Maybe you were the experimental group, but being good isn’t always a straight line.” I smirked a little thinking of wha
t Corey said. “Sometimes there’s a gray area.”
He seemed to consider this. “Maybe there is a way to make this easier, more light gray than dark.”
He took my hand, turning me to the road. His head held a little higher, and his gaze steady. I only hoped we could finally be one step ahead of Alice.
BETTER THAN STEALING
The sun was setting when we descended on the back lot of Henshaw Customs. It took a few bus rides and then miles of walking, but we took a path around to the rear of the property once we got close.
We were huddled in a tree line about ten yards from the edge of the back lot. We waited until we were sure the last of the people had left, the garage doors closed, the office locked up and dark. There was no sign of movement for at least a half hour before we emerged from the woods.
“Keys are kept in the office,” he said. “But there’s cameras. And the feed is monitored.” He motioned to it. “Should be secure…It’d be our people watching.”
“Why couldn’t we approach them during the day when they were still there? They aren’t going to give us to Alice.”
