“Because a headache is the worst of my problems right now. I thought you were going to kill me,” I said, my voice not my own. I sounded hoarse, my throat completely raw.
He sighed heavily and scratched his forehead with the back of his thumb, still holding his cigarette. “Yes, well, I couldn’t very well do it with Carver around. He’d be likely to gut each of us after that.”
I stayed silent, lying there, listening to him.
“I imagine he’ll be here soon,” he told me quietly, almost regretfully.
I didn’t understand. Was he bringing Carver here to me to finish the job his men couldn’t? I wondered if Carver knew that I didn’t have any important information from Bruno, that everything he’d told me was speculation and barely believable at that. He hadn’t presented me with any hard facts or information, so I really had no bargaining chips for my life. Not that they’d spare it regardless.
We stayed there, not saying a word to one another, him continuing to light and suck down one cigarette after another, me drifting in and out of consciousness.
Eventually, when it felt like years had passed, a quiet clicking of the door sounded, and I watched Deleviv stiffen. The door gently swung open, and unsurprisingly, Carver stepped inside. He was wearing black sweatpants, combat boots, and a dark T-shirt that hugged his gorgeous muscles. There was a black bag slung over his shoulder, hanging low below his hip. He had a thick, black scarf around his neck and an unfamiliar gun in his hand. It was odd seeing him wearing clothing that wasn’t approved by ENAD, or holding a gun that wasn’t ENAD issue.
He glanced at me in my cell, but walked over to Deleviv. Carver stood a few feet away from him, neither of them saying anything for a moment. I thought they were about to reach out and touch one another, embrace each other like lovers. Instead, Carver held his gun out and pointed it at Deleviv’s head. It was a standard-issue Haven Model 8, designed in nine by nineteen, something so simple and commonplace, yet highly untraceable because of how cheap and accessible they were. Just the make of the gun he was holding said things about his plans for that night.
Deleviv sighed and threw his cigarette on the ground to stub it out with his toe. He looked up at Carver with pleading eyes.
“I knew you’d come here tonight, Carver, but I was hoping it wouldn’t play out like this.” Deleviv spoke to him. “Did you know I’d be here waiting for you?”
“Yes,” Carver replied.
“But you brought a gun?”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re holding that gun to my head?”
Carver didn’t reply.
Deleviv shot up from his seat, taking a hasty step toward Carver and the gun he was holding out.
“I could never hurt you, Carver,” he said gently. “I’d give you the world if I could, but you already know that. And you know that if you wanted him, I’d give him to you too. Did you really think I’d be the one to stand in your way? Did you think that you’d have to hold a gun between us?”
“I wasn’t taking any chances,” Carver said.
“Even after all this time, you could stand there and point a gun at me? Would you actually be able to shoot me?” Deleviv sounded so hurt, almost on the brink of desperation.
Carver didn’t reply.
“That was a stupid question.” Deleviv sighed. “Of course you could.”
Carver let his hand fall and placed the gun back into the waistband of his sweatpants. “I can’t play this game with you anymore, Ros. The game pieces and the players are lost to me. I don’t understand the rules, and I’m tired of losing.”
“I can promise you that I’d rather die than hurt you, love,” Deleviv said to him, reaching out and cupping Carver’s scarred cheek in his palm. “I’d rather die than hurt him too, if he’s what you want. But I can’t make promises for the others. I can’t tell you I’ll be able to stop anyone.”
“I know the risks.”
“I just don’t want you to take them.”
“We’re leaving, Ros, and if you try to stop us, I’ll shoot you,” Carver told him without a moment’s hesitation.
“Yes, and I suppose I would deserve that for creating the monster inside you, wouldn’t I?” He smiled sadly.
Carver walked over to the cell and stood at the electronic keypad before glancing over his shoulder at Deleviv. Deleviv sighed once again, came to where Carver stood, and let the keypad scan his retina, PIN, and fingerprints. The door clicked, and Carver pulled it open hastily. He walked over to me and crouched down close.
“I’m here,” he told me.
“Is that supposed to make me feel safe?” I croaked out.
