I swallow, nodding slowly.
“I am not going to hurt you,” he whispers, and I believe him. My tense muscles slowly relax under his grip. He keeps his hand pressed to my face, shifting his body to peek around the corner before meeting my eyes again and releasing me.
“Micah Winters,” I breathe, studying his features, comparing them to the single employment photo Maeve and I saw of him on the Devil’s Peak police department website. He’s in his department issued blue polo, the collar hugging the colorful ink around his neck. “I don’t understand,” I continue. “Why are you here?”
He lifts his hands into the air to shush me, and I’d be offended if it weren’t for the situation we were in. The sound of distant arguing dies off and leaves behind a single voice mumbling lowly on the other side of the wall.
“If you distract them, I can get her out of here.” He nods toward the wall behind me where Maeve lies helpless and unconscious on the other side. His statement surprises me, but there’s something happening where our eyes are clashing. He seems just as worried about Maeve as I am. I can see it in his swirling, icy eyes that he knows how badly I want to protect her, and the way his eyes flash with a frightening combination of rage and fear, I realize that for some reason, he wants the same thing. “I’ll come back and help you.”
The memory of what I’d seen in his eyes in his employment photo springs to life in my mind. He’s not an angel. He’s not offering to come back and protect me. He’s offering to come back and help me finish these people off.He’s like me.
“No,” I find myself saying. “Just get her out. Get her away from here.”
“Chloe,” he argues, pressing his hand to the wall behind me. The gesture seems so oddly intimate that I find my spine straightening under his stare. It’s like he’s known us for years, like he’s just part of the gang showing up to help get shit done. “Colin will kill me if—”
I press my hands to his chest, silencing him and gently pushing him away. “Don’t worry about Colin, and don’t worry about me. Worry about Maeve.”
He looks conflicted, and after a moment of hesitation, he reaches into his back pocket and produces a switchblade, extending it in the space between us. I nod, taking the knife from his hand and he nods in return. Slipping around the corner, I sprint in the direction of the man pacing across the room.
I surprised him. I can tell by the way he freezes his movement and turns in my direction slowly, caught off guard for a moment that I’m the enemy. It’s too late by the time I make it across the room, have the switchblade flipped open, and collide with his body, slamming my hand into his shoulder and plunging the knife in my other hand into his stomach.
“Fuck!” The gun he’d been holding—which I did not notice until right now—drops from his hand and he presses his fingertips to where I’ve extracted the sharp metal from his gut. “Bitch!” he cries. He lifts his bloody hand off his stomach and whirls it into my face. I jolt backward, my back slamming into the metal lift gate holding the pile of teetering logs in place.
I’m dazed, but as the black recedes from the edges of my vision, I glance toward the spot Maeve was curled up in, and she’s gone. And honestly, I don’t care what happens next.
I’m tired of this. Of hoping someone sees me. Hoping someone recognizes the dark inside me as just shaded light.
Maeve is safe, and with the knowledge that someone else is as protective of her as I am, I let my body sag against the cold metal behind my back until I’m sliding toward the floor.
“You’re something else, you know that?” the man grunts, drawing my focus back to him. He’s bending slowly toward his gun on the ground, his other hand pressed to the dark red circle forming on his t-shirt.
“So I’ve been told,” I mumble.
I couldn’t place his voice before, but seeing his face, I realize he’s the third guy from Max’s group. The one who’s been on the run the last couple of weeks. He was there at the bowling alley the night they challenged us to a game. I remember his voice from the alley when Max knocked me out, he was the one urging Max to pick me up. I’m assuming he was also at that party, but I still can’t remember anything from that night.
Raising the gun in my direction, he takes a weak step toward me, the blood in his face draining toward the wound in his stomach. “You’ve been taking out our best guys. You’re ruining—”
“Freeze!”
I startle at the sound of a woman’s voice off to the right, and I swing my head in her direction, my brain rattling with the swift movement. Gun raised in Chase’s direction, she slowly creeps forward, eyes flicking toward me briefly. “You ok?” she asks me, and I manage a wobbly nod.
I recognize her, too, as the woman who came to my house and took my statement after Max’s assault. She’s Lucy, Colin’s colleague who I called a witch and was a bit unfriendly to because I was jealous that she was moving in on my man.
Well, shit. Don’t I feel like an ass now.
“Put the gun down, Chase.” The barrel of her pistol stays pointed in his direction as she takes another slow, steady step forward.
“You’re kidding, right?” Chase returns, keeping his gun aimed at me.
And then apop popcatches me off guard. For the briefest moment I think maybe this is it, that my time has come, but then Chase hits his knees across the room and I see a look of shock on his face before his body collapses forward onto the ground with a heavy smack.
“Holy fuck,” I breathe.
“Idiot brothers,” Lucy mutters, releasing the magazine from her gun before slamming it back into place and racking the slide. “He’s not wrong, you know,” she says, her voice smooth, eyes studying the pistol in her hand before letting it fall to her side and meeting my eyes across the room.
“About…what?” I ask. My thundering heartbeat slows, and I settle my hands onto the cold floor behind me, wishing I could lean back against something for support. But the lift gate is over a foot above my head, and the best I can do is press my weight onto my palms.
Lucy walks toward Chase, kicking his gun away from his body and bending to a crouch. She reaches her arm out, pressing her fingertips to his neck, and for a moment I think she’s checking to make sure he’s still alive. As I watch her unhurried movements, I wonder why she’s so calm. Why she’s not pulling her radio out and calling for an ambulance. Why the gun is hanging from her hand instead of being slipped back into the holster on her hip.
