"They're coming for the intel."
"They're coming for Alexandra. Get back in your room and lock the door."
"No."
He stop and turns to look at me, and the flat expression cracks for a second and underneath is not anger but fear, actual fear, and seeing it on his face does something to my stomach that I'm not prepared for because this man does not get scared. He gets loud and reckless and violent, but he doesn't get scared, and the fact that I'm the thing scaring him right now rewrites something in my understanding of what's happening between us.
"Savannah. I am not fucking asking."
"And I am not fucking hiding in a room. I threw a fucking lamp at you, imagine what I could do with a gun in my hand. It’s not my fucking problem you want to treat me like Rapunzel."
"Your problem is staying alive. My problem is keeping you that way. Get your fucking ass back in the room."
"Yeah… you’re gonna have to make me. Asshole."
They’re the same words from the gym, but they aren’t. In the gym they were flirtation, a dare, foreplay and a challenge. Here in this corridor with red lights strobing and gunfire echoing from the east wing and soldiers running past us, they're a fight. A real one. Two people who want opposite things and neither of them is going to bend.
He steps toward me, one, two, until he’s so close I can see the fire burning in his eyes.
"If something happens to you," he says, "I will become the monster I try so hard not to be. Do you understand me? I will burn this place down and everyone in it and I won't feel a goddamn thing except that I didn't keep you safe."
"Then keep me safe. Don't lock me away."
"Savannah, this is stupid."
"Emilio, don’t talk to me like a fucking child. I’m a whole ass woman. I even get my period once a month."
We're inches apart and the corridor is chaos around us and his free hand, the one not holding a gun, comes up and grabs my jaw, not gentle, firm, his fingers pressing into my cheeks, tilting my face up to his.
"You're going to get me killed," he says.
"Not if you do your job."
He kisses me. Hard, fast, teeth on my bottom lip, his hand on my jaw holding me in place, and I grab the front of his vest and pull him in and kiss him back with everything the gym started and the phone call interrupted. His tongue is in my mouth, and the alarm is now background noise and somewhere down the corridor a gun goes off and none of it matters because his mouth is on mine and his body is pushing me backward until my shoulders hit the wall. His hips pin me there and I can feel him, hard against my stomach, and the man just heard gunfire and put on a tactical vest and his body is still responding to me and the power of that is fucking surreal.
He pulls back long enough to look at me. His eyes are black in the red strobe light.
"Please, I’m begging you, stay right here and don't move from this spot. I will come back for you."
"Emilio..."
"For fuck’s sake you vexing woman. Just fucking promise me."
Something in his tone tells me to give him some leeway. "I promise. Go."
He goes. He turns and runs toward the east wing and the gunfire and the shouts and he's gone around the corner before I can say anything else, and I'm standing against the wall in the corridor with my back against concrete and my lips swollen and the taste of him in my mouth.
The fighting is loud and close. Not movie loud, where explosions have bass and the sound design tells you what to feel. Real loud. The flat crack of suppressed weapons and the fuller bang of unsuppressed ones and the shouts that come between them, orders and confirmations and once, a scream that cuts off too fast. The compound walls carry sound in every direction and standing here I can track the fight by the way it moves through the building, east wing ground floor, then the stairwell, then the corridor above, then back down.
The fighting lasts twelve minutes. I count them all because that’s what you do when the world gets loud and your hands are empty. I stand in the corridor with my back against the wall and my fingers on the bottle cap in my pocket and wait like I was told to wait.
Twelve minutes. Fourteen gunshots after he left, and each one is a coin flip I have no say in. He's down there with a vest and a gun and the cold version of himself that I saw for two seconds before he kissed me, and I am standing in a hallway in jeans and a t-shirt listening and hoping the number stays at fourteen because fourteen means the shooting stopped and the shooting stopping might mean he's okay.
Then shouting, then silence, then Carmelo's voice on a radio somewhere saying "clear" in a tone that sounds more annoyed than relieved, which is apparently how Carmelo expresses everything including the end of a firefight, and then the alarm stops and the red lights die and the corridor goes back to its normal ugly white, and the compound goes quiet.
I don't move. He told me to stay right here and I'm staying right here because I promised and because the look on his face when he said it made promises feel like the kind of thing you keep for a man who kissed you against a wall while his family was under attack.
He finally rounds the corner. Walking, not running, with blood on his hands. A cut above his left eyebrow that's bleeding freely down the side of his face and dripping off his jaw onto the collar of the tactical vest. His gun is holstered. The vest has a new mark on the left side, a round that hit and didn't get through, and the sight of that impact point, a dent in the fabric a few inches from his ribs, makes my knees go soft in a way that has nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with the sudden, violent understanding that this man almost died thirty feet from where I'm standing.