Carver carefully reached down and began touching my naked body, poking me, prodding me, feeling my muscles. I groaned in pain and tried to roll away from him, but he held me still.
“You have quite a few broken bones,” Carver said.
“Yeah, well, you can thank that chain-smoking asshole over there for that.” I tipped my pounding head in Deleviv’s direction.
Carver took the bag off his shoulder and unzipped it to pull out what appeared to be spare clothes for me. He put his arm around my waist and helped me sit up, drawing a pained groan out of me. Carver’s hands were gentle when he took the gray sweatpants from his bag and pulled them on my legs, up to my waist. Next a thin, very loose T-shirt was tugged over my head, and then socks and boots were pulled onto my feet.
“Can you stand?” Carver asked me, and I shook my head, squeezing my eyes shut tight. “Toughen up, soldier. If you can’t even stand, you’re not leaving here.”
He was right. I was caving in to the pain, lacking in strength, and using that as my excuse. I put one open palm against the cold metal wall and used it to help me pull myself to my feet. I took a few shaky breaths, then stood up as straight as I could.
“I was stabbed in the leg. I’ll be limping. It could be a hindrance,” I told Carver.
“We’ll make do. Come on.” He led me outside of the cell, letting me lean on him with one of my big arms around his neck and shoulders.
“You won’t have a lot of time,” Deleviv said, standing half-shadowed in one of the corners of the room. “We won’t track you down, but you know that ENAD won’t be so kind. They want that information that your boy here has, and they won’t stop at anything to get it from him. From both of you.”
We walked over, much slower than normal, to the door. Carver stopped to take a look over his shoulder at the man standing there in the darkness.
“This is good-bye, Ros. If we meet again, it won’t be under good circumstances.” Carver spoke, low and even.
“Yes, I know,” Deleviv replied. “I just wish I could’ve kept you a little while longer.”
And with that, Carver punched in the key code, and the door slid open. We made our way out into a dingy, dark hallway. There were security cameras everywhere; I could see at least four in separate corners near the ceiling. The walls were tall and completely barren of any adornments or windows. I suspected this was where they took people who weren’t expected to return.
We continued down the hall, Carver supporting a lot of my weight and me trying my best to stand up straight and not stop to rest my eyes and head. My brain felt like it was melting from the inside out, and every bone in my body felt damaged and bruised. The only thing keeping me upright and going was Carver under my arm, dragging me along.
One of the doors at the end of the hallway had a frosted-glass panel that appeared to be white and smoky and extremely thick. Carver punched in another code on the door and waited for the glass to slowly disappear before our eyes. Some sort of hologram that was only afforded to the richest and most influential people. I’d seen other things like it before; they acted like solid objects, but were really a mixture of lights that refracted off each other.
Through the door was an elevator. We stepped on, and Carver punched something into the keypad and selected a floor, but I wasn’t watching which. I leaned against the side of the wall, breathing heavily, my chest heaving in and out. My entire body was sore; I wanted to lie down right here on the shoe-print-covered floor and close my eyes, just for a few moments.
“We’ll get you medical help, but we can’t go to any hospitals. We can’t go to ENAD. I take it you’re not trusting the situation at your safe house either.” Carver spoke to me from the opposite side of the metallic elevator.
We started to move, the motion making me feel raw and sick to my stomach. I tried to focus on the ground beneath my feet or the pain in my thigh from where I’d been stabbed.
I looked over at Carver, so normal in his casual clothing with no visible weapons. Not like a soldier and definitely not quite as lethal standing there in sweatpants. But he still had that certain sense of danger that surrounded him. It was so thick; it was almost a tangible thing. I was sure that everyone who came into contact with it felt the electric current running through the air, warning them and pushing them away. I still didn’t trust Carver, but there was no way I was planning on lying on that rotting futon until Deleviv or one of his idiot hires decided to shoot me in the back of the head. Carver was my best option at that moment, even if his beautiful face made my heart ache with longing and hurt.
The elevator hit the bottom with a lurch. I tried not to fall over or puke on my shoes. The sick feeling in my stomach was likely a side effect of whatever they’d injected me with. Lovely. The doors pinged opened and Carver was once again at my side, practically trying to drag me through the parking lot.
