I’m brought back five years ago to a craggy, rock-strewn field in Afghanistan. We had ten days to take out the surveillance equipment in a terrorist camp near the border. Command wanted us to infiltrate the camp and sabotage the equipment quietly, but gave us carte blanche to get the job done however our team saw fit. I was going to go along with command and take the safe route, but one of my men took it upon himself to find a simpler, more brutal method. We were positioned upstream from the camp, and Liam dragged as much rotted meat as he could gather in a day from the surrounding plains and he piled it in the river. In a few days the terrorists were so sick we just walked in and took the place from them and turned off the equipment without wasting a single bullet.
It worked, but I always thought it was a dirty play. Poison is for pussies, as far as I’m concerned, and I only knew one man who resorted to it. I look at all the waiters and waitresses with renewed interest, realizing the majority of them have hard eyes and hard bodies. Professionals. All of them. This is a fucking trap and Makayla is right in the middle of it. Meanwhile fucking Edwards and Rosenthal are scanning the perimeter. Useless.
I stand, ignoring whatever Becca says as I rush toward Makayla’s table. A server reaches to refill her wine glass, which she just chugged, and he taps a drop of something in the glass just as I arrive.
“What do you have there?” I ask.
He looks at me, eyes betraying his desire to handle this with fists. “Pardon, sir?”
I take the wine glass from him and smash it on the floor. The room falls silent as heads turn to look at the waiter and I.
“Don’t drink the fucking wine,” I say, projecting my voice so that everyone in the room can hear. Rather than try to explain to the entire room, I grip the waiter by the neck, squeezing him tight and frisking him with my free hand. There are a few gasps and murmurs as I search. I pull a gun free from his waistband and hold it by the barrel, showing the room. This time there are screams and the screech of hundreds of chairs being pushed back as people rush to leave the room. The men posing as waiters push their way through the panicked crowds, eyes intent on Makayla and I.
I shove the waiter to the ground and let him get trampled beneath the escaping crowd, using my size to bulldoze a path to the back exit I spotted when I came in to the large banquet hall. I have a firm grasp on Makayla’s arm, but she keeps tugging me in the wrong direction.
“Kennedy!” she yells over the noise. “I can’t leave Kennedy!”
“They want us,” I yell back to her. “The farther from us, the safer she is. Just stay with me.”
It seems to work, because she stops resisting my pull. A few seconds later, the room is considerably more empty, and I have no way around one of the waiters. When he spots me, he reaches behind his back for a weapon. I snag a plate from the nearest table and frisbee it at his face. He’s too slow and the plate shatters against his forehead. A second later, I’ve grabbed a steak knife and closed the distance to him, still gripping Makayla’s arm. I jam the knife in his chest and strip the gun from him. His eyes widen as he falls to his knees, clutching at the wound.
I push past him, not having time to finish him off because now that the room has mostly cleared out, the waiters will have a clear shot at us any second. I glance over my shoulder just in time to see a man aiming a pistol at us. I flick the safety off the stolen gun and sling Makayla behind me, shielding her with my body as I take aim. I squeeze off a round, favoring quickness over accuracy. The first bullet takes him in the shoulder, jarring his aim so when he fires a split second later, the bullet zips over my head. I fire two more times, dropping him. More gunshots follow, tearing into the plaster and showering Makayla and I in dust as we duck out the exit.
I’m running on pure instinct and training. I scan our surroundings, assessing our options. An alley to our left leads to the main street where I can see crowds of people from the party running past. Too obvious. They will have someone watching the main exit for us. To our right, the alley leads to a wider back alley behind the theater. I yank her to the right and just as we’re about to round the corner I plow into someone, knocking them to the ground.
I’m pointing my borrowed gun at the man’s face before I even register who he is.
“Edwards?” I ask.
He shakes his head a little. “Yeah, fuck. Remind me not to piss you off,” he says, reaching for the hand I offer to help him up.
“Where’s--”
“Here,” says Rosenthal, moving smoothly around the corner.
Just looking at the two incompetent assholes makes my blood boil. They didn’t know I would be inside to look after Makayla. Their “perimeter checks” left her completely vulnerable in there. If I hadn’t been here… Fuck. Just thinking about it turns my stomach. I want to lay into them, but now isn’t the time. Still, I don’t plan to let them out of my sight until I’ve had a chance to rip them to pieces.
“Come on,” I say quickly, “we’ll run a few blocks and then find a place to lay low till this blows over.
Rosenthal slides his hand from behind his back, pointing a gun at Makayla’s stomach. I raise my gun to his head in the same instant, finger tight on the trigger, heart pounding. Edwards shifted to move slightly behind my back and I didn’t even notice. I was so pissed off at the two of them I let my fucking guard down. I run through all the possible outcomes and keep coming up short.
“Nothing personal,” says Edwards.
“You better fucking believe it’s personal,” I growl. They’re betraying us. But why? Money?
The exit door we came out of bangs open and a small group of waiters file out, pistols in hand. They are followed by a man in black with a golden goat mask. I can already tell by the way he moves that it’s Liam.
I clench my jaw, holding Makayla tightly to me. I failed her. The thought burns like acid in my mind. I failed her, just like I failed all the men who trusted me to protect them in the war. My finger twitches on the trigger and I feel it pull back slightly. Dangerous. It’s not my gun, and I don’t know how sensitive the trigger is. I could’ve just blown Rosenthal’s brains out and gotten both of us killed. It rips me up inside to do it, but I lower my gun, knowing this isn’t a situation I can fight my way out of. The only hope we have is to wait for a better opportunity, hope for some kind of fuck up on their part, as slim a hope as that might be.
If it was just me, I would happily kill Rosenthal and try to drop one or two more before they brought me down. But with Makayla beside me, it’s out of the question. As small as the chance may be, we have to take it.
“I expected better,” says Liam, lifting his mask to reveal his scarred face. “The great fucking Jesse Slade only killed one of my men and wounded another before being captured.” He clicks his tongue in disappointment. “And I tried telling these clowns he would never fall for their double cross, but you really have lost your touch, haven’t you?”
“You don’t care about Makayla,” I say. “Let her go and you can torture me as much as you fucking like. I won’t fight.”
He sniffs, smirking at me. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You get to suffer through whatever I put you through knowing you did it for her.” He rolls his eyes, stepping forward and reaching to touch Makayla’s face.