I was right behind him.
I raised my arms, one ready to put over his mouth, the other to draw the blade across his throat.
A tear leaked out of my eye.
He suddenly stepped backward, into me, and turned around in surprise. Wide, dark eyes met mine.
He probably expected to see Travis.
Not me.
And before either of us could even react, Camden was sprinting across the kitchen.
Grabbing the knife out of my hand and shouldering me out of the way.
He put his hand over the man’s mouth and pushed the man’s head back into one of the shelves in the fridge.
Camden took the knife with one swift motion, slit the man’s throat.
The man’s eyes widened even more then froze, blood spilling out of him and down his white shirt. Camden held the man there until he was certain he was dead. Then he took the man in his arms and nodded to the pantry, trying to get me to open the door.
I couldn’t move. My body rocked with terrors while everything inside of me froze. Blood pooled toward my boots.
Camden managed to open the pantry and put the body inside, closing the door quietly behind him. Then he came over to the sink, took paper towels from the dispenser and quickly wiped up the blood at my feet. He shoved the reddened towels under the sink, closed the fridge door and grabbed my shoulders. I looked down at his hands, covered in blood, leaving bloody prints on me.
“Ellie,” he whispered, shaking me. “Ellie. Look at me. Look at me.”
I raised my head and looked at his eyes. They were wild, pupils completely dilated, but they were familiar. He was still my Camden.
Oh god, what had he done?
What had I been about to do?
I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out.
“Ellie,” he said again, his voice hoarser now. “I couldn’t let you do it, you’d never forgive yourself. I’d rather this be on my conscience than yours. I’m getting my son back and I’m going to do whatever I can to make that happen.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out another gun. “I found this on him. Do you want it or should I?”
I licked my lips and managed to say, “You have it.”
“I’m keeping you safe,” he said and quickly kissed my forehead. “Come on.”
He grabbed my hand and led me out of the kitchen back to the hallway.
As sick with shock and horror at what we had just done, I felt a twinge of relief deep inside. The man, who would have no doubt killed us, was dead. We didn’t have to worry about him. And I now knew, I saw, that Camden was prepared to do absolutely anything to keep me alive and get back to his son. I could only hope that he’d make peace with it one day, if we managed to get out of this on our own two feet. The human heart had the capacity to take on only so much and I knew Camden’s heart was overburdened as it was.
We continued down the hall, pausing every few steps to listen. There was some shuffling from one of the rooms at the very end. The door was open and the room faced to the back where the morning sun was spilling into it. It seemed like a place that Travis would sit and have breakfast, perhaps a sunroom where he could sit and think about all the money he was making, drugs he was distributing, people he was killing.
I wondered if Camden was going to take me straight there. Take himself straight to Travis, kill him and have it all over with.
But someone else’s voice came from that room, speaking in Spanish. Travis answered him, also in Spanish, albeit rusty. I couldn’t really figure out what they were talking about, the news perhaps, some event in Honduras. Unfortunately, that made two of them in there. It wouldn’t be so easy now. I doubted we could go in the room the way we were and take them out.
Camden paused then instead of continuing toward the voices, he carefully tried the handle on the first door to our left.
Locked.
And locked for a reason.
He looked to me questioningly. Could I do this?
I nodded and brought out the lock picker with fumbling fingers. I kept hearing Travis down the hall, knowing how close we were to him, how close we were to getting my mother out. Though it took longer than normal, I managed to pick the lock. We carefully pushed the door open and I held my breath waiting for it creak loudly. It didn’t.
And there were a set of stairs leading down into the dark.
We had found it.
Camden motioned for me to go first, the stairs were lit by a bare bulb, and he ever-so-carefully closed the door behind us. We went down slowly, step by step, my legs feeling weak, my jaw clenched hard.
We had found it but I was afraid to see what it was.
I stepped off the last step, my boots on hard concrete. There was darkness all around us, the light from the stairs not reaching very far.
Suddenly a flashback came into my vision. Me, eleven years old, walking down the stairs to Travis’s basement by accident, looking for money that wasn’t there and only finding the chemicals that would change the course of my entire life.