The lot was concrete, with large pillars to hold up the ceiling in the underground parking garage. The lights were bright and the cameras in the building swiveled with a buzzing noise to focus on us. I wasn’t surprised we were being monitored; I was honestly a little shocked no one had followed us. There were hardly any vehicles in the lot, but Carver seemed to be heading for a large black SUV that I didn’t recognize.
I stopped halfway to the SUV, and Carver had no choice but to stop with me. I shoved him away from me, then pulled my arm back and punched him as hard as I could. His face whipped to the side, and he stumbled a step or two. In typical Carver fashion, he only needed a moment to right himself. His lip was broken open again and bleeding, as well as the scar running along the side of his face.
“Are you done?” he asked me calmly, not bothering to reach up and touch the damage my fist had done to his face.
“No, I’m not fucking done! Words can’t describe the ways I want to hurt you right now,” I told him.
“You’re welcome to try.”
“Fuck you, Carver. Fuck you and everything you are. Fuck your arrogant, heartless demeanor, fuck your whole love life with Deleviv, and fuck you for coming to me that first night you touched me. I’ve been broken since the first time you laid eyes on me, and I hate you so much for not wanting me the way I’ve always wanted you. I wish I could break you, Carver.”
He was shifting his weight from side to side, as if he barely heard a word I said.
I saw red. I was a bull against a matador, pounding my heels into the sand. I limped right up to him, pressed my large chest flat against his, and allowed myself a few measures to breathe hard before speaking to him.
“I’m going to kill him, Carver. I’m going to kill him so that you know what it feels like,” I muttered in hushed tones. My promise felt empty, even to myself. I didn’t think I had the guts to kill a man like Deleviv in cold blood.
“And you think that’ll do it? You think that will hurt me?” he replied. Without another word, Carver walked over to the SUV and unlocked the passenger-side door with a code in the keypad and voice recognition. I begrudgingly staggered over to the door he was holding open for me and slipped inside. The door was quickly slammed behind me, and I slouched down in my seat, moaning quietly as I covered my eyes from the bright lights shining through the front window.
I was still coming off of the drugs they’d injected me with, although I had no idea to what extent I was high. They’d brutalized me, and still I wasn’t in as much pain as I should’ve been, and I wasn’t as aware of the throbbing pain in my body.
Carver entered on the other side and started the electric vehicle. He pulled out of the space in a hurry, and the tires screeched as he zipped around corners and bends, exiting us from the parking lot.
The outside world wasn’t as bright as the parking garage had been, and for that I was thankful. Cars were lining the thin streets, but Carver managed to swerve around them easily, making it look like a game.
“No one is following us, you know,” I told him from the passenger side of the car, begging my stomach not to upset all over myself.
“Not yet,” he replied. “But they will.”
“Why did you bother coming back for me?”
He glanced at me with some unreadable expression but didn’t reply.
“You’re so damn cold, Carver,” I snapped, starting to get agitated with his silence.
“I know,” Carver whispered, eyes still on the road ahead of us.
I had no idea where we were going, but Carver kept looking in the rear viewing screen on the display of the vehicle. I tried to relax, lying back into the seat and trying not to squirm or moan when the ache in my flesh came close to unbearable. After we circled the same block at least three times, I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“I’m trying to make sure we weren’t followed. If we get you medical help but they know where we are, it’s relatively pointless.”
I huffed. “Carver, no one is following us. Eventually ENAD is going to find out anyway and track me or you back to the implants we have.”
“We have at least a few more hours before it comes to that, and I want to make sure Deleviv isn’t having us followed.”
“The man said he’d rather die than hurt you. You really don’t trust anyone, do you?”
He barely spared me a glance. It took at least another half hour before Carver was satisfied we weren’t being followed. I continued to try to stay awake, staring out the window at the vast city that housed us. I looked up at the tall buildings we flew by, trying not to pay any attention to the homeless people on the streets or the bright neon lights of the billboards plastered all around us.